Collective farming in the works of Chayanov’s school: 1913–1933

The Chayanov’s school intellectual legacy is usually considered as consisting of the studies of peasant economy and its cooperative development, and as a “neo-populist ideology” and an opposition to the Marxist model of the large-scale collective farming. Such an interpretation overlooks the school’s contribution to the study of large-scale agrarian production under establishing the soviet system of collective farms. The authors present another interpretation of the intellectual legacy of Chayanov’s school by analyzing their research of collective farming from 1913 to 1933 and emphasize that one can discover original and valuable theoretical and empirical studies of collective and large-scale agricultural production in the works of the organizational-production school: in the theory of social profitability of agricultural artel (A.N. Minin), in the organizational model of collective farm (A.V. Chayanov), in the estimates of collectivization (B.D. Brutskus). The authors believe that the Chayanov’s school made a profound contribution to the study of both peasant and collective farming, which determines the necessity of reevaluating its intellectual legacy to understand better the phenomenon of collective farming in Russia in the XX century.