Merl S. “I consistently contribute to the assessment of the Soviet economic model” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2023. V.8. №1. P. 131-163.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2023-8-1-131-163
Annotation
As a part of our traditional “Interviews” we present the selected fragments from the biographical memoirs of Stephan Merl, Professor of the Bielefeld University, a famous researcher of the agrarian economy and policy of the Soviet state. The memoirs were written as answers to the questions formulated by Stephan Merl together with his colleague and friend Alexander Nikulin. The questions set the direction for the biographical reflections as connected with the study of the Russian history and culture, in particular the fate of the Russian village, tragedy of collectivization, and turns of the Soviet agrarian policy. The memoirs reflect the dramatic episodes of the European history in the second half of the 20th century, some of which the author experienced, while others studied in the scientific perspective. Professor Merl’s diligence, deep knowledge of historical sources and research objectivity allowed him to suggest a new interpretation of the events that have become history quite recently or are becoming history now. We present an excerpt from his memoirs which will be published in full in the book series of the Russian Peasant Studies.
Keywords
Russia, Germany, USSR, agriculture, collectivization, agrarian policy, perestroika.
About the author
Merl Stephan, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstr., 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Organization of agricultural production at the local level (Article of A.V. Chayanov in English)
Nov 25 2022Chayanov A. V. Organization of agricultural production at the local level (Article of A.V. Chayanov in English) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2022. V.7. №3. P. 21-34.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-3-21-34
Annotation
This typescript was found in the fund of the Soviet party economist Lev Natanovich Kritzman (F. 528) in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAS), and has never been published before. The typescript consists of 16 sheets without an autograph or any handwritten corrections and marks. The typescript does not have any direct indications of the time of its creation. There are two more documents: a letter to Kritsman of December 26, 1929, and a fragment of the text written by Chayanov’s hand, which is very close to this typescript and seems to be one of its drafts. On the back of this sheet, there is an inscription — “2nd House of Soviets. Room 327. To L. N. Kritzman from A. Chayanov”.
The typescript presents the concept of the gradual ‘rooting’ of the peasant economy in socialism through the voluntary ‘cooperative collectivization’ and with the incentive mechanisms of a purely economic nature. We can see similar theoretical bases in Lenin’s ‘cooperative plan’ and Bukharin’s theory of the peaceful ingrowth of capitalist elements into socialism. In these ideological-theoretical alternatives to Stalin’s collectivization, the peasant was considered a full-fledged subject of the economic activity and socialist construction, who needed all possible assistance with the state policy measures rather than commands.
Chayanov refused to choose between the state-farm construction and the total socialization of the peasant agricultural sector. He developed an alternative program of socialist construction, which included the thorough revision of his own positions on some issues. Based on the data, Chayanov sought to show how far the Soviet village had moved from the pinnacle of the pre-war economic development, and that the Soviet peasantry had ceased to be ‘an object of the agronomic influence’. Thus, according to Chayanov, in contemporary realities, old methods and schemes of agronomic work became ineffective.
Archivists dated the documents in the file to 1930. We do not know reasons for such dating, but it raises some doubts. We can be certain about relative dating and the lower chronological frame — 1927. According to the address-reference book All Moscow, Kritzman moved to Room 327 of the 2nd House of Soviets in 1927 (All Moscow (1927) Address-Reference Book for 1927: 3rd year of publication by the Moscow Council; with the new plan for the city of Moscow, Moscow, p. 147).
There are more doubts about the upper chronological frame. If all these documents are really related to each other, the text should be dated according to the letter to Kritzman. Chayanov wrote that he had not finished an agronomic essay (in collaboration with P. Ya. Gurov and S.G. Uzhansky), because he was terribly upset by the first days of work of the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians. Moreover, Chayanov “did not get Sadyrin’s article, which made him throw away the whole ‘reality’ and end his ‘cooperation’ in the same purely theoretical terms as he had started” (ARAS. F. 528. Inv. 5. F. 137. L. 1). Chayanov could mean his articles for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in which Kritzman edited the section of economic sciences and the subsection of economic policy until 1931; or for one of the periodicals, in which Kritzman was a member of the editorial board (for instance, On the Agrarian Front). Chayanov could use the word ‘cooperation’ as a title for the typescript sent to Kritzman for proofreading and editing.
