Isaak Illich Rubin

Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was a Soviet lawyer, economist and scholar of Marx's work. His most important published work was Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (first edition, 1923).

His scholarly works and textbooks and his popular lectures, e.g., at the Institute of Red Professors, were an important influence on the early Soviet Russian interpretation of Karl Marx; but he was not himself a Bolshevik and was frequently jailed, then banished to Soviet Central Asia, then executed in 1937 during the Great Purge. Though Rubin's reading of Marx had produced an extensive Russian literature throughout the 1920s, by the late 1930s his work and memory had been completely expunged within the Soviet Union. Rubin was also unknown in the West until the 1970s, when an English translation of his main work, made from a rare surviving copy, appeared – after numerous references to the "Rubin school" of the twenties had been made in Roman Rosdolsky's major 1968 study of Marx's Grundrisse. Since that time much more material has emerged and he has been a major figure in scholarly disputes about Marx's theory of value since the 1970s. In 1989–91 he was rehabilitated by the Soviet Union.