Two and a half undeservedly forgotten conceptual foundations of rural sociology

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In the first post-Soviet decades, Russian rural sociology had a disappointing ‘diagnosis’, and many ‘diseases’ of this discipline remain ‘uncured’: “The situation of rural sociology both in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia was and is still determined by two factors acting in opposite directions. On the one hand, Russian society is strongly connected with the countryside and has deep ‘rural roots’, which has always explained the scientific interest to rural issues. On the other hand, there are many reasons for ignoring such issues: territorial remoteness of the village from the city, less institutionalized rural environment, inaccessibility of rural residents for standard survey methods, etc. Moreover, there is a clear dependence of rural research on the state agrarian policy in certain periods of the national history. In the 20^th century, Russian village at least twice — under Stalin’s collectivization and postSoviet reforms — underwent the most severe social-economic upheavals. Thereby, despite the great social significance of the village for Russia, the sociological interest to the village as an object of study varied at different stages of the national history and sometimes was lost completely” [82].

This surprisingly stable list of the Russian rural sociology’s problems lacks another significant factor of its ‘unfavorable condition’ — ignorance of its most important conceptual foundations/origins. As a rule, different periodizations of the rural sociology evolution mention that monographic studies of the countryside in the 1920s — 1930s (several villages were comprehensively described) had deep historical roots in the work of provincial zemstvos and sanitary bureaus of the late 19^th century within the general ethnographic tradition (detailed peasant family households censuses, analysis of demographic trends, etc.). Perhaps, this explains a kind of ‘marginal’ disciplinary status of rural sociology: certainly, its research focus shifted from macro-level to micro-objects (from ‘big data’ to ‘expert opinions’ of rural residents); statistical and sociological macro-descriptions of the past and current agrarian reforms, of human and social capital of rural areas and agroindustrial complex, of social-geographical differentiation of the Russian space, etc. were supplemented by ethnographic studies of local rural realities based on various combinations of qualitative methods, with a strong anthropological and/or peasantstudies emphasis; different typologies of Russian rural areas were developed (for instance, ‘territories of growth’, ‘territories of stagnation’ and ‘territories of compression’/‘zones of desolation’ [66]); the party-ideological and institutional orientation of rural research to the social reorganization of the countryside was definitely overcome; however, it is hardly possible to apply the research ‘potential’ of rural sociology to the study of rural human capital, which is so urgent today, until all conceptual prerequisites/foundations of rural sociology are identified and systematized. In this article, we consider as such only two and a half approaches: agricultural economics, theories of peasant agrarianism, and, partly, theory of rural-urban continuum (forgotten in its rural half and widely used to explain the contemporary suburbanization trends).

Agricultural economics developed into an independent science with its own subject field and research methods in the early 19^th century, based on some agrarian and economic sections of the 18^th-century cameralism and the accumulated experience of progressive landowners and farmers in some Western-European countries, mainly England and Germany. A.D. Thaer and J.H. von Thünen were the first to systematize the findings of agricultural economics and to develop the first agrarian-economic models of agricultural production. In addition to creating the first specialized agricultural research and training institutions, Thaer published the first systematic treatise on agriculture The Principles of Rational Agriculture, in which considered the economic planning of agricultural enterprises in the market-economy perspective (maximization of profit rather than of gross production) [94]. Von Thünen followed these ideas and became a pioneer of agrarian marginalism in The Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy, in which presented the model of an isolated city-state to prove that agriculture can be consistently oriented to the maximum possible net profit and to show the types of change in agricultural industries and regions in relation to their market location [95]. Von Thünen’s regional-industry marginalism remains an important methodological approach in the management of agriculture and the whole economic system.

