HOLZMAN, Franklyn Dunn 1918-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born December 31, 1918, in Brooklyn, NY; died from complications from a stroke September 1, 2002, in Clifton, NJ. Economist, educator, and author. Holzman was an expert on the economy of the former Soviet Union and a critic of President Ronald Reagan's defense budget. He was a graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he earned his A.B. in 1940. During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps in the Ukraine, and it was here that he first became interested in studying the Soviet economy. After the war, Holzman went on to complete his doctorate at Harvard University in 1948. He was an economist for the U.S. Department of the Treasury for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Washington, where he taught until 1961. He then moved on to Tufts University, where he was a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy until retiring in 1992. As a researcher and author, Holzman revealed flaws in the Soviet economy, such as in his Soviet Taxation: The Fiscal and Monetary Problems of a Planned Economy (1955) in which he showed that tax laws in the USSR ran counter to the Communist idea of fair distribution of wealth. In the 1980s Holzman argued that the Soviet Union could not sustain its military budget, which was actually far less than it was believed to be. He felt, furthermore, that President Reagan inflated figures for Soviet spending in order to gain approval for his own military budget. Holzman was later proved correct when the Soviet Union collapsed and some of its records were made public. Some of Holzman's other writings about the Soviet economy include Financial Checks on Soviet Defense Expenditures (1975), The Soviet Economy: Past, Present, and Future (1982), and The Economics of the Soviet Bloc Trade and Finance (1987). He was also an expert on foreign trade and inflation.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

New York Times, September 7, 2002, p. A13.

Washington Post, September 9, 2002, p. B6.