#8
The Guardian (UK)
27 June 2002
The background
Taking the plough to centuries of tradition
Owning the land
Ian Traynor
Conflicts for control of the soil have tormented Russia for 500 years, shaped the character and culture of the country and the people, and had a mostly baleful effect on development.
From medieval peasant uprisings to man-made famines in the 20th century, the issue has had a profound impact on its politics and economics.
President Vladimir Putin's law to privatise farmland and establish private rights in land is a further step towards "westernising" Russia. But Russia's attitudes towards the land and land ownership have always been key elements distinguishing and separating it from the west.
"The Russian revolution," the novelist Leo Tolstoy predicted in 1865, "will be directed not against the tsar and despotism, but against the ownership of land." He was writing only a few years after the serfs were finally liberated from slavery and allowed to farm independently and own small strips of land.
The peasant insurrections of the 17th and 18th centuries, led by the folk heroes Stenka Razin and Emilyan Pugachev, were partially driven by grievances about land ownership and exploitation.
But even for the wealthy landholding class conditions under the tsars were markedly different from those in western Europe.
It was not until 1785 that landholders obtained formal title to their estates. Before that most land belonged to the crown and was granted to the landholders on the whim of the tsars and in return for favours and fealty.
"The relationship of property in land to the growth of statehood had been in Russia the reverse of that encountered in the history of western Europe," the historian Richard Pipes wrote in his Russia under the Old Regime.
"The imposition of service obligations on all holders of land ... meant nothing less than the elimination of private property in land. Private property of the means of production became virtually extinct. This occurred at the very time when western Europe was moving in the opposite direction."
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 did not bring the instant nationalisation of the land: it was expropriated and turned over to peasant communes.
It was Stalin, between 1928 and 1934, who enforced the brutal collectivisation of agriculture, eliminating private farming, deporting and murdering "kulak" farmers by the million, and causing a disastrous famine.
By 1936, 164m hectares (405m acres) had been turned over to the peasantry, Stalin claimed.
Collectivisation remained the central land feature of the communist regime until Boris Yeltsin began dismantling that legacy in the early 90s. He did not get far. Most farmland still belongs to the state or decaying collectives.
Yesterday's legislation is the first real attempt to create a market in land, reversing not only to the 70 years of communism but centuries of Russian custom.
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