Alexander Chayanov

Alexander Chayanov (1888 to 1937) was a Russian, then Soviet agrarian economist, scholar of rural sociology and advocate of agrarianism and cooperatives. Born in Moscow, the son of a merchant and an agronomist, he attended the Moscow Agricultural Institute from 1906 to 1911, became an agronomist, and taught and published on agriculture until 1914. After the October Revolution he served on Soviet committees for agrarian reform and was a member of Narkomzem. He supported agricultural cooperatives but doubted large scale farms, arguing that peasant households practising subsistence farming tend to produce only what they need, so that the state would find it hard to force them to cooperate and produce a surplus; Stalin denounced this as defence of the kulaks. Arrested in 1930 in the fabricated Labour Peasant Party case, he was sentenced in 1932 and shot in 1937, and rehabilitated in 1987. His Peasant Farm Organisation appeared in Russian in 1925.