ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some additional arguments to the thesis that A. V. Chayanov's vision of peasant economy was rooted in the Narodnik ideal of peasant socialism. Chayanov, together with A. N. Chelintsev, N. P. Makarov, A. A. Rybnikov, was a member of the OPS, which emerged in 1911 from various interests concerned with the spread of agronomic knowledge. Chayanov is a remarkable figure in the history of economics. His mix of contrasting talents is so rare that it is hard to find another economist, inside or outside of Russia, to compare him with. The most intensive theoretical discussions about the direction of agrarian reforms in Russia were conducted in the League for Agrarian Reform, established in 1917 on Chayanov's initiative. With an obvious debt to the ideas of Johann Heinrich von Thunen, Chayanov explored the relationship between population growth and intensification of land cultivation. The Peasant Republic was Chayanovs retort to the multitude of socialist utopias of Bellamy, Morris, Moore, Blatchford and Fourier.
