Leonid Abalkin

Leonid Ivanovich Abalkin (Russian Леонид Иванович Абалкин; born May 5, 1930 in Moscow, † May 2, 2011 ) was a Russian economist.

It was 1966 Head of the Chair of Political Economy at the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy in Moscow. He was appointed professor in 1972. In 1986 he became director of the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, whose full member he was in 1987. Shortly before the end of the Cold War, he was appointed on 8 June 1989 to the Foreign Member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.

Abalkin who liked to play chess in his spare time, in the 1980s, was chairman of the Chess Federation of the RSFSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he dealt with the reopening of the chess schools in various parts of Russia. Together with Anatoly Karpov, he headed the Commission for Chess and Education of the Russian Chess Federation.