Political economy of space: the peasant question and the problem of rent in the USSR in the 1920s

The purpose of this article is to analyze the discussions about rent in the USSR in the 1920s. Based on the printed materials, the author shows that the problematic of rent became the most important prism reflecting economic problems and social conflicts of the NEP period. First, academic economists were not the only group participated in the discussion about rent: the discourse was also open to professional revolutionaries, politicians and ordinary state employees. Thus, the discussion about rent cannot be reduced to the confrontation between the traditional academic elite (so called “bourgeois specialists”) and the new Bolshevik academic cadres. The author analyzes the ideas of the following people: A.N. Chelintsev and G A. Studenskii, two academic economists, members of the Organization-Production school; a well-known Menshevik N.N. Sukhanov; a rank-and-file financial clerk L. Shanin; Y.K. Berztys, a professional revolutionary and a Bolshevik; and an orthodox Marxist K.V. Ostrovitianov. Second, the issue of rent articulates many of the tensions between the Soviet government and the peasantry. On the one hand, what is called differential rent in Marxist political economy, described the heterogeneity of the space of rural economy: comparatively more fertile and conveniently located lands gave surplus profit. The egalitarian intentions of the participants of the discussion implied that this unearned income should have been redistributed among the peasants. Absolute rent, on the other hand, reflected the imbalance in economic power between the town and the country. It suggests that, due to the low capital intensity, agricultural producers can profit above average. The agrarian sector did indeed recover in the 1920s faster than the capital-intensive industry, and the Bolsheviks feared that counter-revolutionary elements would sabotage socialist construction. Third, the discussion about rent made it possible to articulate an different understandings of the problem of the transitional economy. NEP by definition was a transitional regime that combined the remnants of capitalism, planning, and even elements of simple commodity production in peasant farms. The situation with rent was a kind of litmus test, which showed whether the Soviet economy was approaching socialism or whether it was still organized irrationally and unfairly. With the Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the end of the 1920s, the discussion about rent was aborted. The opinion that any form rent was absent in the Soviet economy prevailed. Stalinism was the regime that rejected the very notion of the economic as a separate realm of life. Paraphrasing Stalin himself, “there are no economic laws that the Bolsheviks cannot cancel.”

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