Pavel V. Maksakovsky (1900 – 2 November 1928) was a Russian and Soviet economist.

Maksakovsky was born in 1900 in Ilevo, in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.^[1] His father and brothers were metalworkers, but in 1912 their factory closed down.^[1] After four years working on the land, they moved to Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine.^[1]

After the Rada declared independence in 1917, Maksakovsky joined the underground resistance.^[1] He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918, volunteering with the Red Army when it reached Ekaterinoslav in 1919.^[2] He was captured by Anton Denikin's White Army and sentenced to death, but managed to escape.^[2]

From 1920 to 1924, Maksakovsky worked as an instructor at a Bolshevik party school in Sverdlovsk, Ukraine and briefly at the Plekhanov Institute before he was invited to join the Institute of Red Professors in 1925.^[2] During this period, he suffered recurring bouts of illness, which ultimately led to his death at the age of 28 in 1928.^[2]

His only known work, apart from an article published in the journal Bolshevik in 1928, is The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory of the Cycle, which was published posthumously in 1929 in 3.100 copies by the Communist Academy.^[3] An English translation and introduction by Richard B. Day at the University of Toronto Mississauga was published in Historical Materialism Volume 10, Issue 3 in 2002. The translation was later republished in hardcover by Brill Academic Publishers in 2004 and in paperback in 2009 by Haymarket Books. A Swedish translation of the essay was published in the journal Fronesis in 2014.^[4]

A brief description of the book is in Crisis theory.