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.
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Chayanov A.V. What will our national economy be like after the war? (Article of A.V. Chayanov) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №1. P. 6-12.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-1-6-12

Annotation

This article by A.V. Chayanov was published in the edition of the Moscow Union of Consumer Societies “Cooperative Rural Calendar for 1918” (Moscow, 1917, pp. 42–44). The article is of interest mainly as a short, impressive, journalistic, rapid forecast of the possible evolutionary directions of the Russian economy and society in the short-term and mid-term national-economic perspective. This is a polemical political-economic article due to Chayanov’s reflections on the interpretation of such concepts as ‘state socialism’ and ‘socialism’ in general, on the meaning of ‘public reason’ in the ongoing and future reforms, and also due to Chayanov’s forecasts of the Russian economic development as determined by such multidirectional economic, political and social factors as the state debt that had multiplied during the war, the weakening impact of inflation on the economy, and the after-war tasks of transferring the economy to a peaceful track. In his positive forecasts, Chayanov put special hopes on the awakening social and productive forces of the Russian peasantry. Chayanov believed that the growth of culture, labor productivity and cooperation among the peasantry would allow to find a way out of the impasse of the 1917 economic devastation. Although, as the later historical events showed, Chayanov’s belief in ‘public reason’ and the corresponding humanistic socialist prospects for Russia did not come true, he systematically identified the key dominants of both revolutionary and evolutionary transformations of the huge peasant country under the great social-political upheavals of the 20th century. 

Keywords

Agrarian reform, A.V. Chayanov, state socialism, cooperation, peasantry, public reason, World War I, revolution.

About the authors

Chayanov Alexander V.
Afanasenkov Vladislav O., Researcher, Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Junior Researcher, Research Laboratory of Economic and Social History, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Vernadskogo Prosp., 82, Moscow, 119571, Russia.
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Round table “In memory of Teodor Shanin” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №4. P. 39-77.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-4-39-77

Annotation

On the final day of the Chayanov International Conference (October 22–23, 2020), the round table was held in memory of Teodor Shanin, a remarkable agrarian scientist and researcher of A.V. Chayanov’s legacy. The round table was dedicated to both the memory of Professor Shanin who passed away on February 4, 2020, and to his 90th birthday on October 29, 2020. More than 60 scientists and students from different regions of Russia and the world watched presentations of friends, colleagues, and students of Shanin at the round table held online due to the pandemic. The round table was opened by Professor Shulamit Ramon, the widow of Teodor Shanin, who spoke about the worldview dominants of his life and work, his intellectual connection with Russia. The British colleagues of Teodor Shanin—Professors Henry Bernstein, Mark Harrison and Judith Pallot—spoke about directions of the main academic research and discussions which started in the 1970s on social differentiation of the peasantry and referred to the ideological legacy of Lenin and Chayanov; Teodor Shanin made a huge contribution to these debates.
The French scholar Aleksey Berelovich focused on the features of Shanin as a political scientist and a brilliant analyst of the political processes of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Russian colleagues of Teodor Shanin—geographer A.I. Alekseev, historian V.V. Kondrashin, sociologists V.G. Vinogradsky, O.P. Fadeeva, I.E. Shteinberg, A.M. Nikulin, D.M. Rogozin, and A.A. Artamonov—shared their personal memories of Shanin and provided a comprehensive description of his interdisciplinary methodology of agricultural research. Agrarian scientists from South Africa—Boaventura Monjane and Ruth Hall, and India—Sima Purushotaman—emphasized the importance of Shanin’s legacy for the study of the peasant development in the regions of Africa and Asia. Most presentations stressed and analyzed the intellectual connection of Professor Shanin with the Russian agrarian research of Marxists, populists, and the Chayanov school. [/tab]

Keywords

Shanin, peasantry, agrarian sociology, social differentiation, Russia, Marxism, populism, Chayanov [/tab]