Further agricultural and economic discussions of the 19^th century clarified interdisciplinary issues in the interaction of natural sciences, technology and social sciences. By the early 20^th century, the school of von der Goltz developed a model for the analysis of the agrarian enterprise based on a comprehensive study of its constituent economic elements. The economist of this school used a special reference book with tables of agricultural norms and coefficients and elementary arithmetic calculations to estimate various options for the profitability of farming, confidently calculated rent amount and land cost, i.e., it seemed that he could organize the sustainable development of the agricultural enterprise without even leaving his office. The empirical data accumulated over decades ensured von der Goltz’s school unconditional dominance in the European agrarian science until the World War I.

In the early 20^th century, a new systematization of knowledge and models of agricultural economics was proposed by F. Aereboe and T. Brinkman [1; 7] in the holistic concept of the agricultural enterprise as a systemic interdependencies of subsystems, in which the scholars analyzed both microeconomics of agricultural enterprises and macroeconomics of agricultural sector: “Agricultural enterprise is a system of harmonious balance of economic factors, and the task of the organizer of the economy is to bring the tension of these factors to the limit and harmony. Thus, the success of the farm is determined not by the average cow, but by the ‘maximum’ cow the farm can keep with its fodder resources… At the same time, there is no place for abstract arithmetic at the farm, and everything should be based on the positive specific experience… Agricultural production is not only a technology in which the means of production and labor in kind must be harmoniously combined, but also an economy that depends on the general conditions of the national economic situation; this determines the need to combine technical and economic considerations of each issue in agricultural economics” [7]. After the World War I, in the seventh volume of Grundriss der Socialokonomik, Brinkmann managed to connect general issues of political economy with the specific issues of agricultural economics, which helped the latter to overcome its initial ‘provincialism’ determined by its long staying away from the fundamental debates of agrarian theory.

In Russia, agricultural economics was influenced by the German science: Russian scientists studied and creatively adapted the theoretical and empirical experience of German professors to the Russian realities of the late 19^th — early 20^th centuries (A.P. Ludogovsky, V.K. Khdyudzinsky, A.N. Shishkin, A.I. Chuprov, A.I. Skvortsov, K.A. Verner and A.F. Fortunatov [53]). From the classical allEuropean theoretical issues between political economy and agronomy (land rent, law of diminishing fertility of the soil or of diminishing returns, spatial marginalism, etc.), Russian scientists selected and adapted some issues to the specific conditions of rural Russia. The head of the organization-production school A.V. Chayanov developed the theory of peasant economy and agricultural cooperation, and, on this basis, made practical conclusions and recommendations for agrarian policy, which have not lost their relevance [13]. By the 1920s, agricultural economics in the USSR reached its peak in the works of Chayanov’s colleagues — A.N. Chelintsev, B.D. Brutskus, N.P. Makarov, G.A. Studensky and others.

The turn of the 1920s — 1930s was marked by the political-ideological crisis in agricultural economics. The political crisis in the USSR was associated with the excesses of collectivization — many representatives of agricultural economics were repressed as petty-bourgeois saboteurs [76]. In the 1930s, a new Soviet agrarianeconomic science was announced — economics of agriculture based on the postulates of the Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism. At the same time, the world economic crisis, which provoked authoritarian political upheavals, adversely affected the stronghold of agricultural economics — Germany, and the American approach began to dominate, being more interested in empirical research than in the systematic development of the theory of agricultural economics in the German style. Thus, the German economic-philosophical agrarian approach Betgiebslehre was replaced, on the one hand, by the American pragmatic agricultural economics (market capital, prices, land relations, credit, crises, etc.); and, on the other hand, by the applied farm management.

Ideologists of agrarianism believed that the rural way of life had many advantages over urban life, the social-moral status of the peasant was higher than of the urban wageworker, and agriculture as a way of life formed the key social values. T. Inge defined agrarianism as follows: agriculture is the only occupation that ensures complete independence and self-sufficiency; urban life, capitalism and technology destroy independence and dignity and promote vice and weakness; agricultural community with its collective labor and cooperation is an ideal social model; farmers have a strong, stable position in the universe, a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a sense of belonging to a particular family, place and region, which are favorable in the psychological and cultural perspectives; harmony of farmers’ lives restrains encroachments of the fragmented, alienated contemporary society; farming “has positive spirituality”, which allows the farmer to gain such virtues as “honor, courage, self-confidence, moral integrity and hospitality” — this is the result of the farmer’s direct contact with nature and — through nature — of the closer relationship with God; farmers are blessed to follow the example of God in creating order out of chaos [44. P. 12–13].

