#26 - JRL 2006-253 - JRL Home
Russia Profile
November 9, 2006
Going Back to Stolypin
Landed Class Held by History
Comment by Georgy Bovt
Georgy Bovt is the editor of the Russian weekly magazine Profil. He contributed
this comment to Russia Profile.
The land question has been seen as the key to Russia’s development for many centuries, but ever since the issue was, in theory, resolvedwith the recent adoption of the Land Codethe country has yet to see any dynamic agrarian transformations. Apparently the majority of those who for centuries demanded “land and freedom” have no clear idea of what to do with the private capitalist happiness that has been thrust upon them.
Notwithstanding the ratification of the Land Code three years ago, regulating the buying and selling of land, suspicions remain regarding land ownership. According to the Public Opinion Foundation, which carried out its last survey on the subject in 2005, 45 percent of Russians are against the buying and selling of land, while 42 percent said land turnover should be subject to all sorts of limitations. Advocates of free buying and selling of land made up between 6-8 percent of those questioned. Moreover, according to earlier surveys, more than 80 percent of the population is in favor of unhindered private ownership of land as garden plots, and only just over 10 percent against.
This is partly the result of the land question in Russia being overrun with an unbelievable quantity of ideological dogma. Centuries of traditional peasant slavery, the heritage of the peasant commune (built on principles of leveling and mutual help), and Communist propaganda have also had an effect. The result is a fetishized idea of land as something akin to a spiritualized part of the Motherland. Such land cannot be just a commodity to be acquired cynically for money.
Land has never been a freely circulating good in Russia. In the middle of the 19th century, there was no such thing as “nobody’s” land in European Russia. In the first half of the 19th century, it was possible to acquire land together with workers, exclusively for the needs of agricultural production (this was the basis for the plot in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls). But by 1861, all the land in the country basically had real ownersthe commune and the serfs. There were also land plots belonging to the emperor or his family, the treasury and the church. This structure of land ownership prevailed until the February Revolution in 1917.
Russia has never had a free market for land in the European sense. After the emancipation of the serfs, the question arose of redistribution of communal and serf lands. This also took place outside the limits of free buying and selling. Banks were founded for nobles and peasants, and helped the state to regulate the redistribution of the land using financial mechanisms. With such control, there could be no question of land speculation emerging. Land turnover achieved slightly greater freedom as a result of the reforms carried out under Pyotr Stolypin in the early 20th century, which created a new class of strong village landowners based on a gradual dismantling of the peasant commune. But Stolypin’s death, followed by war brought the process to a halt. The commune itself was reincarnated in a monstrous form during the collectivization of the 1930s.
Collectivization strangled at birth the new class of village landowners that had begun to appear before the revolution. Nevertheless, after the Soviet Union fell apart its agricultural sector saw the appearance of real peasant landholdersfarmers.
In today’s Russia, there are 120 million hectares of agricultural land. Even after 15 years of market reforms, only 19 million hectaresor less than 10 percentbelong to farmers. Russia’s farmers produce 17 percent of the country’s grain, almost 30 percent of its sunflower seeds, and over 10 percent of its sugar beets. But these figures cannot by any stretch of the imagination be seen as an agrarian revolution. They do not signify a victory for private capitalism in agriculture, nor a clear advantage for private ownership of land as proof of the effectiveness of this form of agricultural production.
Additionally, we should remember some other circumstances. First, Russian farmers include the remnants of healthyprimarily moralforces in the village who actually want to work. This gives them a huge advantage over drunken, squalid and marginalized villagers. Second, the majority of Russian farmers are not private landholders, but rent the land. Third, the former communal farms are today more like cooperativesnot private enterprisesand in recent years, as the market develops, are becoming no less efficient than farmers. In a number of agricultural sectors, these large farms have turned out to be much more effective than farmers, and the form of landholdingrenting or complete ownershipin practice does not make a decisive difference.
Much more important now are extreme measures to get the villages out of their state of intoxication, indolence, dependency, and inability to work. At this stage, the introduction of any methods of developing meaningful agricultural life will bring positive results. And then we can think of how to approach the final stage of the Stolypin reforms, after a 100 year hiatus, and create a class of private land owners.
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