By the end of 1929, Chayanov was in an extremely difficult situation, and it became even worse after the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians, at which Chayanov and his colleagues were ideologically persecuted. Probably, after Stalin’s speech, Kritzman decided to postpone or abandon this publication. There is no article by Chayanov in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and no articles by Gurov or Uzhansky in the corresponding volumes; and this typescript was not published.
If our reasoning is correct, Chayanov’s courage can hardly be overestimated: under the huge ideological and psychological pressure, he decided to publicly announce his disagreement with Stalin’s course.
Editor’s notes are marked as Ed. and given in square brackets.
Keywords
Chayanov, collectivization, peasantry, state, social agronomy, socialism.
About the authors
Chayanov Alexander V.
Afanasenkov Vladislav O. (publisher), Senior Researcher, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Junior Researcher, Research Centre for Economic and Social History, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Vernadskogo Prosp., 82, Moscow, 119571, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Trotsuk Irina V. (translator), 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.
Organization of agricultural production at the local level (Article of A.V. Chayanov in Russian)
Nov 23 2022Chayanov A. V. Organization of agricultural production at the local level (Article of A.V. Chayanov in Russian) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2022. V.7. №3. P. 6-20.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-3-6-20
Annotation
This typescript was found in the fund of the Soviet party economist Lev Natanovich Kritzman (F. 528) in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAS), and has never been published before. The typescript consists of 16 sheets without an autograph or any handwritten corrections and marks. The typescript does not have any direct indications of the time of its creation. There are two more documents: a letter to Kritsman of December 26, 1929, and a fragment of the text written by Chayanov’s hand, which is very close to this typescript and seems to be one of its drafts. On the back of this sheet, there is an inscription — “2nd House of Soviets. Room 327. To L. N. Kritzman from A. Chayanov”.
The typescript presents the concept of the gradual ‘rooting’ of the peasant economy in socialism through the voluntary ‘cooperative collectivization’ and with the incentive mechanisms of a purely economic nature. We can see similar theoretical bases in Lenin’s ‘cooperative plan’ and Bukharin’s theory of the peaceful ingrowth of capitalist elements into socialism. In these ideological-theoretical alternatives to Stalin’s collectivization, the peasant was considered a full-fledged subject of the economic activity and socialist construction, who needed all possible assistance with the state policy measures rather than commands.
Chayanov refused to choose between the state-farm construction and the total socialization of the peasant agricultural sector. He developed an alternative program of socialist construction, which included the thorough revision of his own positions on some issues. Based on the data, Chayanov sought to show how far the Soviet village had moved from the pinnacle of the pre-war economic development, and that the Soviet peasantry had ceased to be ‘an object of the agronomic influence’. Thus, according to Chayanov, in contemporary realities, old methods and schemes of agronomic work became ineffective.
Archivists dated the documents in the file to 1930. We do not know reasons for such dating, but it raises some doubts. We can be certain about relative dating and the lower chronological frame — 1927. According to the address-reference book All Moscow, Kritzman moved to Room 327 of the 2nd House of Soviets in 1927 (All Moscow (1927) Address-Reference Book for 1927: 3rd year of publication by the Moscow Council; with the new plan for the city of Moscow, Moscow, p. 147).
There are more doubts about the upper chronological frame. If all these documents are really related to each other, the text should be dated according to the letter to Kritzman. Chayanov wrote that he had not finished an agronomic essay (in collaboration with P. Ya. Gurov and S.G. Uzhansky), because he was terribly upset by the first days of work of the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians. Moreover, Chayanov “did not get Sadyrin’s article, which made him throw away the whole ‘reality’ and end his ‘cooperation’ in the same purely theoretical terms as he had started” (ARAS. F. 528. Inv. 5. F. 137. L. 1). Chayanov could mean his articles for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in which Kritzman edited the section of economic sciences and the subsection of economic policy until 1931; or for one of the periodicals, in which Kritzman was a member of the editorial board (for instance, On the Agrarian Front). Chayanov could use the word ‘cooperation’ as a title for the typescript sent to Kritzman for proofreading and editing.
By the end of 1929, Chayanov was in an extremely difficult situation, and it became even worse after the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians, at which Chayanov and his colleagues were ideologically persecuted. Probably, after Stalin’s speech, Kritzman decided to postpone or abandon this publication. There is no article by Chayanov in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and no articles by Gurov or Uzhansky in the corresponding volumes; and this typescript was not published.
