Basile Samsonoff is a minor member of the Lausanne School of Economics, author of a dissertation entitled ‘Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la rente’ (1912). He was one of three students, the others being Marie Kolabinska and Pierre Boven, who obtained their doctoral degrees at the University of Lausanne under the supervision of Vilfredo Pareto. After obtaining his degree in Lausanne, Samsonoff went back home to Russia, where he continued his economic research and what already promised to be a brilliant academic career. In 1914, however, he was enrolled in World War I, and he died at the front in 1917, not yet 30 years old.

Samsonoff 's dissertation was reviewed in the American Economic Review by Esther Lowenthal, who found that it looked more like a didactic essay, and in the Political Science Quarterly by Frank Fetter, who found that it should be read by every student of economic theory, especially by the tenants of the older theories. In Russia, it was studied by Struve, who found it very stimulating and by Bilimovic, in the sole obituary of Samsonoff.

Samsonoff is now almost forgotten. He has been mentioned by historians of the Lausanne School, and in the Russian literature, he is listed by Paškov as a member of a Russian group of ‘bourgeois’ mathematical economists.