Reception of Mandelbrot and his economic ideas in Russia

In this article, I analyze the Russian-language academic literature mentioning and discussing Benoit Mandelbrot's economic ideas.The main findings are that Mandelbrot's economic ideas about the fractal nature of markets have a limited popularity among Russian-speaking scholars.The peak was reached in the middle of the 2010s, and now every year we see a smaller number of publications mentioning him.He stays more recognized in the field of mathematics and geometry, compared to economics.However, in the works of Russian-speaking scholars mentioning Mandelbrot we can see that his ideas were met with quite a positive attitude.His novelty and originality are recognized.The reception of fractal theory in economics varies from being the only working strategy for building an adequate model of the market and predicting financial collapses to not having many benefits in comparison to the classical probabilistic theory.Nevertheless, evidence shows that markets have fractal (not random) nature, and new works support that idea.Some scholars regret the undeserved unpopularity of fractal theory, while others explain it by its incompleteness and complexity, which limits the wide practical usage of Mandelbrot's ideas.Despite all limitations, the fractal theory definitely has its own place in economics and finance.Probably the main significance of Mandelbrot's theory is not in its practical tools, but in the general philosophic idea.