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Organization of agricultural production at the local level1
A. V. Chayanov
Irina V. Trotsuk (translator), DSc (Sociology), Professor, Sociology Chair, RUDN University; Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82. E-mail: [email protected]
Vladislav O. Afanasenkov (publisher), Senior Researcher, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Junior Researcher, Research Centre for Economic and Social History, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Vernadskogo Prosp., 82, Moscow, 119571, Russia. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract. This typescript was found in the fund of the Soviet party economist Lev Na-tanovich Kritzman (F. 528) in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAS), and has never been published before. The typescript consists of 16 sheets without an autograph or any handwritten corrections and marks. The typescript does not have any direct indications of the time of its creation. There are two more documents: a letter to Kritsman of December 26, 1929, and a fragment of the text written by Chayanov's hand, which is very close to this typescript and seems to be one of its drafts. On the back of this sheet, there is an inscription — "2nd House of Soviets. Room 327. To L. N. Kritzman from A. Chayanov".
The typescript presents the concept of the gradual 'rooting' of the peasant economy in socialism through the voluntary 'cooperative collectivization' and with the incentive mechanisms of a purely economic nature. We can see similar theoretical bases in Lenin's 'cooperative plan' and Bukharin's theory of the peaceful ingrowth of capitalist elements into socialism. In these ideological-theoretical alternatives to Stalin's collectivization, the peasant was considered a full-fledged subject of the economic activity and socialist construction, who needed all possible assistance with the state policy measures rather than commands.
Chayanov refused to choose between the state-farm construction and the total socialization of the peasant agricultural sector. He developed an alternative program of socialist construction, which included the thorough revision of his own positions on some issues. Based on the data, Chayanov sought to show how far the Soviet village had moved from the pinnacle of the pre-war economic development, and that the Soviet peasantry had ceased to be 'an object of the agronomic influence'. Thus, according to Chayanov, in contemporary realities, old methods and schemes of agronomic work became ineffective.
Archivists dated the documents in the file to 1930. We do not know reasons for such dating, but it raises some doubts. We can be certain about relative dating and the lower chronological frame — 1927. According to the address-reference book All Moscow, Kritzman moved to Room 327 of the 2nd House of Soviets in 1927 (All Moscow
1. The article was written on the basis of the RANEPA state assignment research program.
22 (1927) Address-Reference Book for 1927: 3rd year of publication by the Moscow Council; with the new plan for the city of Moscow, Moscow, p. 147).
There are more doubts about the upper chronological frame. If all these documents are really related to each other, the text should be dated according to the letter to Kritz-man. Chayanov wrote that he had not finished an agronomic essay (in collaboration with P.Ya. Gurov and S. G. Uzhansky), because he was terribly upset by the first days of work of the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians. Moreover, Chayanov "did not get Sadyrin's article, which made him throw away the whole 'reality' and end his 'cooperation' in the same purely theoretical terms as he had started" (ARAS. F. 528. Inv. 5. F. 137. L. 1). Chayanov could mean his articles for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in which Kritzman edited the section of economic sciences and the subsection of economic policy until 1931; or for one of the periodicals, in which Kritzman was a member of the editorial board (for instance, On the Agrarian Front). Chayanov could use the word 'cooperation' as a title for the typescript sent to Kritzman for proofreading and editing.
By the end of 1929, Chayanov was in an extremely difficult situation, and it became even worse after the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians, at which Chayanov and his colleagues were ideologically persecuted. Probably, after Stalin's speech, Kritzman decided to postpone or abandon this publication. There is no article by Chayanov in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and no articles by Gurov or Uzhansky in the corresponding volumes; and this typescript was not published.
If our reasoning is correct, Chayanov's courage can hardly be overestimated: under the huge ideological and psychological pressure, he decided to publicly announce his disagreement with Stalin's course.
Editor's notes are marked as Ed. and given in square brackets.
