11 Facts About Eugen Varga

Eugen "Jeno" Varga studied philosophy and economic geography at the University of Budapest.

In February 1919, Varga joined the newly created Hungarian Communist Party.

Eugen Varga survived the purges of the 1930s, during which Bela Kun and other Hungarians were executed.

Eugen Varga attended the Potsdam Conference of 1945 as an expert.

Eugen Varga authored the economic reports the congresses of the Comintern discussed between 1921 and 1935.

In 1922, Alexander Barmine, a Soviet diplomat who later defected to the west, travelled by train to Moscow with delegates to the Fourth Congress of Comintern, including Eugen Varga, who "showed the most revolting lack of consideration" by demanding a private railway compartment.

The most brilliant member of the Stock Exchange would have envied the way in which Eugen Varga was kept informed.

In 1946, Eugen Varga published The Economic Transformation of Capitalism at the End of the Second World War, in which he argued that during the war, western governments had accumulated great power over the management of capitalist economies, which brought them closer to socialist economies and more likely to last.

Eugen Varga was attacked by Nikolai Voznesensky, then a powerful figure as Chairman of Gosplan and a member of the Politburo, who wrote a book in which he accused "certain theoreticians" of having "empty opinions which deserve no consideration".

Eugen Varga's book was condemned at a meeting of economists and political experts in May 1947, and the institute he headed was closed and subsumed into Gosplan.

In March 1949, Voznesensky was arrested, and two days later, on 15 March, Eugen Varga published a self-critical letter in Pravda.