If our reasoning is correct, Chayanov’s courage can hardly be overestimated: under the huge ideological and psychological pressure, he decided to publicly announce his disagreement with Stalin’s course.
Editor’s notes are marked as Ed. and given in square brackets.
Keywords
Chayanov, collectivization, peasantry, state, social agronomy, socialism.
About the authors
Chayanov Alexander V.
Afanasenkov Vladislav O. (publisher), Senior Researcher, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Junior Researcher, Research Centre for Economic and Social History, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Vernadskogo Prosp., 82, Moscow, 119571, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Evidence of war and occupation in the memoirs of Russian peasants: Two Cossack women near Stalingrad
May 15 2022Nakhimovsky A. D. Evidence of war and occupation in the memoirs of Russian peasants: Two Cossack women near Stalingrad // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2022. V.7. №1. P. 69-102.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-1-69-102
Annotation
The article examines the life of Russian peasants in the steppe regions adjacent to Stalingrad and occupied by the German army at the time of the Stalingrad battle. The battle began in these regions in July–August 1942. In September, when the fighting moved into the city set on a narrow strip along the Volga River, the surrounding steppe was taken over by a more or less organized occupation regime. The occupation came to an end after the Soviet counterattack on November 19-23. While abundant literature has been devoted to the battle in the city, there is practically nothing on the life of peasants under occupation in the surrounding area. Relatively little has been written about the life of peasants during the Great Patriotic War. Studies of the occupation have focused on the western regions of the Soviet Union, where the occupation lasted for years. In the Volga Region, it lasted only for months. There was no occupation administration — only soldiers mostly preoccupied with daily fighting. The local population consisted primarily of the Don Cossacks who preserved Cossack traditions and retained sharp memories of collectivization. The article considers: (1) how the occupiers and the occupied negotiated such unusual conditions; (2) how traditional peasant values and behavioral norms were expressed; (3) how on occasion the occupiers defied their usual stereotypes. The study is based on the records of linguists, specifically dialectologists. Dialectology and oral history frequently use similar materials for different tasks. It is worth noting that the oral history began to develop in Russia only in the 1990s, while dialectology continues a tradition established in the 19th century. Especially in the study of the Russian peasantry, records made by dialectologists can be a valuable source for historians.
Keywords
Oral history, World War II, Stalingrad, Nazi occupation, peasantry, Don Cossacks, Nazi collaboration, partisans, collectivization, de-kulakization.
About the author
Nakhimovsky Alexander D., PhD, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics (Emeritus), Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, New York, 13346 USA.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Kondrashin V.V., Nikulin A.M. “If you are engaged in scientific research, you must have courage!” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №3. P. 135-171.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-3-135-171
Annotation
The interview with the DSc (History), Professor V. V. Kondrashin presents the milestones of his biography in the historical context of the Russian science and politics in the 20th—21st century. This biographical reflection includes the events of childhood that awakened his interest in history, the difficulties in the academic career of a young man of the people, the historian’s survival under the social crisis of the 1990s. An important part of the interview is formed by Kondrashin’s memories of his teachers in school and university—V. V. Danilov and V. V. Kabanov, M. Levin and T. Shanin. Another significant part of the interview focuses on the most important issues of Kondrashin and his colleagues’ historical research, mainly the history of the Russian and Soviet countryside under revolutions and reforms of the 20th century (peasant wars, NEP, collectivization, World War II and the late Soviet period of agrarian history). The interview was not limited to the Russian historical context—Kondrashin mentions international scientific projects such as the study of the 1932-1933 famine in the USSR, and of the survival and development of the Soviet Union in the interaction with its close and distant neighboring countries. Kondrashin describes the cooperation of Russian scientists with their colleagues from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Eastern Europe, France, England, USA, Japan and Australia. A special part of the interview presents his reflections on the ‘historian and power’ issue. Due to his active social position, Kondrashin was engaged in various social-political activities, including his work as a Senator of the Federation Council. The interview ends with a discussion of his scientific plans for the year of his sixtieth anniversary.
Keywords
History, peasantry, revolution, reforms, NEP, collectivization, USSR.
