Rybnikov Alexander Alexandrovich (1877-1938)

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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.

Alexander Vasilievich Chayanov (1888-1937)

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Chayanov, an outstanding representative of the Russian economic thought of the early 20^th century, was born in Moscow on January 17 (29), 1888 in the family of a wealthy peasant V.I. Chayanov and a daughter of the famous Vyatka merchant E.K. Klepikova.

After graduating from the non-classical secondary school in 1906, Chayanov entered the Moscow Agricultural Institute, and his teachers N.N. Khudyakov, D.N. Pryanishnikov and A.F. Fortunatov became his model in science and in life. Already at the Institute Chayanov showed himself as a remarkable scientist. In 1908, he published his first article Travelling Departments in Italy. In 1911, after the successful defense of his graduate work, Chayanov was awarded the title of the scientist-agronomist of the first category, and the leadership of the Institute accepted him as a scholarship holder to continue his scientific-teaching activities. In 1911, at the Moscow Region Congress of Agronomic Assistance to the Population Chayanov met economists with whom he made up the backbone of the organization-production school in the Russian economic thought – Chelintsev, Makarov and Rybnikov.

In 1912-1913, Chayanov published two issues of Essays on the Theory of Labor Economy, in which he outlined the theory of the labor-consumption balance in the labor peasant economy. In 1913-1917, Chayanov studied the theory and practice of cooperation, methodology of budget studies of the peasant economy and its organization. In 1915, together with Anisimov, Maslov and Rybnikov he organized the Central Partnership of Flax Growers – a cooperative association that quickly arranged the purchase and sale of flax including abroad.

During the World War I, Chayanov focused on solving the food question. In the Special Meeting on Food established in 1915, he was a representative of the All-Russian Union of Cities, and in March 1916, he headed the Food Department of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union. Chayanov also taught at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, A.L. Shaniavsky People’s University and different agricultural courses.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Chayanov was an organizer of the League of Agrarian Reforms and a member of the Main Land Committee that developed the agrarian reform. In October, he was appointed an advisor of the Minister of Agriculture S.L. Maslov in the last composition of the Provisional Government, but did not take up his duties.

In the difficult 1918-1919, cooperation helped many economists to survive. Chayanov was one of them, and he wrote most of his works on cooperation including the most significant one – Basic Ideas and Forms of Peasant Cooperation (1919).

In 1918, Chayanov was one of the youngest professors of the Peter’s Agricultural Academy. In 1919, he headed its Higher Seminar of Agricultural Economy and Policy that was transformed into the Research Institute of Agricultural Economy and Policy in 1922, and focused on theoretical and practical issues in organization of agriculture, taxation and accounting, cooperation, standards, agricultural regionalization and economic geography.

During the NEP, Chayanov worked in administrative bodies. He was a member of the Presidium of the Economic Meeting of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and planned its activities for 1921-1922, and as a member of the Board of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture he coordinated the work on the first plan for the development of agriculture in the RSFSR. In 1922, Chayanov had a long business trip to England and Germany. As an authority for cooperators, he was to help the People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade L.B. Krasin to establish foreign trade relations, and he was to participate in an extensive program of the studies of world agriculture and to purchase scientific literature with the allocated funds for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and the Research Institute of Agricultural Economy and Policy. In Germany, Chayanov developed the theory of the peasant economy organization, published articles and a large work in German – Doctrine of Peasant Economy, which was published in the USSR in 1925 as Organization of Peasant Economy.

Chayanov was a talented economist, he wrote five fantastic novels, poems, a play and a film script, he was an expert in the history of Moscow and old engravings, he was a bibliophile with a collection of more than 5 thousand books.

After his return from the business trip, Chayanov focused on the research and teaching, and in 1923-1927 he became the most influential agrarian economist of the organization-production school, whose representatives worked mainly in the departments of the Faculty of Economics of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.

However, the authorities moved the discussion, which began in 1927 on the differentiation of peasant economy and development of cooperation and collectivization, from the field of scientific debates to the field of administrative regulation. In 1928, Chayanov was removed from the position of the head of the Institute. The speech of I.V. Stalin at the conference of agrarian Marxists, in which he used the name of Chayanov as plural and figurative, marked the start of repressions against the organization-production school. On July 21, 1930, Chayanov was arrested and charged with membership in the Labor Peasant Party that was accused of creating a crisis in agriculture and aiding intervention. Chayanov was sentenced to 5 years in prison and sent to the Yaroslavl Political Isolation Ward. In 1934, the prison sentence was replaced by an exile to Kazakhstan.