Key words: Chayanov, collectivization, peasantry, state, social agronomy, socialism. DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-3-21-34
One of the most important questions of our economic policy is how and in what forms our agriculture, almost entirely peasant, can be integrated into the system of state capitalism, and whether such forms can become the basis for the further development of socialist economy and for the transformation of this transitional system of state capitalism.
One cannot but admit that this issue receives enough attention. It has been and is still considered by many authors; however, they tend to consider it in the most general terms — pointing either to the system of state regulation and cooperation or to the state trade and credit as forms for linking agriculture with urban industry; foundations of state capitalism are the most evident in the organization of the latter.
As a rule, there is no clear development of these provisions and no details; thus, it is absolutely impossible to imagine how different authors interpret the 'molecular' structure of the new Russian village, the specific everyday economic and social behavior of Ivans, Si-dors, Pankrats and Emelyans — each of them separately and all of them together.
Certainly, this specification forms the heart of the matter; this specification can reveal those 'molecular' shifts and processes that
transform the entire social array of peasant economies and completely change its quality as a fabric for all kinds of social constructions.
In the current situation, the question can be formulated as follows — should we consider the peasant economy as an element of dispersed dwarf family farms, in relation to which the system of state capitalism has to adopt the same methods of work as the system of ordinary capitalism, i.e., to organize the peasant economy with the methods of market pressure, to draw it into the orbit of its influence, and to make it a source of primary accumulation by the usual means of trading and financial capitalism. Or should we admit that in the thickness of the peasant economy, there are historical processes which, provided their further development, lead to the elimination of the spontaneity and dispersal of peasant economies and introduce principles of the large-scale social economy, thus, allowing to organically integrate our agriculture into the planned economy of the state capitalism system.
In the first case, the further path leads to the destruction of the peasant economy and to its gradual replacement by large grain and meat factories; in the second case — to the ever-increasing strengthening among the small commodity producers of the elements of the social large-scale economy to its optimal size under agricultural production, and to the organic combination of the resulting new system of agricultural organization with the large-scale urban industry.
It goes without saying that the question cannot be decided by the cabinet-style logical reasoning — only by the historical process of rural development.
However, even today we can and have to admit that in the surrounding rural reality, there are economic and social elements, the development of which can lead to the second decision of our main question, i.e., to the gradual organic rebirth of the peasant element into higher forms of production organization.
We have already considered in great detail the theoretically conceivable forms of such development in the articles on the production significance of agricultural cooperation and on the forms of industrialization in agriculture; it seems that we have succeeded in proving the theoretical possibility of this form of the peasant economy evolution.
However, for the current practical policy, it is not the theoretical possibilities that are important, but the actual presence of the described processes in the peasant economy, their share in the current stage of the historical development of the Russian village, and the state influence methods that can strengthen and accelerate these processes.
Today, this is precisely the heart of the matter.
Before the revolution and especially in its first years, the development of the Russian economic and political thought was to a large extent limited to a number of urban issues. The countryside was considered only a factor that put pressure on national and urban inter-
A. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
_ 24 ests, which explains our little awareness of the state of affairs in the
depths of the countryside; the revival of interest in it made us almost теория send special expeditions to the countryside similar to expeditions to Central Africa.
However, for local agronomists, cooperators and other rural workers, it is clear from their daily impressions that, under the developing monetary-commodity relations and the favorable global market conditions for agricultural products, our countryside is reorganized relatively quickly and is filled with those elements of social economy which determine a higher level of its organization.
The village organization is expressed in the development in its thickness, partly in infancy and often to a large extent, of the following elements of social economy and life, which were completely unknown in the village before 1905.
1. Proper organization of settlements by territory, allocation of settlements, and in general proper, rational land management
2. Organization of water supply by engineering means
3. Organization of roadworks and equipping highways and other access2 roads to railway stations
4. Equipping the local commodity circulation with commercial premises, scales, warehouses, elevators, refrigerators, etc.
