Free Economic Society

With the likes of Arthur Young and Jacques Necker among its honorary members, the Society was "supposed to publicize advanced methods of farming and estate management as practiced in foreign countries.

In this international competition, held in 1766, only five essays out of 160 were in Russian; some entries (including Voltaire's) were singularly conservative; others were too libertine to be printed (e.g., Professor Desnitsky of the Moscow University declared that "worst of all is the serf who could not own even the smallest bit of property").

Early members of the society — including agriculturist Andrey Bolotov, general Mikhail Kutuzov, admiral Aleksey Senyavin, and poet Gavrila Derzhavin — largely shared the Physiocratic ideals then prevalent in France.

Under the direction of Admiral Mordvinov (1823–40), the Society acquired British agricultural machinery and sought to intervene into traditional farming techniques as practiced by Russian peasants.

Under his guidance, the Society evolved into "an expanded cultural center, in which academics, agricultural experts, journalists, and leading spokesmen of the feuding socialist groups argued rather freely about current economic and political issues"[3] Public debates of Pyotr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky on the precepts of Legal Marxism attracted many non-members (Maksim Gorky, Yevgeny Tarle) to attend the meetings.