In Europe, F. Quesnay was an ideological Confucian supporting the Chinese agrarianism and working hard on the theoretical basis of agrarianism in the Age of Enlightenment [80]. In the United States, the development of agrarianism is associated with the first president, T. Jefferson: he argued that it was farmers who were real citizens, sincerely devoted to the republic, and that farmers’ republicanism restrained landed aristocracy and urban corruption, forming a true national virtue [32. P. 56–57]. In the second half of the 19^th century, Germany became the leader of agrarianism, and then countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In Germany, ideology of agrarianism was typical not only for Bauers (peasants), but also for political associations of the Prussian Junkers (landowners). European agrarianism declared that land and rural labor were the basis of the economy and society, while urban life, alienated from nature, wasted physical and mental health, i.e., agriculture was the true source of progress.

Critics of agrarianism insisted that it reflected the delayed modernization in agriculture: the feverish struggle for access to the market formed the ideological system of agrarianism in countries with the developing capitalist relations, especially in Eastern and Central Europe. In the poorly industrialized agrarian countries, rural movements and their agrarian ideologies strived to preserve the rural family economy and traditional village communities. In the first third of the 20^th century, agrarianism affected deeply the intellectualcultural life of peasant societies in the Eastern-European region and became a part of its national identity. After the World War I, many agrarian ideologists sought to promote agrarianism as a social alternative to both liberalism and socialism [65]. Agrarianism flourished between the two world wars — when many influential parties and peasant movements played the key role in national governments. Some peasant parties in Europe suggested to create an international peasant political union — by the mid-1920s 16 agrarian parties (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Serbia, Hungary, etc.) united into the so-called Green International with the headquarters in Prague, since Czechoslovakia was the theoreticalorganizational leader of European agrarianism [5]. In the USSR, the Bolsheviks also decided to play the revolutionary card of leftist agrarianism and created in 1923 an international alliance of leftist peasant movements and parties — Peasants’ International, or Krestintern (‘brother’ of the Third Workers’ International, Comintern) — to exert the communist political influence on the peasantry of Eastern and Central Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Unfortunately, there were many contradictions between left and right agrarianists. For instance, activities of the ‘red’ Peasants’ International were criticized by liberal conservatives from the Green International. The Krestintern was accused of being pro-communist and pro-Bolshevik, of striving to make advances to the peasantry for the sake of the world proletarian revolution. Ideologists of the Krestintern accused the Green International of betrayal and named it a ‘kulaks’ international’ acting in selfish, conciliatory interests of the bourgeoisie. In some countries of Eastern Europe, liberal-democratic agrarianists came to power (Czechoslovakia), while in other countries — authoritarian agrarianists (Bulgaria, Poland and the Baltic states).

In Eastern Europe, the struggle for universal suffrage was to ensure the political mobilization of the peasants in the interests of land reforms, which led to the integration of the rural population into nation-states and to the democratization of public life in the 1920s. At the same time, agrarianism showed a powerful conservative potential — not only of anti-capitalism and anti-communism, but also of nationalism and anti-Semitism. Under the crisis of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, political agrarianism moved significantly to the right, often becoming the ideological support of authoritarian and fascist regimes in Europe and Asia [69]. In the USSR, the period of forced collectivization coincided with the refusal to cooperate with the international peasant movement — the Krestintern was abolished, and supporters of agrarianism in Soviet Russia were repressed for political reasons.

