Alexander Chayanov

Alexander V. Chayanov (Russian: Александр Васильевич Чаянов) (1888 – October 3, 1937) was a Soviet agrarian economist, and scholar of rural sociology and advocate of agrarianism and cooperatives.

Chayanov was born in Moscow, the son of a merchant, Vasily Ivanovich Chayanov, and an agronomist, Elena Konstantinovna (born Klepikova). He attended a Realschule (1899–1906) and the Moscow Agricultural Institute (1906–1911), becoming an agronomist; he taught and published works on agriculture until 1914, when he began working for various government institutions. In 1912 he married Elena Vasilevna Grigorieva, a marriage that lasted until 1920. In 1921 he married Olga Emmanuilovna Gurevich; they had sons Nikita (born 1922) and Vasily (born 1925).

After the October Revolution, he served on several Soviet committees for agrarian reform and was a member of Narkomzem as well as "holding lecturing and administrative posts at several universities and academies."

He was a proponent of agricultural cooperatives, but was skeptical about the inefficiency of large-scale farms. Chayanov's skepticism was rooted in the idea that households, especially peasant households which practice subsistence farming, will tend to produce only the amount of food that they need to survive. He believed that the Soviet government would find it difficult to force these households to cooperate and produce a surplus. These views were sharply criticized by Joseph Stalin as "defence of the kulaks". However, Chayanov was ultimately shown to be right about the problems with Soviet agricultural planning.

In 1930 Chayanov was arrested in the "Case of the Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая крестьянская партия), fabricated by the NKVD. The name of the party was taken from a science fiction book written by Chayanov in the 1920s. The process was intended to be a show trial, but it fell apart, due to the strong will of the defendants. Nevertheless, on a secret trial in 1932 Chayanov was sentenced to five years in Kazakhstan labor camps. On October 3, 1937 Chayanov was arrested again, tried and shot the same day.

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