5. Providing the population with postal, telegraph, telephone and other means of communication
6. Development of a cooperative network and related local facilities for the primary processing of agricultural products (dairy, potato-grating, drying, canning, and other plants)
7. Development and rationalization of the local industry auxiliary to agriculture (repair shops, forges, etc.)
8. Development of a network of agronomic centers and other auxiliary agricultural facilities (cattle breeding and seed farming, grain cleaning, coupling and rental points, etc.)
9. Power organization of the region, i.e., its electrification and supply with tractors
10. Organization of public medicine, veterinary medicine and sanitation
11. Development of a network of schools, village reading rooms, local museums, folk houses, theaters and other forms of cultural work
12. Organization of regional social life, its linking with cultural centers, and providing equipment for this work.
It is clear that this organizational work, which is ever-increasing quantitatively due to the developing cooperative collectivization of individual peasant farms, will lead to the inevitable qualitative rebirth of the countryside and to its historical transition to new forms of social life.
2. Corrected, in the original 'uyezd roads' — Ed.
The development of the above-mentioned elements — imperceptible, routine, but gradually increasing for local workers — was clear already from 1911; however, it seemed self-evident and was not given any fundamental importance3 despite its historical significance.
By way of proof, we would take the liberty of providing information about the current development of these elements in the village organization based on the Moscow uyezd data, i.e., the region without a special agricultural organization.
The main responsibility for the local economy reorganization is taken by land departments of local councils, and its key part is undertaken by the apparatus of the so-called 'agronomic assistance to the population'.
In the Moscow uyezd, this apparatus, in addition to the central uyezd group of specialists and agronomists, is divided into 12 groups — each serves one small-district volost, has a small plot of land, and is headed by the district agronomist. We will provide information based on the handwritten reports of these agronomists.
From October 1, 1923 to October 1, 1924, with the significant participation of agronomists and specialists, 14 single-plan settlements were allotted, and 11 settlements were divided into farmsteads (khutors) and land allotments. Most importantly, in 80 villages, intra-communal land management was carried out, and land was divided into wide strips. The number of strips owned by one peasant in each field before the land management was 3.5, after — 2.0; thereby, the average size of the strip increased from 222 square sazhens^ to 648. With the transition to wide strips, there was a transition to the improved crop rotation. Before the transition to wide strips, 89% of 80 villages had the three-field system, after the transition — only 1.3%; the rest chose other, mainly rational crop rotation.
80 villages that reorganized their territory in 1924 accounted for 14% of 569 villages in the uyezd; together with the settlements that switched to wide stripes in previous years, they accounted for 278, or 48% of the villages that rationally organized their territories. As the reader can see, the pace of the reform is striking. Even more surprising is the pace of the grass-sowing development.
By 1924, there were 134 villages (23%) with grass-sowing; during 1924, 85 villages switched to grass-sowing, i.e., 219 (38%) in total; out of 350 villages without grass-sowing, in 130 it was economically irrational (horticulture and other more intensive areas); 200 villages keep the three-field system, but, provided the same pace of transition, they would switch to grass-sowing in 3-4 years at most.
A. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
3. Underlined in the original — Ed.
4. 2.13 square meters — Ed.
_ 26 In addition to land management, 13 associations were engaged in
land improvement: more than 30 versts5 of drainage channels were dug теория in a year, and extensive measures were taken to improve meadows.
The scope of organizational and social work of 12 agrarian points can be seen from the following data:
1. agrarian staff had 613 conversations on agriculture in 419 villages — 16,340 listeners, 1226 hours;
2. gave 347 lectures on agriculture in 264 villages — 15,968 listeners, 1101 hours;
3. taught 35 general and special advanced courses — 1472 people, 1271 hours;
4. held 4395 individual consultations;
5. organized 3 agricultural exhibitions attended by 21,000 people, mostly peasants.
Thus, peasants contacted agrarian staff in the form of lectures, conversations and consultations 38,175 times, or 49,000 if we count visits to exhibitions. This work was of a truly mass nature.
In addition to oral propaganda, more than 3,000 copies of agricultural books were distributed free of charge; 33 libraries with 15,000 volumes were engaged, which, however, were considered by agronomists to be far from complete.