About the authors

Alekseev Alexander I., DSc (Geography), Professor, Faculty of Geography, Lomonosov Moscow State University. 119991, Moscow, Lenin Hills, 1.
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Artamonov Alexander A., Leading Specialist, Center for Agrarian Studies of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 82, Prosp. Vernadskogo, Moscow, Russian Federation, 119571.
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Berelowitch Alexis, University Paris—Sorbonne (Paris IV). France, Paris-5, Rue VictorCousin, 1.
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Bernstein Henry, Emeritus Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). London WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom.
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Fadeeva Olga P., PhD (Sociology), Leading Researcher, Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Prosp. Lavrentieva, 17, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.   
Hall Ruth, Professor University of the Western Cape, X17, Bellville, 7535.
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Harrison Mark, Emeritus Professor, Department of Economics, University of Warwick. Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.
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Kondrashin Viktor V., DSc (History), Professor, Head of Center for Economic History, Institute of Russian History Russian Academy of Science. 117292, Moscow, D. Ul’yanova St., 19.
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Monjane Boaventura, Post-Doc, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
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Nikulin Alexander M., Head of the Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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Pallot Judith, Emeritus Professor, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom.
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Purushothaman Seema, Professor, Azim Premji University Survey. 66, Burugunte village, Bikkanahalli main road, Sarjapura, 562125 Bengaluru.
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Ramon Shulamit, Professor, School of Health and Social Work, University of Hertfordshire. Hatfield AL10 9AB, United Kingdom.
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Rogozin Dmitry M., Senior Researcher, Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting, Russian Presidential Academy for National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), 119034, Moscow, Prechistenskaya Nab., 11 bld.1.
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Shteinberg Ilya E., PhD (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. Sretenka St., 29, Moscow, 127051, Russia.
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Vinogradsky Valery G., DSc (Philosophy), Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp., 82.
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Bernstein H. Shanin, Chayanov and peasant studies of Russia and beyond // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №4. P. 32-38.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-4-32-38

Annotation

This text is based on the presentation at the roundtable in memory of Teodor Shanin (Moscow, 23 October 2020) and on the recent author’s paper in press, which surveys Shanin’s work of the 1970s and 1980s. The author provides a guide to tracing Shanin’s main themes and issues. First, the family farm is usually if not invariably featured first in Shanin’s characterizations of peasants as a general or generic type. Second, Shanin sought explanations of peasant household reproduction in his model of ‘multidirectional and cyclical mobility’ against the ‘biological determinism’ linked to the organization-production school and against the ‘economic determinism’ of Marxists. Third, Shanin emphasized “life of a small community within which most of the peasant needs of social living and social reproduction can be met”, but he aimed to avoid a romantic view of the mir. Fourth, Shanin believed that “the definitions of peasantry, which view it as representing an aspect of the past surviving in the modern world, seem, on the whole, valid”, and that rural society can be understood in terms of labour and capital flows which are broader than agriculture. Fifth, Shanin wrote that the triple origins of Marx’s analytical thought suggested by Engels—German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy—should be supplemented by the Russian revolutionary populism. Sixth, Shanin argued that the concept of ‘peasant mode of production’ had too many heuristic limitations to be sustained. Finally, Shanin’s vision of an alternative to both capitalist development and the projects of Soviet style was firmly rooted in the legacy of Chayanov.

Keywords

Shanin, Chayanov, peasant economy, organization-production school, populist, peasantry, peasant mode of production

About the author

Bernstein Henry, Professor Emeritus, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK; Adjunct Professor, School of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing.
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Worobec С.D. The influences of A.V. Chayanov and Teodor Shanin on the English-language historiography of peasants in the Russian Empire // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №4. P. 8-31.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-4-8-31

Annotation

In the 1980s, various influences were at play in producing a groundswell of interest in the Russian Empire’s peasantries, not least of which were the works of A.V. Chayanov and Teodor Shanin. The interdisciplinary social history movement, which eschewed traditional political history and its focus on elites, arose in the 1960s. The initial interest in biographies of Russian revolutionary men and women and histories of the nascent Russian working class and labor movement in order to explain the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were suddenly supplemented and eventually displaced by an avid interest in peasants. The article examines the conclusions that the first-wave of scholarship on the peasantries of the Russian Empire produced. It shows how the ideas of Chayanov and Shanin remained dominant but were challenged by archival sources, histories on the micro- and regional levels, and attention to household tensions, gender issues, craft production and non-agricultural trades, growing literacy, as well as out-migration and return migration. By the mid-1990s, it became impossible to talk about a generalized autarkic, insular, cohesive as well as egalitarian Russian peasant society with traditional mores and customs that rebelled spontaneously because of its immiseration. The post-structural turn had furthermore begun to chip away at the veracity of statistics produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to question depictions of peasants which tended to emphasize their dark, primitive, and seemingly backward nature. Although this turn almost dried up interest in Russian peasant studies, a steady stream of historical works began to appear again in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We now have a firmer grasp of an economically and socially differentiated peasantry, the contours of the normal political accommodation that peasants made with the state (instead of always resisting it), and peasants’ utilization of the legal system to challenge their neighbors and family members. Furthermore, we know how a moral economy operated between the state and its peasant taxpayers and how and why zemstvo statistics produced Chayanov’s brilliant model of the dominant middling peasant household. At the same time, the agency with which Chayanov and Shanin infused the peasants has taken center stage in historical analyses.

