Abstract: Normative state socialist economic theory appeared in the mid-1920s with Soviet economist Preobrazhensky. In Nigeria, many economic thinkers were influenced by Soviet and other Eastern European economic theory during the Cold War years. Bala Usman and Segun Osoba focused on the destruction of feudal land law and on delinking from the capitalist world economy; Bade Onimode and Ola Oni on emulating state socialist Eastern European economic theory and practice in an effort to overcome structural underdevelopment; Claude Ake in his Marxist phase made use of the Hungarian economist Tamás Szentes’s heterodox socialist development theory that the latter developed while the two were colleagues at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Nigeria’s oil incomes were to be used in all these plans to kick-start heavy industry in the country. As the USSR’s alternative globalization path disappeared and then the Nigerian compradores’ share of profits grew by the early 21st century, interest in these radical classics reappeared in Nigeria.