Chayanov A.V. Letter from A.V. Chayanov to V.M. Molotov on the current state of agriculture in the USSR compared with its pre-war state and the situation in agriculture of capitalist countries (October 6, 1927) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2018. V.3. №3. P. 6-18.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2018-3-3-6-18
Annotation
Alexander Chayanov wrote this analytical note to Vyacheslav Molotov in early October 1927 to discuss plans for the agricultural development of the first five-year plan in the USSR. Chayanov begins with a brief review of the history of world agriculture in the early twentieth century. He identifies two poles in this evolution: western (American — typically North America and partly South America, South Africa, and Australia) and eastern (Indian-Chinese, typically agrarian overpopulated countries). The American type of agricultural development is based on farms that use machinery and wage labor and are controlled by the vertical system of financial capitalism. The Indian-Chinese type of agricultural development is characterized by agrarian overpopulation of the peasantry under dominant pre-capitalist relations, exceptional labor intensity, and widespread bondage rent and credit. The rest of the world’s regions can be placed between these two poles. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia is a paradoxical, complex mixture of these two types. Chayanov believed that in the agrarian science of pre-revolutionary and prewar Russia, these polarized agrarian worlds were reflected in the agrarian-economic disputes of the so-called “southerners” and “northerners” about the strategy of agricultural development. “Southerners” insisted on turning Russia into a “hundredpercent America” by the forced development of farmers’ agriculture. The “northerners” suggested supporting the regional strata of the middle peasantry and its own vertical cooperation to prevent the seizure of the village by trade and financial capital. Chayanov considered himself a “northerner”. He argued that the post-war, post-revolutionary village has changed significantly. First, the younger generation of peasants who had experienced the world war and Russian Revolution set the tone. Second, the Soviet agronomic science and cooperation of the 1920s contributed to the real progress of peasant farms. Soviet Russia has a unique chance to find a fundamentally new path of rural development, thus avoiding the Scylla of Americanfarmers’ dependence on financial capital and the Charybdis of the Indian-Chinese stagnation of peasant overpopulation. Instead of American vertical agrarian integration through the dominance of financial capital over farmers, Soviet vertical integration was to promote the development of diverse forms of peasant cooperation with the support of the socialist state. In the final part of the note, Chayanov considers the ratio of industry and agriculture in the first five-year plan and predicts a radical socialtechnological change under agricultural industrialization. The Soviet leadership ignored the ideas of this note: Stalin rejected Chayanov’s democratic type of vertical cooperation of the peasantry and preferred a horizontal type of cooperation in the form of collectivization. The publication with comments was prepared by A.M. Nikulin.
Keywords
Agrarian policy, peasants, farmers, agricultural cooperation, agrarian capitalism, socialist agriculture, ways of agricultural development.
About the authors
Alexander V. Chayanov
Editor: Alexander M. Nikulin, PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; 119571, Moscow, Prosp. Vernadskogo, 82.
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Translator: Irina V. Trotsuk, DSc (Sociology), Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Professor, Sociology Chair, RUDN University. Prosp. Vernadskogo, 82, Moscow, Russian Federation, 119571.
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Savchenko E.S., Nikulin A.M. “We are all pioneers” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2018. V.3. №2. P. 127-154.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2018-3-2-127-154
Annotation
In the interview to the Russian Peasant Studies, the Governor of the Belgorod Region, Doctor of Economics, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yevgeny Savchenko refers to his life trajectory to consider the history and the present state of the agrarian and social policy in Russia and the Belgorod Region. The interview focuses on the role of the state in developing a responsible agrarian policy that establishes the rules under the market economy and regulates economic and social interaction of large and small forms of agricultural production, the social development of the village, innovative trends in agriculture, and takes care of environmental challenges, problems of local self-government, and training of personnel for agriculture. The governor emphasized the significance of agroholdings in agriculture and in the Russian society in general, identifies possible directions of agroholdings participation in the development of rural areas. In the Belgorod rural programs, particular attention is paid to restoring soil fertility, environmental development of the “Green Capital” project, and barriers to the spread of bioenergy and alternative energy. The governor notes that despite the catastrophic trials in the life of the Russian peasantry in the 20th century, which determined the loss of peasant mentality, in contemporary Russia there is still a need for preservation and development of the culture of rural communities and territories that seamlessly combine rural traditions and innovations, for example, in the form of ancestral estates and homeowners’ associations. In the conclusion, the interview stresses that by the will of fate rural Russia often had to be a pioneer.
Keywords
Rural Russia, rural development, agrarian policy, collective and state farms, agroholdings, vertical integration, ecology, local self-government.
About the authors
Evgeny S. Savchenko, DSc (Economics), Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Governor of the Belgorod Region. 308005, Belgorod, Sobornaya pl., 4.
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Alexander M. Nikulin, PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; 119571, Moscow, Prosp. Vernadskogo, 82.
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