Włodzimierz Brus

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Włodzimierz Brus (August 23, 1921 - August 31, 2007) was a Polish economist.

Brus was born in 1921 in Plock, northern Poland. He started his studies at Wolna Wszechnica. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled to the then-Polish city of Lviv (known as Lwów in Polish), now part of the Ukraine, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. He continued his studies at John Casimir University (now Lviv University) and Leningrad University in the Soviet Union. He then fled to Saratov, where he was a teacher and also worked in a factory. Towards the end of the war, Brus returned to Poland with the pro-Russian Polish First Army, only to find that his parents and sister had been killed in the Treblinka concentration camp. He found his wife Helena Wolińska,^[1] whom he had married before the war, but then thought died in the Holocaust, alive but re-married.^[2]

After the war, Brus became the head of propaganda for the communist Polish Workers' Party (PPR). He also wrote his doctoral thesis on the Marxist law of value and then started teaching at Warsaw University. In 1952, Maximilian Pohorille and he wrote a textbook. It expressed admiration for Joseph Stalin's book The Economic Problems of Socialism, which conceded that some aspects of economic development could not be overcome by state planning. It also attacked Titoism and Władysław Gomułka's ideas, both proposed non-Soviet paths to socialism. In 1955, Brus became the vice-chairman of a council which was to advise the Gomułka government on economic reforms, but, with the economic stabilization that followed the Poznań 1956 uprising, most of the council's proposals were ignored.^[1] In 1956, he re-married Wolińska, now a military prosecutor.^[2]

In 1961, Brus's most influential work The General Problems of the Functioning of the Socialist Economy appeared, in which he argued that both democracy and market mechanisms were a necessity on the road to socialism. In 1965, he testified in defense of Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, who were on trial for their "Open Letter to the Party" calling for democracy. He would also defend Leszek Kołakowski and Kazimierz Pomian when they were expelled from the Party, but in 1968 he left it himself. Between 1968 and 1972, following the Party in-fighting in 1968, Brus was not allowed to publish under his real name. In 1972 he immigrated to the United Kingdom where he became a professor at the University of Oxford. In 1989, together with Kazimierz Laski, he published From Marx to the Market, in which the arguments presented in Brus's 1961 work were extended. In the 1990s, Brus and his wife decided against their return to democratic Poland because she would face charges there for her involvement in the unlawful detainment and subsequent murder of General Emil August Fieldorf. Brus died in 2007.^[1]

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