Chayanov Research Center

Rybnikov Alexander Alexandrovich (1877-1938)

Bibliography of works about A.A. Rybnikov

Rybnikov was born in 1877 at the Alexander-Nevsky station in the Moscow Province (according to other sources, in the city of Ryazhsk in the Ryazan Province) in an impoverished merchant family. His father was from the old merchant family of the Rybnikovs, and his mother was from the family of merchants Schukins.

After graduating from the commercial school in Moscow in 1896, for three years Rybnikov worked as an accountant at the Enzeli-Tehran road in Persia, in 1899-1902 – as an accountant in the South-Russian Industrial Bank in Moscow, in 1902-1905 – as an accountant in the Churin & Co. trading company in Vladivostok.

From 1906 to 1910, Rybnikov studied at the Law Faculty of the Moscow University, and after graduation he prepared for a professorship under the guidance of Professor N.A. Kablukov. In 1911, Rybnikov left the university in protest against the policy of the Minister of Education L.A. Kasso. In 1911-1912, Rybnikov conducted zemstvo-statistical studies of the peasant economy in the Smolensk Province. In 1911, at the All-Russian Congress of Flax Growers and at the Moscow Region Congress of Agronomic Assistance to the Population he made presentations on the development of the Russian industrial flax growing; he met Chayanov and Chelintsev, and they became the founders of the organization-production school in the agrarian-economic thought. In 1915, together with Chayanov, Maslov and Anisimov he established the Central Partnership of Flax Growers that quickly entered the Russian and world flax markets.

Since 1914, Rybnikov taught agricultural economy and statistics at the Saratov Higher Agricultural Courses that turned into the Saratov Agricultural Institute in 1917, in which in 1917-1922 Rybnikov was a professor of the Department of Agricultural Economy and Statistics. In 1917, Rybnikov worked at the League of Agrarian Reforms (as the head of its Saratov branch), at the Main Land Committee and Department of Agricultural Economy and Policy of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Provisional Government headed by Chelintsev. In 1920-1922, Rybnikov worked in the planning bodies of the Lower Volga Region and in the agricultural section of the State Planning Committee of the Labor and Defense Council, and developed measures to fight drought and restore the handicraft industry as a way to ensure the growth of the national economy.

In 1922, Rybnikov was added to the list of those who were to be expelled abroad, but at the request of the Board of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and deputy executive secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars his expulsion was canceled. In 1922-1930, Rybnikov taught economics and economic geography at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, at the first and second Moscow State University, and at the same time he led scientific research at the Research Institute of Agricultural Economy on the economic description of Kazakhstan and the Volga-Don interfluve region. Since 1926, Rybnikov worked at the section of economic geography of the Russian Association of Social Sciences Research Institutes.

On July 28, 1930, Rybnikov was arrested by the United State Political Administration in the case of the Labor Peasant Party, and on January 26, 1932 he was sentenced to 5 years in a concentration camp but was released from custody due to a mental illness (suspended sentence). After the treatment course, in 1934-1937, Rybnikov worked at the All-Union Institute of Flax in Torzhok. In June 1937, the Moscow Region Planning Committee assigned him to place the fiber flax growing in the Moscow Region in the third five-year plan.

On December 26, 1937, Rybnikov was arrested again, charged with terrorism against the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) and the Soviet government, and on September 16, 1938 he was shot by the sentence of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. Rybnikov was rehabilitated on this sentence in 1963 and fully rehabilitated on the Labor Peasant Party sentence only in 1987.

Boris (Ber) Davidovich Brutskus (1874–1938)

Bibliography of works about B.D. Brutskus

Brutskus was born on October 3 (15), 1874 in the township of Palangen in the Courland Province (today the city of Palanga in Lithuania) in the family of an entrepreneur. He graduated from the high school in Moscow with a gold medal (1891). In 1892–1894, Brutskus studied at the Medical Faculty of the University of Warsaw, then at the New-Alexandrian Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (in the New Alexandria suburb of the Lublin Province, today the city of Pulawy in Poland), from which he graduated in 1898 with a gold medal for his graduate work in physiology.