Although the term ‘agrarianism’ did not become popular in Russia, its ideas influenced certain theoretical concepts of populists and neo-populists in the early 20^th century. In Russia, specialization and concentration of production in agriculture were slow compared to industry. In tsarist Russia, rural life and work were determined primarily by peasant households with their small-scale and largely subsistence economy. Peasants often kept strip farming in the traditional primitive way, and their worldview remained extremely conservative. In general, the peasant economy did not correspond to the ideas of the modern rational economy, and the peasantry was endlessly reproached for eternal rural backwardness [52; 62]. Therefore, the idea that agrarian modernization implies a radical transformation of peasant agriculture was often a commonplace in liberal and socialist ‘solutions’ of the peasant question.

Certainly, supporters of agrarianism did not dispute the obvious backwardness of the peasantry, but they believed that the social-economic progress would provide unprecedented means for the sustainable development of the peasant economy. Agrarianists were skeptical about the popular opposition of the progressiveness of large farms to the inefficiency of small farms, arguing that the sustainable agrarian growth could be based on the peasant way of life. Moreover, agrarianists believed that the peasantry could take the path of progressive evolution almost spontaneously [56. P. 6]. Critics and supporters of the theory of agrarian modernization skeptically defined the scientific interest to the peasant economy as an ideological rejection of the modernization of rural life. When in 1924 Chayanov, the leader of the Russian agrarianism, published a collection of selected articles on the development of agriculture, the agrarian Marxist L.N. Kritsman criticized him for developing “political economy of the pre-capitalist small economy and what is more of the antediluvian small economy with stagnant technology, i.e., an economy at the mercy of the forces of nature” [9. P. 5]. By the way, criticism of the Russian agrarianism resumed after the discovery of Chayanov’s legacy in the 1960s — 1970s: his model of the peasant economy was declared a kind of shelter for underdeveloped, crisis forms of the traditional economy [27; 55; 74].

However, in the early 20^th century, Russian agrarianists did not seek to “protect the idealized peasant world from rationalized modernity” [101. P. 278]. The fact that they studied the peasant economy did not mean that they wanted to combine agrarian conservatism, nationalism and cultural phobia in a new agrarian myth to preserve the glorious rural past [6]. Their interest in peasant models of agricultural development was determined mainly by the search for contemporary rural alternatives to the excesses of industrialization and urbanization. In the era, when social-economic progress was associated primarily with the expansion of industrial production and the declining role of agriculture, Chayanov’s school worked on an interdisciplinary development program for peasant Russia and did not accept the subordinate development of agricultural sector as a prerequisite for urban modernity; on the contrary, agricultural development (rural modernization) was declared the cornerstone of social development/modernization.

Thus, the concept of the Russian peasant modernization was a version of agrarianism as a set of political-philosophical ideas about the priority of the rural way of life as culturally and technologically not inferior to the urban way of life. Agrarianism consists of a wide range of programs suggested by politicians, scientists, groups of intellectual elites, peasant communities, cooperators and writers from different countries as a critical response to industrialization. All agrarianists wanted to find an alternative to the one-sided urban modernization in which they saw a source of social problems (spontaneous growth of the disenfranchised, aggressive proletariat, domination of monopolies, alienation of man from nature, mental illness from stresses of the urban lifestyle, political conflicts, religious and environmental crises, etc.) [61]. Agrarianism has never been a unified philosophical approach — rather an eclectic ‘pragmatic ideology’ [25. P. 19] as if between two ideological poles — rural idealism (conservative ‘village’ romanticism with myths of glorious but perishing rural traditions) and ideas of pragmatic agrarian modernization (regional models of rural family households, powerful peasant cooperatives, peasant parties defending ideology of agrarianism in the political struggle, latest agricultural technologies, etc.) [84].

