Vasily Vorontsov

Vasilii Pavlovich Vorontsov (Russian: Василий Павлович Воронцов; Pseudonym: V.V., 13 January 1847 – 10 December 1918) was an influential Russian narodnik economist and sociologist, one of the principal protagonists in the controversy between narodnik and Marxist economists (like G. V. Plekhanov and P. B. Struve) in the 1880s and 1890s. Life V. P. Vorontsov came from a distinguished aristocratic family. In the 1860s and 1870s he became involved in the populist (narodnik) movement. Although he had contacts with illegal narodnik circles, he was not himself involved in significant revolutionary activity. Instead, he was associated with the 'Legal Populists' who advocated political and economic reform from above. In particular, Vorontsov advocated measures to protect the repartitional peasant land commune which still survived in Russia. Vorontsov was one of the first Russian economists to study the works of Karl Marx and was strongly influenced by Marx' historical materialism. However, unlike other early Russian students of Marx (e.g., N. I. Ziber, N. F. Danielson or G. V. Plekhanov), Vorontsov did not think the development of industrial capitalism was possible in Russia. His argument was that Russia did not have access to sufficient markets to fuel capitalist industrialisation: foreign markets were largely dominated by older, established capitalist powers, and Russia's domestic demand was too weak. As the 1890s wore on, Vorontsov had to admit that capitalism had made some inroads in Russia, but he attributed this to misguided government policies, such as protective tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, subsidies and low-interest loans to Russian industrialists and an ambitious infrastructure programme (e.g., railway building), together with agrarian policies designed to undermine communal land tenure. By contrast, Danielson thought that industrial capitalism had already taken root in Russia and that industrialisation was not necessarily bad, but that Russia, owing to its belated development, did not have to reproduce all the forms of capitalist relations of production under which industrialisation had occurred in the West, but could proceed to a more humane non-capitalist form of modernisation. Nevertheless, Vorontsov and Danielson are usually grouped together as major exponents of narodnik economics (much to Danielson's dismay).