Besides this usual in methodology agrarian propaganda, its new forms were used quite successfully — agrarian plays and courts, agricultural holidays and all other kinds of campaigns.
Methods for the objective influence on the peasant economy deserve even more attention. In 95 villages, on the land of 110 households, 124 demonstration plots were organized for various comparative experiments on agricultural improvements; in 100 settlements, experiments with crop variety testing caused a massive demand for pedigree seeds.
At 74 rental points of 12 agricultural plots, there were 929 agricultural machines serving 1811 households; 26,905 poods6 of oats, rye and wheat were threshed and cleaned. It should be noted that this does not include the work of numerous rental points of agricultural cooperation.
8 coupling points with 18 stallions impregnated 27 peasant horses; the work on other types of animal husbandry is being organized. Pest control is carried out on a large scale. In total, in 1924, agrarian staff made 5,205 working trips from agricultural bases.
The above-described work of 12 agrarian points is supplemented by the work of 189 agricultural cooperatives (according to the Moscow Land Department's data as of October 1, 1924). The nature of the work of this cooperative network can be seen from its composition. As of October 1, 1924, there were 6 communes, 33 artels, 16 part-
5. 1.06 km — Ed.
6. 16.4 kg — Ed.
nerships for joint plowing; 19 land improvement, 18 animal husbandry, 13 electrification, 22 credit, 8 agricultural, 3 dairy, 1 seed breeding, 2 beekeeping, and 7 handicraft artels; 13 machine associations, and 28 consumer societies.
The provided information on only one branch within only one uyezd precincts is completely sufficient to prove that our village is in the state of the rapid economic fermenting and organization. In the place of the routine rest of disunited, isolated local farms, we see, perhaps, the first steps, but they are impressive enough to admit those processes of our village rebirth, which we spoke about at the beginning of the article, and this predetermines the second decision for our main question.
Due to the importance of this question, we have to examine in more detail the main organizing principle of the above-described agronomic apparatus and its agronomic assistance to the population.
Certainly, we know that far from everywhere things are going just as well as in the Moscow uyezd. However, as one can judge from the comments of local agronomists visiting Moscow, from the impressions of agronomic conferences and from all kinds of printed materials, reports, articles and even books, in recent years, the local agronomic work has gradually woken up from the almost ten-year stagnation that began in 1914. For many years, this stagnation has torn agronomic workers from their plots to send them to the front, food production, state-farms, schools, commercial trade, land department offices, agricultural bases, i.e., everywhere except peasant fields and stalls.
Today, this difficult period has ended or, more precisely, is ending. A new agronomy is developing and starting to work. The observer and participant of this process would strive to identify the main direction of this new agronomic work and what is happening — the revival of the old agronomy or the emergence of something new.
There are fierce debates about this issue, which sometimes become of a sharp, almost political nature: the 'young' and the 'old' butt heads — the latter admit the continuity of the Soviet culture from the Russian pre-revolutionary culture, while the former do not accept anything from the obsolete world.
In any case, this issue is on the agenda and requires if not a solution, then at least clarification or, perhaps, abolition.
We believe that if we consider this issue with some composure, both sides — 'revivalists' and 'originators' — will turn out to be both right and wrong. If we define 'revival' as the restoration of the old agronomic work in general, 'revivalists' are clearly wrong and historically naive... In 19247, the old village, the old zemstvo, and the en-
A. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
7. Corrected, in the original 1912 — Ed.
_ 28 tire old social-political atmosphere, in which the old local agronomy
had developed and existed, were gone never to return. теория On the other hand, those are completely wrong who want to build the new from scratch and declare the entire experience of the old zem-stvo agronomy to be obsolete and to be thrown overboard with other elements of the obsolete system. This would be an organizational blunder. Neither Lenin nor other leaders of the October Revolution have ever denied the fact that in its smallest forms our Soviet culture is a successor of the Russian pre-revolutionary culture, and that many of the Soviet cultural elements and ideas were inherent in the Russian public consciousness long before October 25, 1917. The very basic ideas of communism and dictatorship of the proletariat, which determine our contemporary existence, were born many decades before this historical date.
