Teodor Shanin

The nature and logic of the peasant economy 1: A Generalisation 1

This article discusses the major specific aspects of a general type of peasant economy: the family farm production‐consumption unit, the village as an economic organisation, the market and money in the peasant economy, the political economy of peasant societies. It concludes with an examination of the differing ideas of analysts who agree on the existence of a specific peasant economy but disagree on the relative importance of its characteristics. The aim is to provide a starting‐point for a systematic discussion of the general, the diverse, the relatively stable and the changeable in peasant economy, and the way in which it is affected by state policies; the latter aspects are dealt with in part II†.

Chayanov's treble death and tenuous resurrection: an essay about understanding, about roots of plausibility and about rural Russia

The paper presents Chayanovs ‘Theory of Vertical Cooperation’ as the main conceptual alternative to Stalinist collectivisation of the 1930s. It also brings back the drama of physical and intellectual destruction of the brilliant Russian school of agrarian economists 1890–1920s who paid the price for opposition to the 1930s attack on the peasant majority of the Russian population. It then proceeds to the social and political roots of ideological blindness concerning the failures of collectivisation and of its impact on the history of contemporary Russia.

Forum: Fifty years of debate on peasantries, 1966–2016

The idea for this discussion originated in a wooden cabin in the Dutch polders in the late summer of 2015. Harriet Friedmann responded enthusiastically to my observation that the International Rural Sociology Association (IRSA)’s 2016 conference in Toronto would coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of two landmark books which had defined new poles of debate in peasant studies: Peasants (Wolf 1966) by Eric Wolf (1922–2009), and The theory of peasant economy (Chayanov 1966), the first English translation of parts of the work of the Russian ‘social agronomist’ Alexander Chayanov (1888– 1937). Both of these books had great influence on us, and on many others, at the time; and the debate between the two traditions which they represent, and their implications for agrarian policies and agrarian movements, continues to the present. We therefore proposed a panel discussion to mark this anniversary and to consider what has stayed the same, and what has changed, in the last 50 years of agrarian thought and agrarian politics. The organisers enthusiastically picked up the idea, elevating it from ‘panel’ to plenary and inviting us to organise the first plenary session of the conference, with the title 50 years of debate on peasantries, 1966–2016. The present panel, minus Jun Borras, matches our original wish list. The five members of the panel were born at various times between 1930 and 1950, but – having differing early life-course trajectories – we all developed our interest in peasant societies, as undergraduate or graduate students, at some point during the 1960s; we thus came under the influence of these books at roughly the same time. Eric Wolf, then teaching at the University of Michigan, was a formative influence on his student Harriet Friedmann; Teodor Shanin became aware of Chayanov almost by accident when he was asked to assist his PhD supervisor R.E.F. Smith with the translation of Chayanov’s work. As graduate students or young lecturers, we also read Teodor’s edited book Peasants and peasant societies (1971) which was widely used in teaching. In the second edition (1987) two emerging agrarian scholars, Harriet Friedmann and Henry Bernstein, contributed original chapters. Harriet wrote on ‘The family farm and the international food regimes’ (Friedmann 1987), a theme on which she had already published two landmark papers