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.