In 1899-1908, Brutskus worked as an agronomist at the Central Committee of the Jewish Colonization Society – an international organization with a branch in Saint Petersburg. He studied the economy of Jewish agricultural colonies in the south of Russia. In 1908-1917, Brutskus worked in the insurance companies – ‘Russian Transport Insurance Company’ and ‘Russia’. Since 1907, he taught at the non-governmental higher education institution – the Stone-Island Higher Agricultural Courses – and gave lectures on ‘economy and organization of the economy, agricultural policy and history of agriculture’. Brutskus gave public lectures at the Saint Petersburg Imperial Agricultural Museum and published a lot in Kharkov Journal of Agronomy. After the transformation in 1918 of the Stone-Island Higher Agricultural Courses into the I.A. Stebut Agricultural Academy and then into the Petrograd Agricultural Institute, until 1922 Brutskus was a professor of these educational institutions and taught in other universities established after the Revolution.

Brutskus interpretation of agricultural economy coincides with that of the organization-production school. During the Stolypin reforms, his views on agrarian policy changed in favor of classical liberalism – he admitted the progressive importance of private land ownership for peasants. In 1917, Brutskus criticized Narodniks in the press and opposed projects of land socialization and nationalization and of preserving the peasant community. During the ‘war communism’, Brutskus came to the conclusion of the fundamental impossibility of an effective economy based on the theory of socialism. In 1922, Brutskus published a series of articles Socialist Economy in the journal Economist, in which he criticized the ideology and practice of socialism – the journal was closed, Brutskus was arrested by the United State Political Administration and in November expelled from Soviet Russia as an enemy of the Soviet power.

Until 1935, he lived in Berlin and worked as a professor at the Russian Science Institute established by emigrants. He continued to critically analyze the national economy of the USSR under the NEP and the first five-year plan, published works in Russian, German and English. The Hitler regime in Germany forced him to move to Palestine (the British protectorate at that time), and he taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the rest of his life. Brutskus died of cancer on December 7, 1938. From the late 1920s to the late 1980s Brutskus works were banned in the USSR.

Gennady Alexandrovich Studensky (1898–1930)

Bibliography of works about G.A. Studensky

Studensky was born on December 4, 1898 in the village of Alekseevka of the Chembarsky Uyezd of the Penza Province in the family of a deacon. He graduated from the parish school, rural high school, Penza Theological Seminary (1912-1918) and Peter’s (Timiryazev) Agricultural Academy (1918-1921). In his student years, Studensky worked as a district agronomist and assistant of the head of the state farm in the Penza Province (November 1919 – May 1920). After graduating from the Academy, in which Chayanov was his teacher, Studensky was offered to prepare for teaching ‘agricultural economics’.

In 1922-1923, Studensky worked as a researcher in the Department of Agricultural Economy and Planned Work of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture headed by N.D. Kondratiev. In 1922, Studensky led the expedition to study peasant budgets in the Penza Province. Then he worked at the Research Institute of Agricultural Economy under the guidance of Chayanov, and since 1926 he was a professor at the Samara (Middle Volga) Agricultural Institute. During his scientific trip to Germany in 1927, Studensky studied the organization of large agricultural enterprises. In 1928, he led the budget studies of peasant economies in the Samara Province. In 1929, Studensky had a long business trip to the United States to study the economics and geography of the American agriculture and processes of its mechanization, which allowed him to develop an original theory of agrarian crises.

In his early works, Studensky followed the ideas of the organization-production school and tried to combine them with the ideas of the classical economic theory (Essays on the Theory of Peasant Economy, 1923). Later he abandoned the ideas of the organization-production school. In the book Essays on Agricultural Economy (1925) based on his own statistical data on the Russian agriculture on the eve of the World War I, Studensky criticized Chayanov theory of labor-consumption balance and Chelintsev demographic theory of agrarian evolution, and denied the need for a special economic theory of peasant economy for he believed that such an economy could be fully described in the terms of market economy.

In 1927, in the journal Paths of Agriculture Studensky criticized the draft of the first five-year plan of the USSR. In the Soviet literature since the mid-1920s, the views of Studensky were qualified as bourgeois. In 1930, he was arrested on the trumped-up charges of the Labor Peasant Party and died during the investigation (according to the official version, he committed suicide in prison).

Studensky is an outstanding representative of the Russian economic thought of the 1920s. However, he remains forgotten despite about 60 scientific publications including 13 in German and English.