with delegates to the Fourth Congress of Comintern, including Varga, who "showed the most revolting lack of consideration" by demanding a private railway compartment. Barmine considered that he should have content with a berth in a first class carriage. He wrote: "The little luxuries of power go to men's heads." Another Soviet defector Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, writing under the pseudonym Alexander Uralov, left a humorous description of Varga, whom he described as having "the pedantry of a German official, the obstinacy of a Russian accountant, and the suppleness of an Oriental fakir", and of his institute, where "share fluctuations were followed more attentively than in any London or New York bank. The most brilliant member of the Stock Exchange would have envied the way in which Varga was kept informed." Post-War Controversy In 1946, 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. He was praised by Kremlin watchers in the west as a 'person with a Western orientation' and a 'defender' of the Marshall Plan, but "these implications were highly distasteful to Soviet conservatives" who believed that capitalism was heading for an extreme and possibly terminal crisis. During a closed meeting of economists called by USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow University, in May 1947, "Varga was attacked for his writings by most, if not all, of the participants." He was also 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'. 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. Though he remained a leading academic economist, his prestige had diminished - in the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia he was qualified as a "bourgeois economist" - but the fact that he was not dismissed or arrested implies that he had powerful protectors. In March 1949, Voznesensky was arrested, and two days later, on 15 March, Varga published a self-critical letter in Pravda. Years after Stalin After Stalin's death in 1953, he reappeared on the scene.