Alexander Vasilievich Chayanov

Chayanov left a distinctive legacy not only as an economist but as a prolific fiction writer. From 1918 to 1928, under the pseudonym 'Botanist X' (Ботаник Х), he privately published five Gothic romances, including The Tale of the Hairdresser's Doll (1918), Venediktov, or the Memorable Events of My Life (1922), and The Venetian Mirror (1923). Illustrated by his artist friends and printed in tiny luxury editions, these stories belong to the Hoffmannesque tradition of supernatural fantasy, 'Moscow diableries' that ran entirely counter to the mainstream of Soviet literature. Because their title pages bore 'Botanist X' rather than his real name, they survived Stalin-era book bans.

Even more remarkable is the novella he published in 1920 as Ivan Kremnev (Иван Кремнёв): Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia. The protagonist awakens in Soviet Russia of 1984 to find a de-industrialized future: cities have withered and peasant cooperatives organize the whole of society. The book is famous for predicting, eleven years in advance, the demolition of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The hero gazes upon 'titanic ruins' where the golden cathedral once stood, a vision fulfilled with eerie precision when Stalin dynamited the real cathedral in 1931. The novella is now regarded alongside Zamyatin's We as a key text of early Soviet utopian–dystopian literature.

Chayanov's literary work was no mere hobby. Throughout the 1920s he produced scientific papers and Gothic tales in parallel, timing his romantic stories as birthday gifts for his wife. In 1927 he attempted to collect the five tales as Romantic Evenings, but Glavlit chief Pavel Lebedev-Polyansky banned the collection for 'propagating mysticism and devilry alien to the Soviet person', a prohibition that paradoxically sharpened Chayanov's literary identity.

In 1926 Chayanov was accused of a petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist interpretation of the peasant economy. As collectivization began, the criticism grew from a charge of "neo-populism" into one of defending the interests of the kulaks, and at the Conference of Marxist Agrarians of 20-29 December 1929 so-called "Chayanovshchina" was declared an "agency of imperialism" connected with the right deviation in the VKP(b). Stalin attacked the "anti-scientific theories of 'Soviet' economists of Chayanov's type" at that conference. In July 1930 Chayanov was arrested together with other leading economists in the case of the invented "kulak-SR group of Kondratiev-Chayanov", part of the fabricated "Toiling Peasant Party" accused of intending to organize kulak uprisings. His interrogations were conducted by the head of the OGPU secret department, Ya. S. Agranov, and A. S. Slavatinsky. The sources differ on the year of the sentence: the Russian-language biography records that on 26 January 1932 the OGPU collegium sentenced him to five years' imprisonment, four of which he served in the OGPU investigative isolator and the Butyrki and Yaroslavl prisons, the last year being commuted to exile in Alma-Ata; another reference source dates the five-year sentence to 1931 and his release to poor health. The July 1930 arrest is agreed across the sources.

In exile at Alma-Ata Chayanov worked at the Agricultural Institute, the research institute of agricultural economics and the Kazakh People's Commissariat of Agriculture. In 1935 the exile was extended by three years, and in the same year he was tasked with writing a book on agriculture in the Kazakh SSR. In March 1937 he was arrested again by the NKVD. His name was entered on the Stalin execution list of 15 September 1937 for the Kazakh SSR, with Stalin and Molotov voting for the first category, shooting, and on 3 October 1937 a visiting session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court at Alma-Ata sentenced him to "the highest measure of criminal punishment - shooting". Another source states instead that he was arrested on 16 March 1937 and shot on 3 October "by the sentence of the Special Meeting of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR". The sentencing body and procedure are disputed between the sources; they agree that he was executed at Alma-Ata on 3 October 1937, and the place of burial is unknown.

His published books were banned by Soviet censorship and entered in Glavlit lists and consolidated catalogues: they were not to be circulated and were withdrawn from libraries. Not all the books were destroyed, however, because part had been issued under the pseudonyms "Ivan Kremnev" and "Botanist X". The first pseudonym was exposed; the second, under which he issued five "romantic" tales between 1918 and 1928, saved those books from destruction. He was not a member of any political party. His second wife, Olga Emmanuilovna Chayanova (née Gurevich, 1897-1983), a theatre scholar, was twice unreasonably repressed, in 1937 and 1948; the English-language account states that she spent 18 years in labour camps, was released in 1955 and died in 1983. Of his two sons, Nikita Alexandrovich Chayanov (1923-1942) died of wounds and Vasily Alexandrovich Chayanov (1925-2005) survived.

Full rehabilitation came in 1987 on the initiative of the scholar A. A. Nikonov. On 16 July 1987 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court ruled that Chayanov and others had been unreasonably convicted in a non-judicial procedure, that they had not been members of an anti-Soviet organization and had not engaged in wrecking activity, and that the confessions had been obtained through unlawful investigative methods (Agranov, Radzivilovsky and Slavatinsky were themselves later convicted for such methods). The ruling quashed the OGPU collegium decision of 26 January 1932 and closed the criminal case for absence of an offence, thereby rehabilitating him.