Chuprov, Aleksandr Ivanovich

Born Feb. 6 (18), 1842, in Mosal’sk, in what is now Kaluga Oblast; died Feb. 24 (Mar. 8), 1908, in Moscow. Russian bourgeois economist, statistician, and journalist. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1887).

The son of a priest, Chuprov graduated from the faculty of law at Moscow University in 1866. From 1878 to 1899 he was a professor of political economy and statistics at the university. A founder of Russian statistics, he wrote numerous works on political economy, the agrarian question, and the economics of railroad transport. He organized the Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in 1869 and the Statistics Divison of the Moscow Juridical Society in 1882.

Chuprov was the leading exponent of the liberal Narodnik (Populist) school of bourgeois economics, which called for partial agrarian reforms—such as the improvement of farming techniques, the organization of cottage artels, and the resettlement of the peasantry—that would leave intact the peasant commune and the ownership of land by the gentry. He edited the liberal Populist collection The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Certain Aspects of the Russian National Economy (1897), which was sharply criticized by V. I. Lenin (see Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 3, p. 207, note; p. 311, note).

Chuprov took part in the zemstvo (district and provincial self-government) movement and was a frequent contributor to the newspaper Russkie vedomosti.