Abstract
A leading non-Marxist agricultural economist of early Soviet Russia, Director of the Moscow Institute for Agricultural Economics, Alexander Chayanov (1888–1937) produced exhaustively researched analytic work on the peasant economy, which had a lasting impact in two fields, rural sociology and economic anthropology. He dominated rural studies in Russia from the late imperial period through the mid-1920s. He was removed from his post after failing to dissuade the Soviet government from a rapid course of industrialization and collectivization. He was arrested, imprisoned, sent into exile, and executed in 1937, and his works were not available in Russia until his rehabilitation in 1987. After then, a surge of interest renewed his importance in his field. Chayanov’s writings continue to provide rich data-based framework for considering the peasantry as a distinct community within the larger economy with production incentives that are rooted in local custom and non-market exchange. A social agronomist, A. V. Chayanov was cast by Stalin as a leader of a (fictional) oppositional party, but his importance lies not on the sidelines in a historical opposition but in the continued influence of his works as the foundation of modern peasant studies.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Bourgholtzer (1999, p. 14 and 49, n. 3) observes that biographical materials about Chayanov are limited. For example, a lengthy stay in England and Berlin (April 1922 to October 1923) is known only through archived letters, later published by Vasily Chayanov (1998) and from the record of his interrogation in 1930 by the chief of the Secret Department of the OGPU, Yakov Agranov.
- 3.
Scientific Research Institute for the Agricultural Economy and Agricultural Policy.
- 4.
See also Chelintsev (1919) and Makarov (1920) from this group. Colleagues include V. S. Nemchinov, who is credited with introducing mathematical methods into Soviet economics, and mathematical economists A. L. Vainshtein and N. D. Kondratiev, who was director of the Conjuncture Institute in the Timiriazev Academy (Barnett 1995, p. 413).
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Much of the work of his school draws on budget surveys of peasants carried out from the 1880s by zemstva statisticians; he also continued work on surveys in the 1920s, from 1924, he had surveys done in Penza, Volokolamsk, and other guberniias, including where beets were grown, in 1925, and in Yaroslavl guberniya in 1927.
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Quoted in Özveren 2005, p. 774.
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Erlich (2013, pp. 189–92), provides a chronology of industrialization debates and shifts in party decisions from 1921 through the autumn of 1929, when the collectivization drive began.
- 9.
Russian populists [narodniki] formed a political movement in the 1860s and 1870s focused on peasants and the village commune. During and after the revolutionary era, many joined the radical Socialist Revolutionary party, some of whose members supported democratic socialism and thus opposed the Bolsheviks after they seized power; some participated in the Civil War on the side of the Whites. Shanin (2009, pp. 94–5) underscores how miscast the “neopopulism” label as applied to Chayanov, since he did not share their substantive political views, “e.g., their belief in the exclusive virtues of the Russian peasant commune.” Cf Harrison (1975, p. 390), who uses the term Neopopulist, applied to Chayanov by his critic, L. N. Litoshenko.
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Chayanov argued that some 90 percent of rural households at the turn of the century in Russia could be described by his model (Thorner 1986, p. xiii).
- 11.
On colonial sociology see Dirks (1992).
- 12.
But see Kerblay (1986. p. xxv, n. 2) for references to Chayanov’s works (by A.L. Vainshtein and N. A. Savitskii), and western acknowledgements of his contributions (Werner Sombart, Alexander Gerschenkron, C. von Dietze, J. H. Boeke, and M. M. Postan).
- 13.
This draws on (Leonard 2010).
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Chayanov had influence in the 1930s on Dutch and Japanese social scientists (Chibnik 1984, p. 335).
- 15.
His examples were very small samples (a dozen or so cases) of Melanesian ethnographers’ field work mainly in Tonga and New Guinea, where survey data had originally been collected for other purposes and were not longitudinal.
- 16.
“…households in the best positions to produce more, having less urgent utility curves, do not overproduce. Shan operate only in terms of the single constraint of the equilibrium between drudgery and utility (Durrenburger and Tannenbaum, p. 143).
- 17.
Defined as norms and routines in Bardhan (1989) in rural development as norms and routines.
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Leonard, C.S. (2022). Chayanov: The Reception of an Early Soviet Agricultural Economist. In: Avtonomov, V., Hagemann, H. (eds) Russian and Western Economic Thought. Springer Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99052-7_12
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