Brutskus B.D. Agricultural Economy: National-Economic Foundations. Chapter 14. General Principles of Agricultural Cooperation // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2026. V.11. №1. P. 6-24.
EDN: DORWDB
Annotation
This is an English translation of Chapter 14 “General Principles of Agricultural Cooperation” from the textbook published in Russian by the agricultural economist B. D. Brutskus in Germany in 1923. Boris Davidovich Brutskus (1874–1938), a liberal economist, always emphasized the importance of the multi-structured national economy in which various social institutions can have goals and values different from those of entrepreneurial enterprises of the capitalist market economy. Brutskus recognized the specificity of agriculture compared to other economic sectors, in particular the different organization of the peasant economy and the capitalist enterprise. Thus, he was a like-minded colleague of scholars from Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov’s organization-production school. The Soviet government declared Brutskus a reactionary bourgeois economist and expelled him from the USSR in 1922 for his profound and witty critique of the political-economic foundations of the socialist economy.
While in exile, Brutskus presented his agrarian-economic views as a textbook on agricultural economy. In both Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia of the 1920s as a primarily agrarian country, such textbooks were very popular. Brutskus’s textbook had two distinctive features: first, since the author was an agronomist by basic education, he placed a strong emphasis on agricultural biological processes in relation to agrarian economy; second, two final chapters of the textbook focused on agricultural cooperation, which was also unusual for textbooks that certainly included information about cooperation, but not in such large volumes and not in such a structured manner.
Brutskus’s textbook attracted attention not only in the Russian emigrant community, but also in Soviet Russia, where it was reprinted and widely used in universities until the start of collectivization in 1929, despite the fact that the author was in exile and had been declared an enemy of Soviet power. However, in the USSR the textbook was published without two last chapters on cooperation due to Soviet censorship. Brutskus commented on this ban in the article on cooperative ideology published in the German newspaper in Russian: “Recently, the Soviet government showed minimal liberality towards my academic work. After 15 months of censorship, my course on agricultural economy was cleared for publication4... But in one respect censors showed extreme intolerance: two chapters on agricultural cooperation were cut from the first page to the last. Although there is nothing specifically political in these chapters. However, the Bolshevik censorship could not accept my description of cooperation as a unique principle of economic construction, different from socialism”5. According to Brutskus, cooperative social institutions — a special economic phenomenon, a unique third force, different from institutions of both capitalist and state-controlled, socialist economies; however, cooperation always faces the risk of being incorporated and absorbed by both market entrepreneurship and state bureaucracy. The past hundred years seem to have convincingly confirmed many of Brutskus’s ideas of cooperation and his concerns about the distorting influence of both capitalism and socialism on cooperation. We publish this chapter from Brutskus’s book in English as a still-relevant example of the classic legacy of Chayanov’s school from its golden age.
Keywords
Cooperation, agrarian policy, market, peasantry, capitalism, socialism.
About the authors
Alexander M. Nikulin (publisher), PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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Irina V. Trotsuk (translator), DSc (Sociology), Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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