Russian agrarianists from Chayanov’s circle developed alternatives for rural modernization but also supported legends of rural antiquity. For instance, Chayanov wanted the peasants to understand the electrical nature of thunderclouds and lightning but respected their faith in Elijah the Prophet with thunders on his heavenly chariot. Russian agrarianists respected peasants as equal, not backward members of society and emphasized their role in the rural-urban modernization of Russia. Moreover, agrarianism political-economic programs aimed at achieving democracy and economic growth without concentrating the means of production in the hands of the narrow circle of those in power [91. P. 18]. Russian agrarianism sought to combine agrarian modernization with the democratic political transformation, which would overcome the tsarist and then the Bolshevik legacy of authoritarianism (peasants as eternal political marginals under the central government’s control). Agrarianists called to the preservation and development of peasant households united by various forms of cooperation and territorial local self-government — as a foundation of the national political-economic system [16; 91].

In general, agrarianism ideas of rural modernization were formed at the turn of the 19^th — 20^th centuries, when the Russian zemstvo statistics was creatively combined with the political-economic works, primarily of the German historical school [2; 51; 87]. At that time, populist convictions of most zemstvo statisticians determined their interest in solving social problems, which, according to German scientists, would lead to the recognition of the peasant population of the Russian Empire as the main economic and creative power of the country [20; 48]. Therefore, agronomy, whose representatives — agronomists — were mainly engaged in the natural-scientific and technical fields of agriculture, began to define agronomy as a social science contributing to the development of the organized, political peasant movement, i.e., agricultural statistics and agricultural economics became academic disciplines [34. P. 74]. In the 1910s, the idea that the scientific study of rural life should consider social-cultural conditions of the peasant economy became widespread, and A.F. Fortunatov declared “the equality of natural science and social science as two foundations of agronomy” [35. P. 11]. However, political economy began to change too, and its representatives became interested in agriculture — not only in land relations, but also in small rural credit, demography of the rural population, etc. [28–30; 58].

Thus, in the early 20^th century, zemstvo statisticians and agrarian economists developed a systematized concept of the peasant family economy, the pinnacle of which was Chayanov’s theory [13]. Chayanov’s school argued that the research tools of classical political economy were ineffective in the study of peasant economy, since peasant rationality implied special economic psychology: the capitalist agricultural enterprise was guided by profit maximization, while peasant households were guided by optimization of the labor-consuming balance. Therefore, agrarianists of Chayanov’s school are often called supporters of the labor-consuming peasant balance. However, they argued that, despite the initial focus of the peasant household on family consumption, its further development did not necessarily contradict agricultural progress as the level of agricultural production depended on the peasants’ estimates of their needs for a satisfactory rural life. In other words, the level of peasant consumption is dynamic and depends on the development of culture in the broadest sense of the word [18. P. 164]. Most Russian agrarianists did not believe in stagnation in the peasant-economy development, since the growth of the market exchange led to the new peasant consumption standards and to a corresponding increase in labor efforts based on new skills.

This version of agrarianism reflected a fundamental change in the perception of the peasantry by the educated society. In the 19^th century, Russian elites considered the peasantry as a kind of cultural anti-world and an antipode of civilization — either in the positive (populism) or negative (liberalism, Marxism) perspective; now the peasantry was recognized as the most important force in the developing social system. In the early 20^th century, the fierce ideological battles between Marxists and populists determined the development of agrarianism which strived to combine the key features of these two ideologies [36. P. 46–47]. On the one hand, agrarianism accepted the Marxist identification of capitalism with wage labor; on the other hand, rethought the concept ‘labor’ in the populist sense. By combining Marxist and populist ideas, agrarianism offered an ideal model of the peasantry — as a social stratum cultivating its land with its labor and indifferent to the delights of the capitalist surplus value.

The fact that agrarianists as theoreticians of the peasant economy were often perceived as romantic apologists for the decaying peasant conservatism is largely due to the semantic misunderstanding. The agrarianism thesis about a special peasant, ‘non-capitalist’ strategy was determined by the negative interpretation of capitalism by the educated society, i.e., agrarianists considered the peasantry (mainly family households with a small share of wage labor) as an ideal of the noncapitalist, efficient and fair economic system [93. P. 169]. The critical objection that the peasants were increasingly correlating their economic motivation with the demands of the expanding market hardly bothered agrarianists, since they made fundamental distinctions between the market and capitalist economies and considered the market guidelines for the peasants to be quite progressive (and not contradicting the ‘non-capitalist’ nature of the peasant economy). In other words, as long as the peasants did not exploit the wage labor, their economic activity was not defined by agrarianism as a part of the capitalist production of surplus value. Chayanov’s model of the family peasant economy provided this idea with a complete form by translating intellectual sympathies for the ‘working people’ into the political-economic terms.