About the authors
Kondrashin Viktor V., DSc (History), Chief Researcher, Head of the Center for Economic History, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences. 117292 Moscow, Dmitry Ulyanov St., 19. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Nikulin Alexander M., PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Head of the Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Oral history from below. Materials for the oral history of Russian peasants in the 20th century
Apr 28 2021Nakhimovsky A.D. Oral history from below. Materials for the oral history of Russian peasants in the 20th century // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №1. P. 91-125.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-1-91-125
Annotation
The author analyzes the life stories of those Russian peasants who were old enough to remember collectivization. The large collection of such life stories recorded after 1990 is a rich source of materials for the oral history and other fields of study; however, this collection remains unsorted. Such scholars as the ethnographer Sergei Alymov, the sociologist Valery Vinogradsky, the linguist Leonid Kasatkin, and the historian Tatyana Shcheglova have done much work to collect these materials and to analyze them in different disciplinary perspectives. However, their descriptions remain completely isolated, and the author uses their publications to show the internal unity of their work and to explain that a single archive would be very useful for future research. After a brief introduction, the article turns into a chronological narrative of the Russian peasant history from 1918 to 1953, which consists of those key events/episodes in the lives of narrators that inevitably coincide with the key moments of history. In the comments to the narratives, the author describes the narrators’ psychological traits, their attitudes to the state, work and changes of fate, their connection with pre-revolutionary traditions, and their perception of the new reality.
Keywords
Civil war, NEP, collectivization, famines of 1932–1933 and 1946–1947, migration to the city, walking, court proceedings, infanticide, war, disabled veterans.
About the author
Nakhimovsky Alexander D., PhD, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department; Head of the Linguistics Program (retired), Colgate University. 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, New York, 13346 USA. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Il`inykh V.A. Siberian village during collectivization: Microhistory (Plotnikovo village in the Novosibirsk district of the Novosibirsk Region) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №1. P. 71-90.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-1-71-90
Annotation
The author reconstructs the history of the Plotnikovo village in the Novosibirsk district of the Novosibirsk Region in the late 1920s – 1930s. The research was conducted in the microhistoric format, which allows to consider the agrarian history of Russia in the everyday perspective of its direct actors – peasants united in their primary communities. The article aims at presenting the course of collectivization and its price for a certain rural settlement. In the Plotnikovo village, collectivization began at the end of 1929 with the creation of a giant commune which collapsed after the publication of Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success”. The small collective farm “Zavety Ilyicha” was established on the basis of this commune. Collectivization resumed in 1931 and ended in the late 1930s. The author also considers anti-peasant repressions, de-kulakization, local famine in 1934-1935, state regulations of the size of the collective farmers’ smallholdings, behavioral strategies of peasants and rural officials. The author concludes that in the early 1940s the Plotnikovo village was at the same or even lower level of development than in the early 1920s. Thus, in general collectivization had a negative impact on the development of agricultural productive forces in the village under study, and the difficulties the villagers survived in the 1930s cannot be counted – only named by V.P. Danilov’s term ‘tragedy of the Soviet village’.
Keywords
Peasantry, village, agrarian policy of the Soviet state, collectivization, collective farms, smallholdings, microhistory, Siberia, Т. Shanin, V.P. Danilov.
About the author
Il’inykh Vladimir A., DSc (History), Head of the Agrarian and Demographic History Sector, Institute of History, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 630090, Novosibirsk, Ac. Nikolaev St., 8.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Obozny K.P. Orthodox Church in the USSR on the eve of collectivization // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №3. P. 97-108.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-3-97-108
Annotation
The article describes the position of the Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia on the eve of the mass collectivization and dekulakization in 1930. Based on the church documents and decrees of the Soviet government, the author identifies serious changes in the church life of different dioceses of the Moscow Patriarchate. Church schisms, mass repressions, quantitative and qualitative changes in the composition of the clergy —all these factors in some ways prepared Soviet citizens, primarily the peasantry, for serious changes in the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks. Despite the tough internal policy of the Communist Party, which aimed at eliminating all opposition (political, economic and religious), including among the rural population, the resistance to the collective-farm system was primarily spiritual. Thus, the weakening church and its destruction in the late 1920s—early 1930s became a part of the Soviet government plan that aimed at suppressing and enslaving the peasantry.