Keywords

Chayanov, Shanin, peasantry, Russian empire, Russian peasant society, peasant household, peasant commune, traditional political history, post-structural turn, moral economy

About the author

Worobec Christine D., Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, Northern Illinois University. 1425 W. Lincoln Hwy., DeKalb, IL 60115-2828.
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Doktorov B.Z., Nikulin A.M. Teodor Shanin: Peasant Studies and Russia // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №3. P. 146-172.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-3-146-172

Annotation

In this interview, Boris Doktorov, a Russian sociologist living in America, a researcher of intellectual biographies and methods of social sciences in the 20th–21st centuries, together with the Editor-in-Chief of the Russian Peasant Studies and Head of the Chayanov Research Center of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Alexander Nikulin, talks about the outstanding British sociologist Teodor Shanin, whose scientific legacy is closely related to the development of an interdisciplinary social science—peasant studies, and who conducted a number of fundamental historical-sociological and economic-sociological studies of rural Russia. The interview considers the basic concepts and milestones in the development of peasant studies as a branch of the historical-sociological knowledge in Russia, analyzes Shanin’s estimates of various aspects of the Russian social-humanitarian thought as related to the study of the peasantry and to the recommendations on alternatives for the development and transformation of peasant worlds, which were suggested by agrarian populists and Marxists, G.V. Plekhanov and V.I. Lenin, A.V. Chayanov and I.V. Stalin. The interview considers the impact of literature and art on descriptions and explanations of the role of the peasantry through the intellectual interests of Teodor Shanin; focuses on his joint activities with his closest colleagues in the study of rural Russia—the outstanding agrarian scientists V.P. Danilov and T.I. Zaslavskaya. Throughout the interview, Shanin’s worldview and moral-ethical principles in the search for humanistic alternatives for the Russian and global rural development are discussed.

Keywords

peasantry, peasant studies, agrarian policy, Teodor Shanin, V.P. Danilov, T.I. Zaslavskaya, village writers, rural Russia

About the authors

Doktorov Boris Z., DSc (Philosophy), Professor, Independet Analyst. 100 Village Lane, Foster City, CA 94404, USA.
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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.
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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.
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Chayanov A.V. On differentiation of the peasant economy (Article of A.V. Chayanov) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №4. P. 6-21.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-4-6-21

Annotation

This article by A.V. Chayanov was first published in the journal, “Paths of Agriculture” (1927, no. 5, pp. 101-21).This is a revised version of his report presented at the beginning of 1927 in Moscow at a discussion on the social-economic differentiation of the Soviet peasantry. Many prominent scientists participated in this discussion, including representatives of the two most important, ideological trends in Soviet agricultural science: on the one hand, Marxist agrarians (L.N. Kritsman, V.S. Nemchinov, Ya.A. Anisimov, I.D. Vermenichev, K.N. Naumov), and on the other hand, the so-called “agrarian neo-populists” (A.V. Chayanov, N.P. Makarov, A.N. Chelintsev).
In the report, Chayanov presents a new interpretation of the social-economic differentiation of the peasantry in Soviet Russia, which differs from the differentiation of the peasantry in pre-revolutionary Russia. According to Chayanov, after the destruction of the landlord and capitalist economies by revolution, the main reasons for the differentiation of the Soviet peasantry in the 1920s were regional contradictions in the peasant population distribution. On the one hand, peasants concentrated in the central, black earth regions, and on the other hand, they moved to the markets of sea ports and large cities. Chayanov argued that in this way, four types of relatively independent, family economies emerged from the mass of semi-subsistence peasant economies: farming, credit-usurious, commercial seasonal-working, and auxiliary economies.
Moreover, unlike the famous Marxist, three-element, agrarian scheme —“kulak– middle peasant–poor peasant”—which was developed by the school of L.N. Kritsman, Chayanov developed a more complex, six-element scheme of the differentiation of peasant economies: capitalist, semi-labor, well-to-do family-labor, poor family-labor, semi-proletarian, and proletarian. Based on this scheme, Chayanov suggested a number of economic policy steps for the systematic development of agricultural cooperation, primarily in the interests of the middle strata of the Soviet peasantry.
In the discussion of peasant differentiation in 1927, the arguments of Chayanov and his colleagues from the organization-production school were more convincing and justified than those of their opponents from the Marxist agrarians. However, in 1928, the Stalinist leadership began to inflate the threat of increasing class differentiation in the village. Thus, it initiated the struggle against the kulaks as a class, which became the prologue to forced collectivization during which Chayanov’s school was destroyed.
The publication with comments was prepared by A.M. Nikulin.