The same applies to agronomic work. Our pre-war social agronomy cannot be regarded as something unified, established and firmly connected with the foundations of the old pre-revolutionary society. Agronomic community and agronomic work were a part of the Russian community and Russian life, i.e., showed the similar diversity of ideas and views of agriculture, the struggle of the most diverse approaches, and a large variety of methods. At the same time, it should be noted that most of the guiding agronomic ideas have been formulated for the first time very recently and have not been realized yet in a more or less noticeable form.
Therefore, the only right attitude to our old agronomic experience is a careful analysis of its working ideas and technical methods, and a selection of those vital and practically useful ones that can be applied in our current work.
The whole task is not to deny the old but to identify those elements of the old that can be practically useful in the new.
What has been said is enough to understand the wrong opposition of the 'old' and 'new'. The solution to the dispute lies in the formulation of our tasks as organizing a new system of agronomic assistance to the population, which will correspond to the new political and social-economic situation, provided the indispensable use of all those elements of the old social agronomy that can be practically useful; as we will show further, there are many such elements.
Let us try to find out what will be 'new' and 'old' in our tomorrow's work.
For anyone familiar with our current national-economic life, it is clear that the new will mainly consist of realizing the political essence of agronomic work and its social-economic tasks, while the old will primarily provide some organizational principles, a significant part of pedagogical and technical methods, and the huge agronomic-technical experience that our science has accumulated for decades.
Indeed, we have to consider as new the following elements of agronomic work:
1) The old agronomy was not connected with the state policy of old Russia; moreover, it was mainly hostile to it and in many respects represented 'a state within the state'. This explains why agronomists often tried to heal the deepest ulcers of our pre-revolutionary agriculture with technical reforms by 'tale' and 'show'. It goes without saying that in a significant part of work, this led to helpless marking time, since in a significant number of cases, the desired agronomic effect could not be achieved by either 'tale' or 'show', but needed completely different measures of the agrarian, trade, tax and tariff state policy.
Today, when agronomic measures have merged with all other state measures into a unified system of the state economic policy, such isolation is no longer acceptable. The spontaneous development of peasant economies should be provided not with agrotechnical propaganda but with a system of economic policy and with agronomic assistance as an organic part of this system.
In other words, at each point of its program, agronomic work has to be supported by measures of the agrarian, trade, tax and other state policy. On the other hand, agronomic work should not leave the general course of the state policy or contradict it, because agronomic work is only a service part of the whole.
2) As an organic part of the whole, agronomic work has to pursue the same tasks and goals as this whole. Since the USSR economic policy strives to create a system of state capitalism and to include the scattered agriculture in it, agronomic work has to accept these tasks.
Concerning the peasant economy, penetration of capitalism took place primarily in the forms of trading and financial capitalism, which means the capital's seizure of the peasant commodity circulation and its crediting in usurious forms. Then, the capitalist forms of economy seized the primary processing of agricultural products, which separated primary processing from agriculture into special industrial enterprises (dairy, potato production, canning, flax-scutching, etc.).
Thus, the system of state capitalism primarily strives to occupy these positions of capitalism in order to command these branches of the local economy in the state forms, mainly cooperative trade, credit and production. Thereby, the agronomy's task is to connect its work with these strongpoints, but mainly to organize the population and connect it with local agricultural cooperatives in such a way that each peasant household would establish a certain, though not direct, organizational connection with the planning bodies of our republic.
This statement may seem utopian, but we feel certain that in the RSFSR, in the potato, dairy and partly flax cooperation, the planned coordination of centers has already covered peasant economies that form the basis of the cooperative system.
