Abstract
A.V. Peshekhonov is best known for his political activity as a leader of the Popular Socialist Party in 1906–18 and Minister of Food Supply in the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917. Yet some of his most important work was accomplished before the 1905 Revolution, in the form of a series of articles in the ‘legal populist’ journal Russkoe bogatstvo. Here he developed an analysis of the nature of the peasant economy which was to influence the agrarian policies of both the Popular Socialist and the Socialist-Revolutionary parties, and which also foreshadowed in many respects the views of the ‘Organisation and Production’ school of rural economists, headed by A.V. Chayanov, which have recently been influential in the West.1 Peshekhonov’s writings on the peasantry, therefore, not only constitute an undeservedly little-known contribution to neo-populist thought,2 but also have relevance to a debate which continues to reverberate in academic circles to the present day, and which, if Teodor Shanin is to be believed, may also have significance for contemporary ‘developing societies’.3
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Notes
For an English translation of Chayanov’s major works, see D. Thorner, B. Kerblay and R.E.F. Smith (eds) A.V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966). Teodor Shanin acknowledges a similarity between Peshekhonov’s views and Chayanov’s, without exploring it in any detail: The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972) pp. 102, 105.
There is some discussion of Peshekhonov’s ideas in V.G. Khoros, Narodnicheskaya ideologiya i marksizm (Moscow, 1972);
N.D. Erofeev, Narodnye sotsialisty v pervoi russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow, 1979);
and V.N. Ginev, Bor’ba za krest’yanstvo i krizis russkogo neonarodnichestva, 1902–1914 gg. (Leningrad, 1983).
Teodor Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’ (London, 1985).
A.V. Peshekhonov, ‘K voprosu o roli “sobiratelei zemli” v russkom zemledel’cheskom proizvodstve’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 7 (1897) part 2, pp. 34–50.
A.V. Peshekhonov, ‘Krest’yane i rabochie v ikh vzaimnykh otnosheniyakh’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 8 (1898) part 1, pp. 173–95; 9 (1898) part 1, pp. 54–82.
Ibid., p. 179. The survey was published as Statisticheskoe opisanie Kaluzhskoi gubernii. vol. I. Kozel’skii uezd. 2 vyp. (Kaluga, 1897–8). Chayanov was later to praise this study of Peshekhonov’s for being years ahead of its time in its concentration on the production processes of the peasant farm: A. Chayanov, Byudzhetnye issledovaniya; istoriya i melody, (Moscow, 1929) pp. 192, 281–4.
See B. Kerblay (ed.) Oeuvres choisies de A.V. Cajanov, vol. VII (Paris, 1967) pp. 206, 296–9.
A. Peshekhonov, ‘Iz teorii i praktiki krest’yanskogo khozyaistva’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 9 (1902) part 1, 160–93; 10 (1902) part 1, pp. 71–119.
A.V. Peshekhonov, ‘Zemel’nye nuzhdy derevni (Po rabotam sel’skokhozyaistvennykh komitetov)’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 9 (1903) part 1, pp. 55–92; 11 (1903) part 1, pp. 110–30; 12 (1903) part 1, pp. 113–30; id., ‘Krest’yanskoe malozemel’e, kak problema ekonomicheskoi politiki. (Po rabotam sel’sko-khozyaistvennykh komitetov)’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 7 (1904) part 2, pp. 84–122. These articles were re-published as a separate pamphlet in 1905, together with an article entitled ‘Osnovnye zadachi agrarnoi reformy’, first published in Russkie vedomosti in April 1905: Zemel’nye nuzhdy derevni i osnovnye zadachi agrarnoi reformy (St Petersburg, 1905).
Peshekhonov, Zemel’nye nuzhdy derevni (1905), pp. 39–42.
See for example Maureen Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Socialist-Revolutionary Parly, from its Origins through the Revolution of 1905–1907 (Cambridge, 1976).
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© 1992 School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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Perrie, M. (1992). ‘A Worker in Disguise’. In: Edmondson, L., Waldron, P. (eds) Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22433-3_5
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