Sukhanov at the Menshevik Trial of March 1931

Abstract

By 1928, with the end of the NEP which he had enthusiastically embraced, Sukhanov had certainly fallen foul of the Agrarian Marxist establishment. Headed by Leonid Kritsman, and entrenched in the Agrarian Institute of the Communist Academy, they had brought to their knees the distinguished non-Marxist economists of the Production Organization School, Nikolai Kondratev, Alexander Chayanov and A. Chelintsev¹ and had begun to hound their ‘Marxist’ and Communist rival Sergei Dubrovsky. While during the relatively relaxed mid-1920s Sukhanov’s sharp critique of the Kritsman school had still been grudgingly tolerated as a contribution to the agrarian debate, by the latter part of 1928 his non-conformist views and projects were already attracting attention from the Soviet political authorities. Indeed, Sukhanov is on record on at least three separate occasions as having publicly expressed views diametrically opposed to the policies of the Soviet leadership: in a symposium on ‘The Achievements and Difficulties of Kolkhoz Construction’, chaired and introduced by A. Gaister, he had criticized the early attempts at collectivization as lacking the necessary technological base, the agricultural machinery required to make collective farms attractive to peasants, socially stable and economically viable