Agriculturist V.G. Venzher in the Search of Reforming the Soviet Union

Abstract

On the anniversary of the centenary of the formation of the Soviet Union, we naturally remember the name and ideas of one of the most brilliant Soviet agricultural economists, who made a huge practical and theoretical contribution to attempts to reform not only Soviet agriculture but also Soviet society as a whole. Vladimir Grigoryevich Venzher (1899–1990) was an agriculturist and economist, who primarily became widely known for his correspondence with Stalin in the early 1950s about the possibilities of reforms in the collective farm system of the Soviet Union.At the same time, the fact that his personality was much broader and deeper than his professional incarnation as an agrarian economist. Venzher, of course, was also an original and deep social thinker, partly Marxist and partly populist-cooperative, who repeatedly proposed to the Soviet leadership and then in relation to the Kosygin and Gorbachev reforms a number of comprehensive alternative reforms aimed at shaping the sustainable development of the Soviet Union and Russia based primarily on the required agrarian reforms.1 To prove and develop this statement, this article examines several key fragments of the political economy and social and philosophical heritage of Venzher in the 1960s–1980s, his letters to the Central Committee of the CPSU, and some of his scientific monographs, which have not yet attracted much attention from researchers.