In addition to linking peasant economies with the economic bodies of the state capitalism system (mainly in the form of cooperative organizations), agronomy has to ensure their development around agrarian bases, seed and breeding farms, grain-cleaning, rental and
А. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
_ 30 coupling points, thus, increasing the elements of social economy in
the composition of peasant economy. теория з) Some changes should take place in the social foundations of agronomic work. First and most likely, we would have to stop misusing the expression 'an object of agronomic influence', because our peasant, having passed through the mill of the war and revolution, outgrew 'object' and managed to turn into a 'subject' building the contemporary village. No matter how hurting for our well-being, we must admit that the peasantry (its Soviet and cooperative organizations) becomes the master of the agronomic progress in the countryside after the revolution.
The era of the agronomic 'enlightened absolutism' is over. If in some places it is not over yet, it must end. The social factor will inevitably affect the identification of the village strata which the agronomic work will serve. As a rule, when developing its program, local agronomy prepares its own plans. Often, as, for instance, the south-ern8 agronomists ([L.P.] Sokalsky9 and others) noted, small peasants were unable to implement this program, which threw them out of agronomic work.
Already in 1911, the northern agronomists noted the abnormality of this situation and suggested a differentiated program, i.e., the agronomic program that anticipates the social-economic stratification of the village and finds forms of the progressive evolution for each village strata10. However, before the war, this idea was not realized in any noticeable form. Certainly, under the current agricultural policy, this idea is mandatory.
In new circumstances, these are the principles of agronomic work, which to a large extent change its social-economic content and significance.
Let us turn to the second part of our topic in order to assess whether the new tasks require new organizational and technical methods of agronomic work, or they can be performed with methods of the old zemstvo agronomy.
8. Corrected, in the original 'false agronomists' — Ed.
9. Leonid Petrovich Sokalsky (years of his life are unknown, he died at the age of 47 in 1919 or 1920) — a zemstvo agronomist, full member and secretary of the Kharkov Society of Agriculture; worked for the Agronomic Journal; during the civil war was a Professor at the Don Polytechnic Institute — Ed.
10. Apparently, Chayanov means the report of the representatives of the Yaroslavl Zemstvo at the Moscow Regional Congress of the Workers of the Agronomic Assistance to the Population in February 1911. See: Oshanin M., Piotrashko L., Dmitriev A. (1911) The work and relationship of the zemstvo and government agronomic organizations in the Yaroslavl Province. Proceedings of the Moscow Regional Congress of the Workers of the Agronomic Assistance to the Population on October 21-28, 1911, vol. I: Presentations of Sections I and II (Reports and Journals of the Meeting), Moscow, pp. 62-66 — Ed.
There are different points of view on this issue. It is unlikely to be remembered today, but in 1921, one of the speakers of the Moscow Society of Agriculture suggested to organize peasant economies into groups (30-50 units) headed by managing agronomists with strong administrative powers. Such a system would need tens of thousands of agronomists, whom we do not have; therefore, the speaker proposed to concentrate the available agrarian personnel in two or three provinces leaving the rest up to chance. Such a radical project for the abolition of peasants provoked objections from all those present, including two members of the Board of the People's Commissariat for Agriculture; the project was not developed.
A much more realistic project was the state regulation suggested by N. Osinsky in the last months of war communism: peasant economies were to receive quantitative assignments for various crops and to use new elementary farming methods tested on experimental fields: fall-plowing, and so on11.
With the transition to the New Economic Policy, this project was significantly cut and, when implemented, reduced to a memorable sowing campaign of 1921-1922 with almost no element of administrative interference. Nevertheless, the idea of 'agronomic regulation' cannot be considered abandoned, and there are still lively disputes about it in agronomy.
Strangely enough, we do not regard this issue as fundamental — in the life of our village, elements of 'agronomic regulation' are not new; there have always been such elements in the form of mandatory 'crop rotation', orders for meadows and mowing, and so on. All kinds of forest protection, land-improvement and veterinary measures have always been of a 'regulation' nature. Therefore, the point is not in principle but in feasibility. It is necessary to identify in a detailed study which methods can ensure the same mass results with the least material resources and organizational forces. After all, it is about the price that the result is bought at.
