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

The paper presents Chayanov's '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 1930's 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.