lit a candle 4h agoMy mum rang me about this while I was on the bus in Berlin, she knew I'd want to know. I read The Economics of Transition for a module on post Soviet states and it's still the clearest book I've ever used on any of it. 91 years old, what a run.
Their story
Marie Lavigne was a French economist who for four decades was one of the world's leading authorities on the economies of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and later on their difficult transition to market economies. Her books, especially Les Economies socialistes sovietique et europeennes (1970)…
Marie Lavigne was a French economist who for four decades was one of the world's leading authorities on the economies of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and later on their difficult transition to market economies. Her books, especially Les Economies socialistes sovietique et europeennes (1970) and The Economics of Transition (1995), became standard references in France and abroad.
She was born Marie-Louise Behr in Strasbourg on 12 June 1935, the daughter of Georges Behr, a furniture expert, and Natalie Kolomitseff, a Russian political refugee. She studied Russian and economics at the University of Strasbourg, and her 1960 doctoral thesis on capital in the Soviet economy earned her the CNRS silver medal.
After teaching at Strasbourg until 1969 she moved to Paris, becoming a professor at Paris XII in 1973 and at Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne from 1974 to 1990. From 1974 to 1989 she directed the Centre for the International Economics of Socialist Countries (CEIPS), a research centre devoted to the planned economies of the Soviet bloc. With the economist Wladimir Andreff she wrote La Realite socialiste (1985), and she edited collective volumes on East-South relations and on the emergence of capitalism in Eastern Europe after 1989. In 1991 she joined the University of Pau, where she finished her career as professor emerita, retiring in 1996. She wrote 13 books and many articles, and was a regular contributor to Le Monde diplomatique. Late in her career she also published a study of the reform and opening of the economy of Vietnam (1999).
She married the researcher Pierre Lavigne in 1956, wrote with him a study of the 1977 Soviet constitution, and the couple had two children, Andre and the economist Anne Lavigne. When President Francois Hollande made her a commander of the Legion of Honour in 2015, he said that what he knew of the Soviet economy he had first learned from her book.
Marie Lavigne died at Olivet, near Orleans, on 28 October 2026, aged 91. Her colleague Wladimir Andreff wrote in Le Monde that with her passed a French economist of international renown who had been at the forefront of what was then called economic Sovietology.
Biography adapted from French Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Le Monde obituary by Wladimir Andreff and the family death notice in La Depeche. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Marie Lavigne at Olivet in 2026
by People Forever
same, that book got me through my dissertation