Alexander Chayanov

Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov (1888 to 1937) was a Russian, then Soviet, agrarian economist and scholar of rural sociology who argued for agrarianism and agricultural cooperatives. Born in Moscow, he trained as an agronomist at the Moscow Agricultural Institute and after the October Revolution served on Soviet committees for agrarian reform. He held that peasant households practicing subsistence farming produce only what they need to survive, so a government would find it hard to force them to cooperate and yield a surplus, a view Stalin attacked as a defense of the kulaks. His Peasant Farm Organisation (1925) and On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems were first translated into English in 1966, and his theory of the peasant household shaped economic anthropology, notably Marshall Sahlins on the domestic mode of production, though later writers dispute whether his neoclassical reasoning supports a formalist position. Arrested in 1930 in the fabricated Labour Peasant Party case, he was sentenced to labor camps, arrested again in 1937 and shot; he was rehabilitated in 1987.