In the second half of 1934, Chayanov was allowed to teach variation statistics at the L.N. Mirzoyan Kazakh Agricultural Institute. In 1935-1937, he also worked as a senior economist-analyst in the balance group of the Planning-Financial Department of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and in the Exhibition Committee that prepared the Kazakhstan materials for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. On June 28, 1935, the Special Meeting of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR extended his exile for 3 more years.

On March 16, 1937 Chayanov was arrested again and on October 3 he was shot by the sentence of the Special Meeting of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Chayanov was fully rehabilitated only in 1987.

Boris (Ber) Davidovich Brutskus (1874–1938)

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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.

Alexander Nikolaevich Chelintsev (1874-1962)

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Alexander Chelintsev is a prominent Russian and Soviet agrarian economist and statistician of the late 19 th century –1960s. He was born on August 3, 1874 in the city of Volsk (Saratov Province) in the family of a sales clerk. He got his secondary education at the Mariinsky Agricultural School (Saratov Province), from which he graduated in 1895. After military service, in 1896, he worked as a statistician at the Saratov Provincial Zemstvo Administration and at the same time he was a lecturer-goer at the New-Alexandrian Institute of Agriculture and Forestry. Such a combination of work and study was determined by his family difficult financial situation after the death of his father. After graduating with the title of the first category agronomist, in November 1900, Chelintsev was appointed a teacher of economy, technology, horticulture and gardening at the Mariinsky Agricultural School. In 1901-1904, his first works were published – Gardening in the City of Khvalynsk, Immediate Tasks of Agricultural Economy, Day-Rate Payment of Agricultural Workers in Russia.

In 1904-1906, Chelintsev was sent to Germany and France to study the decorative gardening in the higher schools of Dahlem and Versailles. After the return, Chelintsev got a teacher’s place at the Uman Secondary School of Gardening and Agriculture (Kiev Province) and continued his scientific research in gardening and organization of agriculture. In December 1908, the New-Alexandrian Institute Council of Professors invited Chelintsev to work at the Institute: he was elected first an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor and for ten years lectured in gardening, horticulture and fruit-growing, agricultural economy and statistics. In 1908-1913, Chelintsev published a number of works on the fundamental changes in the agrarian sector of the Russian economy. His original scientific work Agricultural Regions of Russia as Stages in the Evolution of Agriculture, and the Cultural Level of Agriculture in Them had a great impact on further research of the rational distribution and narrow specialization of the country’s agricultural production.

Since 1914, the main focus of Chelintsev together with Chayanov, Makarov and Rybnikov was the theory of organization of the ‘small-scale peasant, cooperatively-united economy’. Chelintsev conducted a field budget study of peasant economies in 16 southern provinces of Russia and opened a research bureau for organizing peasant economies at the Agricultural Union of Cooperatives in Kharkov. After many years of work, he collected extensive data of great importance not only for scientific research but also for the organization of agriculture.

The problems of the Russian agricultural sector escalated during the World War I. In 1916, the Economic Council of the Union of Cities asked Professor Chelintsev to make a presentation “On the general direction in the development of the Russian productive forces” and “On the conditions for the production and sales of main products in wartime”.

After the February Revolution, Chelintsev worked in the League of Agrarian Reforms and in the Main Land Committee. From May to October 1917, he headed the Department of Agricultural Economy and Policy of the Ministry of Agriculture in the Provisional Government, and in October he was appointed a member of this government by the Minister of Agriculture S.L. Maslov. His most famous publications of 1917-1919 are: Issues of Animal Husbandry under Land  Reorganization, Prospects for Dairy Cooperation in the Kharkov Province, The State and Development of the Russian Agriculture According to the 1916 Census and of the Railway Transportation, Is there a Land Rent in the Peasant Economy?, On the Development of Agricultural Cooperation, Results of the Study of the Peasant Economy Organization for the Justification of Public and Cooperative-Agronomic Assistance on the Examples from the Tambov Province, etc.

The civil war broke out when Chelintsev was in the Kuban and led the field research of ‘the Cossack-peasant agricultural production’. He agreed with the Embassy of Serbia on teaching at the University of Belgrade and left Russia from Novorossiysk on March 1, 1920.