We believe that with the combined efforts of the agrarian, trade, tax, tractor and other economic policy, on the one hand, and cooperative and agronomic work — on the other, we can do everything or almost everything without measures of the visible non-economic coercion. To do what is not included in this 'almost everything', we can use administrative interference, provided that it really ensures an inexpensive goal achievement, does not destroy any-
A. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
11. See Osinsky's article in the Pravda of September 5, 1920: "Next year, the following may be added to this first layer: primitive instructions on what to sow (for example, oats but not other fodder cereals bypassing the prodraz-verstka) and how to cultivate land (mandatory regulations of the first plowing time and its repetition, mandatory removal of manure, etc." (Osinsky N. (1920) Agricultural crisis and socialist construction in the village. Pravda, № 196, September 5, p. 2) — Ed.
_ 32 thing in the economic life incidentally, and does not cause social
complications.
теория Thus, the entire methodology of agrarian propaganda and the whole arsenal of techniques and methods, with which the old agronomy awakened peasant independent activity and directed it to the path of the agronomic progress, to a large extent remain in force.
One may say that in our understanding of things, there is nothing new, and the district agronomist will continue to do almost everything he used to do say in 1913. We will answer that, when fighting for Perekop, the three-line rifle in the hands of the Red Army soldier fired in exactly the same way as in the battles of the Bzura and Prasnysh; however, in the former, it was a weapon of the revolution, and in the latter, it was a rifle of the old army.
The point is in the rifle's aim, and we set the social-economic aim of agronomic work with sufficient clarity.
It should be noted that in 1924, the district agronomist works very differently from the way he used to work in 1913: due to the revolution in our village, his possibilities expanded significantly, and, in addition to 'tale' and 'show', there are many means of influence. He selects machines in all cooperative and state warehouses and sets the composition of the improved seeds for peasant economies; he has at his disposal all breeding farms and centers; he can regulate technical requirements for accepting agricultural goods and marketing; he sets all other ways for a direct economic intervention in the depth of peasant economies.
Speaking figuratively, agronomy has always tried to organize agricultural life by influencing the peasant consciousness, and today agronomy has an additional opportunity to change it — by directly influencing the being of the peasant economy.
That is all the author wanted to say. Readers familiar with our agronomic assistance policy can see that we are not so much criticizing as asserting. The only thing I cannot agree with is the widespread local oblivion of the basic zootechnical rule: to get high outputs, all livestock including agronomists should be kept on productive rather than survival feeding.
ARAS. F. 528. Inv. 5. F. 137. Unauthorized typescript
Организация сельскохозяйственного производства на местах
А. В. Чаянов
Публикатор — Владислав Олегович Афанасенков, старший научный сотрудник Московской высшей школы социальных и экономических наук, младший научный сотрудник Научно-исследовательского центра экономической и социальной истории Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФ. 119571, Москва, пр-т Вернадского, 82. E-mail: [email protected]
Переводчик — Ирина Владимировна Троцук, доктор социологических наук, профессор кафедры социологии Российского университета дружбы народов; ведущий научный сотрудник Центра аграрных исследований Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте Российской Федерации. 119571 Москва, проспект Вернадского, 82. E-mail: [email protected]
Аннотация. Публикуемый текст был обнаружен в фонде советского партийного экономиста Льва Натановича Крицмана (ф. 528) Архива Российской Академии наук и прежде не публиковался.
Текст представляет собой 16 листов (без оборота) машинописи без автографа и каких-либо рукописных авторских правок и помет. Кроме того, в документе не встречаются прямые указания на время его создания. К делу присовокуплены еще два документа: письмо Л. Н. Крицману от 26 декабря 1929 г., второй — обрывок текста, написанного рукой Чаянова, очень близкого по содержанию к публикуемому и, видимо, являющегося одним из его черновых вариантов. На обороте данного листа надписано — «2-й Дом Советов. Ком[ната]. 327. Л. Н. Крицман от А. Чаянова».
