The Ghost of Chayanov

Peasants and farmers are not the same thing. Should anybody dust off the great Russian agrarian theorist of the early twentieth century, A. V. Chayanov, the distinction would become very clear. Farmers, even small farmers, are in business, while peasants are people who work the soil to live off it. Even if they have to get money to buy something, they are interested primarily in its use, not in piling up profits somewhere. I have no standing to state which is better; that is up to the Ukrainians themselves, especially the 20-25% of the population who still live on the land. In virtually every village of Ukraine today one will find usually the former head of the local collective farm, now renamed collective agricultural enterprise, who controls most of the agricultural population as tightly as any lord ever did his serfs. On the other hand there is usually a relatively small group of farmers struggling to survive against the best efforts of their former masters with, say, fifty hectares rented from neighbors. What one is hard put to find is the peasantry characteristic of most of the world, people who have enough land to live more or less decently but have no head for business. Most of Ukraine’s former collective farmers will probably not become the sort of small businesspeople that would qualify them for the title of farmer, but they do know the land and how to make it feed them and their neighbors. Moreover, there is no convincing evidence that farming as such is any more efficient than peasant agriculture. Programs to send young Ukrainians off the farm to places like Denmark and France where the family farm (or is it peasant agriculture?) is doing quite well is not simply a worthwhile endeavor but a ray of hope for a huge segment of this nation’s population. Especially with the anniversary of the holodomor manmade famine coming up, there is a fundamental moral obligation to think about the class descended from those who suffered and died in this nation’s central tragedy. I have no idea whether most Ukrainian villagers will want to become farmers or peasants, but anything that can help give them a real choice will not only be a step toward the redress of a historical injustice but a step toward giving this country a healthier social structure capable of exercising the government of, by, and for the people that is at the basis of political philosophy throughout the contemporary civilized world.