Keywords
Russian Orthodox Church, Sergianism, collectivization, repressions, collective farms, spiritual opposition
About the author
Obozny Konstantin P., PhD (History), Associate Professor, St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute. Pokrovka St., 29, Moscow, 105062, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“Look out or you’ll be harmed!”: On the social-political reasons for Stalin’s collectivization
Oct 17 2020Aleksandrov K.M. “Look out or you’ll be harmed!”. On the social-political reasons for Stalin’s collectivization // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №3. P. 70-96.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-3-70-96
Annotation
The article presents the results of the comprehensive analysis of the negative consequences of socialist transformations in the Soviet village for both society and national economy. The article is based on a wide range of sources and works on the reasons for collectivization in the USSR. The historiographic findings provide grounds for broad discussions that take into account different aspects, approaches and concepts—depending on the assessments of the priorities of I.V. Stalin and other leaders of the CPSU (b) at the turn of the 1920s—1930s: from the necessary and forced development of the industry at the expense of the rural population exploitation to the establishment of the personal dictatorship of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and eradication of the peasant economic independence. The author suggests to search for an answer to the conceptual question about the meaning and reasonability of collectivization not so much in the economic conditions as in the social realities of the late 1920s as related to the peculiarities of the one-party state and to the sharp deterioration in the political situation under the grain-procurement crises determined by the artificial restrictions on the private initiative in the previous period. The main beneficiaries of the collective-farm system, which was imposed on the village by the unprecedented violence, were thousands of appointees of the CPSU (b), who sought to preserve their power, privileges and state property in their possession by introducing the ‘second serfdom’ and the all-Union system of forced labor, which put an end to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Keywords
collectivization, collective farms, peasant resistance, I.V. Stalin, V.M. Molotov, appointees, XVII Congress of the CPSU (b), grain procurement crises
About the author
Aleksandrov Kirill M., PhD (History), Associate Professor, St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute. Pokrovka St., 29, Moscow, 105062, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Kuznetsov I.A. Prerequisites for the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №3. P. 47-69.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-3-47-69
Annotation
The article considers historiographic issues in the study of reasons and factors that determined the agricultural collectivization in the USSR in the 1930s. The article is a kind of a review which aims at systematizing the data accumulated in the Russian scientific historical literature and the author’s studies of historical sources. The author identifies a number of prerequisites for collectivization: the ones external to the peasantry (village, agriculture) explain motives of the political choice made by the Soviet government at the turn of the 1920s—1930s in favor of collectivization. These external prerequisites are divided into doctrinal and pragmatic. The doctrine that determined collectivization was socialism, and the author identifies the place of the radical communist idea of the Bolsheviks among other Russian socialist projects for uniting peasants into production collectives since the last quarter of the 19th century. Pragmatic prerequisites for collectivization were determined by the government’s goal to obtain agricultural resources for industrialization and militarization of the national economy in the quantities that would exceed possibilities of the equivalent market exchange. Collectivization did have prerequisites within the village community, which allow to understand why this political course was implemented—the author focuses on the peculiarities of the mentality and political culture of the Russian peasantry.
Keywords
agrarian history, collectivization, socialism, peasantry, industrialization in the USSR
About the author
Kuznetsov Igor A., PhD (History), Senior Researcher, Research Laboratory of Economic and Social History, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Vernadskogo Prosp., 82, Moscow, 119571, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Russian Peasant Studies. Scientific journal
Center for Agrarian studies of the Russian Presidental Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)
- Publisher: Delo Publishing, RANEPA
- Editor-in-Chief: Nikulin Alexander
- ISSN 2500-1809 (Print), ISSN 2949-2564 (Online)
- Founded in 2016
- Frequency: four issues per year (March, Jun, September, December)
- Open Access: All volumes and articles can be downloaded for free in the PDF format.
- Author fees: free of chagre
- Indexation: Russian Science Citation Index, Russian Science Citation Index Core, List of Journals approved by Russian Hihger Attestation committee (Ministry for Sciende and Education), Scopus, UlrichWeb Global Serials Directory, European reference index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIHPLUS), CNKI scholar
- Russian registration number: PI FS77-65824 27-May-2016
Hard copies of the journal can be purchased at the Delo e-store or by subscription in the "Press of Russia" Agency (subscription index - Т81017).
Scimagio rating
e-issn
Friends and Partners
Rosa Luxemburg foundation
was a partner of Russian Peasant Studies before it was removed from list of approved foundation in 2022