The Yugoslav period of Chelintsev life in exile (1920-1923) was quite effective. He was appointed a full-time professor at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Belgrade and lectured in geography, statistics, organization and economy of agriculture. During his university business trips, he traveled almost the whole Yugoslavia, conducted research of the organization of the country’s peasant economy and studied statistical data. Chelintsev developed a course on agricultural statistics of Yugoslavia, wrote scientific papers and made presentations at the Russian Academic Society in Belgrade including the report ‘Agricultural regions of Serbia’. His work World Market for Farm Products and its Connection with the Evolution of the Farm System aroused the interest of the scientific community. Despite being far from the homeland, Chelintsev contributed to the solution of its vital food problem. In the report ‘Supply of Russia with the spring grain crops by the spring of 1922’, he concluded that it was necessary and possible to get seeds from abroad ‘without harming the well-being of the global consumer’.

The political situation in Europe and difficult relations among the Russian emigrants made Chelintsev leave Yugoslavia and move to Czechoslovakia – the largest center of the Russian scientific emigration thanks to the Committee of Practical Issues of Rural Life and the Union of Russian Agronomists and Foresters which aimed at uniting and helping Russian peasants who emigrated to this country and at publishing collections of articles Peasant Russia under the guidance of S.S. Maslov. Professor Chelintsev was accepted to the staff of the Russian Institute of Agricultural Cooperation, became a member of the Institute’s Training Collegium and Agricultural School: he gave lectures on the organization and economy of agriculture, fruit growing and agricultural geography. In 1923, the Institute funded the publication of textbooks: on the history of cooperative credit (S.V.Borodaevsky), cooperative legislation (N.P. Makarov) and agricultural geography of Russia (A.N. Chelintsev). Together with V.E. Brunstom and K.I. Khranich Chelintsev was an editor of the journal Cooperation and Agriculture. Notes of the Russian Institute of Agricultural Cooperation in Prague.

Besides teaching and methodological work, Chelintsev continued to conduct research, made business trips to the Higher Agricultural School in Berlin and in Czechoslovakia to study the reform agricultural policy of the government. The main provisions of his studies are presented in the work Land Reform in Czechoslovakia.

Together with Maslov in 1924, Chelintsev was a founder of the Russian Research Institute of Rural Culture in Prague, headed the Cabinet of Agricultural Economy and worked on the book World Market and World Agricultural Production. In 1923-1925, he published articles on economic issues in Peasant Russia, Cooperation in Agriculture, Notes of the Institute for the Study of Russia. Soviet economic organizations needed highly qualified specialists. Already in 1921, Professor Chelintsev received an invitation from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture of the RSFSR to work in its Planning Commission ‘as a highly qualified prominent economist in agriculture’. In March 1925, with his family he returned to Moscow. Until 1930, he worked in the Land Planning Committee of the RSFSR, the Expert Council of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR on the bread-fodder balance and in the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasant Inspection of the USSR, actively participated in the development of the first five-year plans for the national economy. Chelintsev combined scientific-organizational activities with teaching at the Peter’s Agricultural Academy, Moscow State University, All-Union Research Institute of Agricultural Economy, Land-Surveying Institute and Kharkov Agricultural Institute.

In 1930, together with other agrarian scientists accused of being members of the Labor Peasant Party, Chelintsev was arrested and sent to Voronezh. Two years later he was released ‘from further serving his sentence and with the right to live freely in the USSR’ and was invited to Moscow. Until 1950, he worked at the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR and Aral-Caspian Scientific Expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences to study the irrigation and cotton-growing in Central Asia, and also at the Research Institute of Northern Grain Farming. In these years, Chelintsev studied the dwarf fruit growing, viticulture, agricultural technology of grain crops, organization of subsidiary farms of resorts, planning of agricultural activities and crop yields, development of new land in the Non-Black-Earth regions as arable land and practical zoning of agriculture.

76-year-old Chelintsev finished his work at the All-Union Research Institute of Canning Industry on August 3, 1950. However, the ‘pensioner’ actively participated in the study of agricultural problems in the country and abroad for ten more years. In 1950-1962, he published The State and Development of Fruit Growing and Viticulture in the Republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan and Analysis of the Agricultural Region and Machine-Tractor Stations by Collective Farms. In May 1961, he finished the manuscript of his monograph Agricultural Regions of the USSR in 1956-1959 and Their Comparison with the Agricultural Regions in 1925-1938 and sent it to the Department of Agriculture of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 88-year-old Chelintsev finished his last work Agricultural Regions of the USSR on January 9, 1962, a few days before his tragic death.

In 1987, Chelintsev was fully rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR ‘due to the lack of the event or corpus delicti’.

Gennady Alexandrovich Studensky (1898–1930)

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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.