“I often wondered what really useful could be done for peasants”[«Я Часто Думал, Что Действительно Полезного Можно Для Крестьян Сделать»]

In his biographical interview for the Russian Peasant Studies, Vasily Yakimovich Uzun remembers the milestones of his life from the hungry peasant childhood in the Gagauz village to the mature agrarian scientist working in one of the leading Russian research institutions, and considers issues of efficient interaction of theory and practice, economics and politics in ensuring the sustainability of rural-urban development and norms of social justice. In his memoirs, the scientist reconstructs events of his rural war and post-war childhood related to school years and peasant and collective-farm labor, years of studies at the agricultural institute and work as an agronomist on a collective farm, decision to start a scientific career and study economic-mathematical methods of agricultural management that were actual in the 1960–1970s. Then V.V. Uzun focuses on the political and economic events of the 1980s with their dramatic attempts in the period of both stagnation and perestroika to develop a system of comprehensive measures for the effective agrarian reform of the Soviet economy. The interview provides a detailed review of the post-Soviet period of the Russian rural development, in particular of the Nizhny Novgorod experiments on the market reform of large collective farms. The scientific analysis of political-economic issues of rural development is accompanied by characteristic personal examples and anecdotes from the life of Vasily Yakimovich Uzun.