Keywords

peasantry, agricultural regions, USSR, social-economic differentiation, Chayanov, agrarian Marxists, agricultural cooperation

About the authors

Chayanov Alexander V.

Editor: 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.
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Translator: Trotsuk Irina V., DSc (Sociology), Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Researcher, Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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Schneider S., Nikulin A.M. “In the joint comparative studies, there is much we can learn from each other” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №3. P. 167-185.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-3-167-185

Annotation

In the autobiographical interview, Sergio Schneider, a leading Brazilian sociologist in the field of sociology of rural development and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, reconstructs his scientific career and considers dramatic changes in the life of rural and urban communities of Brazil in the late 20th—early 21st century. In particular, the interview focuses on the development of rural sociology in Brazil, its institutionalization, and research interests of those Brazilian social scientists that determined the development of rural sociology and were the teachers of Sergio Schneider. The development of rural sociology in Brazil is presented as influenced by the German, French, American and English historical-sociological traditions of the study of the agrarian question and interaction of the city and the village. The interview emphasizes the significance of A.V. Chayanov’s intellectual heritage for the worldview of Sergio Schneider and Brazilian rural sociology in general. Sergio Schneider stresses the importance of his personal activist position that has always helped him in the search for interaction between politics and science. In conclusion, he raises the question of the development of comparative Brazil-Russian-Chinese rural-urban studies, in which he currently participates.

Keywords

Brazil, sociology, regions, peasantry, university science, rural development, Marxism, Chayanov

About the authors

Schneider Sergio, DSc (Sociology), Professor of Sociology of Rural Development and Food Studies, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Av. Paulo Gama, 110, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 90040-060.
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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, MSSES. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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Uleri F. Capitalism and the peasant mode of production: A Chayanovian analysis // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №3. P. 43-60.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-3-43-60

Annotation

Although the disappearance of the peasantry under capitalism was repeatedly announced, peasants are still here, and the peasant mode of production still serves as a livelihood basis for millions of rural households. Based on Chayanov’s ideas, the article identifies some reasons for this resistance to capitalism by describing the internal functional logic of the peasant economy and the difference of the peasant mode of production from the capitalist one. The complexity and spatial-temporal variability of agricultural production and social-economic formations of the mature capitalism are replacing agriculture in the process of changes that consist of multiple transformations (Geels, 2002; van der Ploeg, 2008). One of the most debated agrarian changes is the trajectories of rural development under the persistence or dissolution of the peasant mode of production in the course of modernization that characterizes the evolution and consolidation of capitalist societies. The fate of the peasantry, or the “peasant question”, is the core part of the larger debate on the “agrarian question”, which the Marxist political economy defines as a set of agrarian transformations leading to the penetration of capitalist relations into agriculture and to the transfer from pre-capitalist, feudal or semi-feudal modes of production to capitalism (McMichael, 2006; Akram-Lodhi, Kay, 2010a; 2010b; Lerche, 2014). However today the empirical scenario is contrary to the Marxist perspective for the peasant mode of production expands and reappears in the repeasantization as a viable alternative to the capitalist agriculture (Domínguez, 2012; Corrado, 2013; Carrosio, 2014; van der Berg et al., 2018). The author presents an overview of the classical conceptualizations of the fate of the peasantry and explains “why peasants are still here” by the spatially and temporally contextualized analysis of the peasant economy in the microeconomic perspective with the help of the theory of peasant economy (TPE) proposed by Chayanov in the early 20th century.

Keywords

peasantry, capitalism, Chayanov, capital, labor

About the author

Uleri Francesca, PhD Researcher, Agrisystem Doctoral School, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Piacenza (Italy).
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