Unlike some countries of Eastern and Central Europe [45], in Russia agrarianism did not take shape of the peasant party; however, many prominent representatives of the Russian scientific agrarianism were activists in rural social movements (peasant cooperation and zemstvo self-government) and implemented peasant ideals of social modernization. Unlike agrarian experts in the Russian state apparatus with their bureaucratic management of rural life [42], economists and statisticians of the Chayanov school implemented modernization projects with non-state organizations [73]. With the outbreak of the World War I, the activity and influence of agrarianists increased since the tasks of food supply were assigned to zemstvos and cooperatives [31; 37; 39; 77]: agrarianists managed to formalize and strengthen their institutional status; between the February and October Revolutions, they took an active part in politics, in particular, in the Council of All-Russian Cooperative Congresses and the League of Agrarian Reforms [23; 50; 54]; many agrarianists took important positions in the central departments of the Provisional Government which promised agrarian reforms in peasants’ interests. But agrarianists lacked political experience and decisiveness: when given the opportunity to resolve the agrarian question in accordance with their ideological principles, they gave up reformist-revolutionary actions in favor of discussions about the scientific criteria of the democratic agrarian policy. Repressive restrictions and the Civil War disrupted the activities of agrarianism, and after nationalization of cooperative organizations, rural societies and associations agrarianism as a social-political social movement ceased to exist [22. P. 2], although many prominent agrarianists took expert positions in the Bolshevik institutions and played an important role in the implementation of the New Economic Policy, especially at its initial stage [40; 41; 98].

The fate of the theory of rural-urban continuum is different. This theory states that there are not only fundamental differences between rural and urban communities, but also a spatially extended rural-urban scale of community types differing by size, population density, division of labor, isolation, local solidarity and alienation, temporality of social events. The term ‘rural-urban continuum’ was introduced by P.A. Sorokin and C. Zimmerman in the 1920s and later was developed as an antithesis of a discrete-dichotomous approach to the city and the village [96]. The sharp rural-urban confrontation was recognized in the second half of the 19^th century [38]: since that time, there have been numerous attempts to find a consensus between the city and the countryside — both utopian and scientific. In England, the most advanced in urbanization a century and a half ago, the first models of ruralurban continuum were developed [63]. For instance, to slow down the spontaneous urbanization, E. Howard proposed the model of ‘three magnets’ [43]: cities attract by prospects, but they are cramped, dirty and unsafe; in the village, there are almost no such dangers, but few resources and entertainment; we need a ‘city-village’, a garden city that combines ‘magnetic’ attractions of urban and rural life.

Today, the rural-urban continuum is usually “defined by contradiction: as a rejection of the polarity of the city and the village, of their sharp territorial and social division. These two ‘sections’ complement each other as continual and discrete constructions. Typology can imply a conditional continuum, while its objects remain spatially discrete… This should generally result in the recognition of the plurality of rural-urban continuums that differ in spatial and population scales, structure and nature of connections. The fate of the idea… varied by discipline. When sociologists and culturologists were passionate about the rural-urban continuum, they compared it with the communal Gemeinschaft and the public Gesellschaft (according to F. Tönnies), cohesion, stratification, modernity and tradition, lifestyle, vertical and horizontal mobility… In the middle of the 20^th century, the idea was already criticized” [96. P. 54]. In the first half of the 20^th century, this idea was extremely popular: for instance, Chayanov made it the basis of his peasant utopia, and his Institute of Agricultural Economics used the method of geographical profiles to explore the phenomenology of the rural-urban continuum in the Moscow region : “in the theoretical perspective, Moscow’s influence is of the utmost interest, since our city, for random or non-random reasons, is located at the junction of three natural-historical regions… Accordingly, in the natural-historical perspective, the Moscow region could not represent any unified system, and only the huge industrial city in the center and its enormous economic influence overcome the naturalhistorical conditions and turn the entire central-industrial region into a definite and compact whole. Nowhere else one can so perfectly understand the force of the urban economic influence on the structure of agriculture…” [10. P. 10].

