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

Boris D. Brutskus

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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Brutskus B.D. Elimination of the world crisis (Article of B.D. Brutskus) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2025. V.10. №1. P. 6-15.

EDN: AAOQLZ

Annotation

Boris Davidovich Brutskus (1874–1938) was a remarkable economist whose agrarian studies are usually attributed to A. V. Chayanov’s organization-production school. However, agrarian issues were only one aspect of Brutskus’s multifaceted intellectual heritage as a major specialist in Jewish migration and colonization in the late 19th — early 20th centuries, in the political-economic criticism of the Russian Revolution, Soviet economic system and socialism in general. He was an insightful expert not only in issues of the Russian and Soviet economic policy but also in international economic-political relations.
In his theoretical and ideological views Brutskus was a consistent supporter of liberalism but not an orthodox supporter of the homo economicus model. He spoke with deep respect and understanding about worldview values of socialism of both populist and Marxist directions, which were associated with the ideas of cooperative family economies and a socially oriented state, and emphasized that the market, free enterprise and economic freedom were fundamental conditions for any freedom in principle.
With the Bolsheviks coming to power, during the civil war, Brutskus consistently and convincingly criticized the Soviet economic policy, for which the United State Political Administration (OGPU) expelled him on the so-called philosophical steamship to Germany. In Europe, until the early 1930s, Brutskus lectured on agrarian issues and political economy at the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin and taught at the Yiddish University in Vilnius. After the Nazis came to power, he moved to Paris, and in 1935 emigrated to Palestine, where he headed the Department of Agricultural Economics and Policy at the University of Jerusalem, which was established with funds from the Jewish National Fund and at which he conducted research and taught until his death in 1938. Brutskus “was very enthusiastic about not only teaching but also practical activities to promote Jewish agriculture”. Brutskus’s great contribution to the developing Jewish agricultural and economic science was recognized and highly praised: his course of lectures was published posthumously, and the national journalism called him a Jewish genius of our time.
Brutskus was an incredibly gifted and prolific economist and publicist, his analytical articles on the most current social-economic events of the 1920s and 1930s were published in newspapers and magazines not only in the Russian émigré press but also in national languages in periodicals of some European and North American countries. Thereby, it is not surprising that the article “Elimination of the world crisis”, which was discovered in B.D. Brutskus’s collection in the Central Archive for History of the Jewish People and which the author had prepared for publication but had not managed to publish, provides an overview of fundamental contradictions and probable alternatives for political-economic development of the world economy recovering with difficulty and in contradictory ways from the Great Depression in the second half of the 1930s.
In this article, Brutskus identifies those groups of countries and key sectors of the economy that overcame consequences of the world crisis in different ways. This multipolarity of political-economic development caused Brutskus concern mainly due to the strengthening tendencies of bureaucratic autarkization of economies in some countries preparing for war. At the end of the article, Brutskus prophetically warns that the implementation of the German slogan “guns instead of butter” under declining international movement of migrants, capital, goods and increasing political-economic polarization of countries leads to an escalation of international tension and future military-political conflicts.

Keywords

Crisis, market, capitalism, unemployment, agriculture, industry, League of Nations, economic policy.

About the authors

Boris D. Brutskus
Publishers: Alexander M. Nikulin, PhD (Economics),Head of the Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.Gazetny per., 3-5, bl. 1, Moscow, 125009, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
Vladislav O. Afanasenkov, Junior Researcher, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Gazetny per., 3-5, bl. 1, Moscow, 125009, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
Translator: Irina V. Trotsuk, DSc (Sociology), Professor, Sociology Chair, RUDN University; Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.