The Chayanov known to us, until now, has been largely two-dimensional - the author of a fanciful peasant utopia, and the scientist who built a theory of peasant farm organisation around the concept of drudgery, the peasant's daily decision whether or not to trudge out to work in his field. A third Chayanov dimension emerges from the autobiographical material he was forced to write in the interrogation that followed his arrest, in 1930, and in the letters he wrote in the early 1920s when he lived and worked both in England and in the Germany to which thousands of Russia's greatest minds were...