Chayanov A. V. Essays on the theory of water management // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2026. V.11. №2. P. 6-21.

EDN: DAVLHE

Annotation

Alexander Chayanov visited European countries many times but never visited Asia outside the Russian Empire and USSR; however, his visits to Russian/Soviet Turkestan (as the territory of today’s Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan was called and administered in the early 20th century) from 1915 to 1927 were reflected in several works. Before the 1917 Revolution, 28-year-old Chayanov visited Samarkand (Uzbekistan) to study irrigation and water management in the Central Asian regions. The results of this research were published as “Essays on the theory of water management”, which he begun in 1915 in Samarkand and completed in 1917 in Moscow. Chayanov wanted to study water rent — the oldest and still relevant problem of Asian irrigation, already having some experience of studying the economy of European irrigation: in 1908, during his postgraduate internship in Italy, he had studied the economy of the oldest European irrigation systems in Lombardy. To theoretically generalize European and Asian irrigation, Chayanov wrote these essays as a cascade of abstract marginalist schemes, ingeniously transforming von Thünen’s famous economic-mathematical model of the isolated city-state into his model of the isolated oasis-state for Turkestan — in the center of a great desert, there is an isolated oasis-society, whose entire agriculture is based on irrigation. At the center of this equally fertile and waterless vast plain, there is a single water source — property of a small number of individuals who sell water to farmers competing for it. This constructed object is analyzed through numerous, increasingly complex marginalist examples of the economy of the isolated oasis-state. The initial oasis model is further expanded to include land of varying quality and the natural cyclical functioning of the water source. Chayanov concludes his work with institutional questions about the role of water owners in national economy, social regulation of water, promotion of rational water use and trade-offs in water distribution. Chayanov wanted to test his theoretical model on empirical data from fieldwork but could not do it. A century later, today’s generation of historians, sociologists, economists and anthropologists studying irrigation in arid regions of the globe may find these abstract essays useful.

Keywords

Irrigation, oasis, water rent, water management, land use, dryland farming, isolated state.  

About the authors

Alexander V. Chayanov 

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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