Chayanov made this conclusion after field studies in Moscow’s rural suburbs. At first, he tested some elements of Thünen’s model — by assessing the influence of the Moscow economic region on the structure of rural areas located at different distances from Moscow. Economic profiles were identified by the railway directions: for each verst, Chayanov calculated the fall in prices and the changes it caused in the organization of agriculture and rural areas, i.e., these macro-profiles showed the dynamics of the influence of the huge Moscow market on the structure of rural areas near Moscow. Chayanov supplemented this research with the utopian modeling of the rural-urban development. The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia [16] presents a radical rural-urban continuum in the peasant Russia of the future: cities decreased in size, and the planned deurbanization made the countryside densely and extensively populated. Chayanov developed the idea of the rural-urban continuum in the agrarianism perspective: the main thing for the sustainable rural-urban continuum is a flourishing rural-urban culture based on the best examples of national and world architecture, literature, music and painting; and Moscow is the most important metropolitan social hub capable of absorbing several million inhabitants due to the developed tertiary sector. This utopian rural-urban continuum becomes a vegetative system of the national multi-structural economy as a combination of the powerful peasant-cooperative way of life with public sector that controls natural resources and capitalist entrepreneurship as a source of private economic initiative.

In the early 21^st century, post-socialist capitalist reforms of the countryside again raised the question of the structure of the rural economy as a heterogeneity of organizational and social-economic forms. Today in rural sociology, seasonal works (non-agricultural employment of the rural population) are interpreted as one of the key trends in rural development. Just like the studies of the early 20^th century moved from ‘economy’ as an isolated unit devoid of the social-communal qualities to the ‘elements of the peasant community’, contemporary rural sociology increasingly focuses on the community, i.e., issues of social capital and social norms as determining rural daily practices. Despite the seeming disappearance of the objective basis for the reproduction of the traditional peasant model, rural studies show preservation, re-institutionalization and revival of the traditional elements of the rural social organization in the course of the rural population adaptation to the post-reform changes. In other words, the continuum model of rural ‘objects’ remains extremely important for understanding social development of contemporary rural areas, and some Chayanov’s ideas are added to this model in the projects of cultural industries. The ideas of the theory of peasant economy and cooperation have become an integral part of the still reproducing large-scale ideological programs for creating an agrarian society based on a harmonious combination of peasant family economies, cooperatives and local self-government — as a foundation of a multi-structural rural-urban Russian economy.

Note

(1) Our review of agrarianism is based on the ideas and findings of K. Bruisch presented in: Als das Dorf noch zukunft war: Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion. Köln; 2014; Expertise and the quest for rural modernization in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: Introduction. Cahiers du Monde Russe. 2016; 57 (1); coauthored with M. Kopsidis, D.W. Bromley. Where is the backward Russian peasant? Evidence against the superiority of private farming, 1883–1913. Journal of Peasant Studies. 2015; 42 (2).

About the authors

A. M. Nikulin

Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences

Author for correspondence.
Email: harmina@yandex.ru
Vernadskogo Prosp.,84, Moscow,119571, Russia; Gazetny Per.,3-5,1, Moscow,125009, Russia

I. V. Trotsuk

Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; RUDN University; National Research University Higher School of Economics

Email: irina.trotsuk@yandex.ru
Vernadskogo Prosp.,84, Moscow,119571, Russia; Miklukho-Maklaya St.,6, Moscow,117198, Russia; Myasnitskaya St., 20, Moscow, 101000, Russia

References