В тексте декларируется концепция постепенного «врастания» крестьянского сектора в социализм через добровольную «кооперативную коллективизацию» за счет использования побудительных механизмов сугубо экономического характера. Аналогичный теоретический базис был подложен под ленинский «кооперативный план» и бухаринскую теорию мирного врастания капиталистических элементов в социализм. В этих идейно-теоретических альтернативах сталинской коллективизации крестьянин понимался как полноценный субъект хозяйственно-экономической деятельности и социалистического строительства, нуждающийся не в директиве, а во всемерном способствовании разнообразным нуждам инструментами государственной политики.
Чаянов, отказываясь от выбора между совхозным строительством и тотальным обобществлением крестьянского сельскохозяйственного сектора, выдвинул альтернативную программу социалистического строительства, в том числе подвергая основательной ревизии и собственные позиции по ряду вопросов. Привлекая конкретные данные, Чаянов стремился продемонстрировать, насколько далеко вперед ушла советская деревня от наивысшей точки развития предвоенной экономики, и что советское крестьянство перестало быть просто «объектом агрономического воздействия». Следовательно, в современных реалиях старые методики и схемы работы агрономического персонала оказывались, по мысли Чаянова, непригодными.
Объединенные в одно дело документы архивисты датировали 1930 г. Что за этим стоит, нам неизвестно, но такая датировка вызывает определенные сомнения. С уверенностью судить можно только об относительной датировке и нижней хронологической рамке написания этой работы — 1927 г., так как по сведениям адресно-справочного издания «Вся Москва» в комнату под номером 327 Второго Дома Советов Крицман переехал только в 1927 г. (Вся Москва. Адресная и справочная книга на 1927 год: 3-й год издания Московского Совета: С приложением нового плана г. Москвы. М., 1927. С. 147).
Относительно верхней границы сомнений больше. Если допустить, что все перечисленные документы действительно связаны между собой, то текст следует датировать по письму Крицману. В этом письме Чаянов сообщал о том, что завершение работы над неким агрономическим очерком (в соавторстве с П. Я. Гуровым и С. Г. Ужанским) откладывается из-за того тяжелого душевного состояния, в которое он впал по итогам первых дней работы Первой всесоюзной конференции аграрников-марксистов, а кроме того, что «не дождавшись садыринской статьи я выбросил всю "реальную действительность" и кончил свою "кооперацию" в том же сугубо теоретическом плане как и начал» (АРАН. Ф. 528. Оп. 5. Д. 137. Л. 1). Речь
А. V Chayanov Organization of agricultural production at the local level
34 здесь могла идти о статьях для «Большой советской энциклопедии», в которой Криц-
ман вплоть до 1931 г. редактировал отдел экономических наук и подотдел экономия мической политики, или же для одного из периодических изданий, членом редколлегии которого был Крицман (например, «На аграрном фронте»). «Кооперацией» Чаянов мог назвать публикуемый нами текст, который и выслал Крицману для корректуры и редактуры.
К концу 1929 г. положение Чаянова уже было чрезвычайно шатким. Оно еще более пошатнулось по итогам Первой всесоюзной конференции аграрников-марксистов, на которой была устроена настоящая идеологическая травля Чаянова и его коллег. Видимо, после выступления Сталина Крицман решил повременить с публикацией или же полностью отказаться от публикации Чаянова. В БСЭ так и не была помещена ни одна статья за его подписью. Впрочем, статьи за подписью Гурова и Ужанского в соответствующих томах так же не встречаются. Не вышел в свет и публикуемый ниже текст.
И если наша логика верна, то смелость Чаянова трудно переоценить: в условиях колоссального идеологического и психологического гнета он решился во всеуслышание объявить о своем несогласии со сталинским курсом.
Редакторские примечания помечены Ред. и даны в квадратных скобках.
Ключевые слова: государство, коллективизация, крестьянство, общественная агрономия, социализм, Чаянов.
