This collection of articles on land ownership begins appropriately with Piotr Stolypin’s statement that “land is the guarantee of our strength in the future; the land is Russia.” Appropriately, not just because the contributors would concur in his assessment of the cardinal importance of land in Russia, nor because his name is associated with the agrarian reform begun in 1906, but also because Stolypin had been Governor of Saratov, where the idea for this book was generated. Indeed, the collection has a contemporary political colouring, introduced as it is by Saratov’s current governor, Dmitrii Ayatskov. Ayatskov was the executor of the “Saratov Experiment” in the mid 1990s, which legalized for the first time in Russian history a free market in agricultural land. About a third of the book is devoted to post-Soviet agrarian reform. However, this coloring adds to rather than detracts from the whole, showing how the conflict over models of land ownership continues to this day. As one of the contributors points out, interest in the history of land ownership was actually rekindled by proposals for land reform under Yeltsin. A systematization and elucidation of the deep historical reasons for the existence of a specifically Russian concept of property ownership, especially in the agrarian sphere, became of great significance as battles over proposed legislation raged fiercely in the 1990s.
“Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii” traces the development of various conceptualizations of land ownership and models for resolution of the “land problem” developed by Russian elites, nobles, bureaucrats, politicians and political thinkers, revolutionaries, agrarian experts, and the educated public. It is conceptualizations and projects that they are most concerned with, although some do draw on archival material to illustrate the situation from below, or give good statistical overviews of the state of agriculture at various times.
In her article “Property in Feudal Russia,” N. A. Gorskaia outlines the specificities of land ownership in Russia, which then reverberate throughout the book. She concludes that there was no concept of land ownership in medieval Russia, in the modern sense of the word. Ownership of land by the state, the votchinniki, and the nobility was connected to control over the peasants, “power over the direct producer, ownership of a human being.” Another feature was the wide scale of state ownership, which reached its apogee in the twentieth-century nationalization, and which was aided by the monarchy’s early evolution into autocracy and absolutism. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the state’s priority was to guarantee its own prerogatives to land. Another basic feature was the peasant commune. The idea that the “land belongs to God,” that is, to society as a whole, was fundamental to the psychology of the Russian peasant. Communal land use prevented the development of a concept of private property not just among peasants but also the nobility.
Even in the nineteenth century, noble status was judged not by the amount of land held but the number of serfs owned. M. D. Dolbilov’s contribution “Land Ownership and the Emancipation of the Peasants” picks up on the lack of clarity of landownership among the nobility. He claims the nobility saw “ownership” of land as conditional and involving a duty of care to the peasants. This awareness that they were organizers of peasant labor deprived them of a fixed concept of private property. During land registration many nobles were found to have a very unclear idea of what exactly their properties consisted of, and Dolbilov conjectures that if one were to conceptualize a topographical map of Russia with the noble estates projected on it, the result would be not so much a network of clear boundary lines as areas of cloudy patches and overlapping contours. This “openness” of the concept of property allowed for rich and complex discussions in government and society. He challenges the notion that the nobles’ response to the proposed emancipation was the defense of their rights to property ownership. Only a small circle of aristocrats held to the inalienability of noble property rights on the basis of estate exclusivity. Most nobles preferred the solution of the razviazka; their property rights would be guaranteed and they would be freed from limitations and duty of care to the peasants. However, this “individualistic pathos” should not necessarily be seen as a potential basis for the development of bourgeois property rights; they hoped not only for state regulation in their favour but also wanted to keep the estate system intact.
In his study of post-reform repartition, P. N. Zyrianov makes a point about the commune, which is in turn developed by other contributors. The basic principle of the commune was that of the collective ownership of land combined with individual household labour. Although he is not mentioned, this is similar to narodnik K. A. Kacharovskii’s work of 1906, which showed that there were two contradictory elements to peasant customary law: the rights of labour (pravo truda) and the rights to (one’s own) labour (pravo na trud). As V. V. Zhuravlev later in the collection states, the agrarian reform projects of both the tsarist and the Soviet regime were based on only one of these two elements. Russia’s rulers never managed to crack the code of peasant mentality and solve the riddle of whether the peasant was a collective individualist or an individual collectivist. The rest of the articles describe the attempts by political parties and regimes to develop agrarian projects.
In his two articles on party programs and agrarian debates in the Duma, V. V. Zhuravlev claims that it was the Kadet “Program of the 42” put to the First Duma that had the greatest chance of success in reconciling social forces and creating a framework for evolutionary change. The blinkeredness of the Tsarist regime and the demagogy of the left parties destroyed this chance. Although he accepts that the SRs had the most detailed land program, he dismisses it as an illusory social utopia produced by Chernov. In fact, research by the Finnish historian Hannu Immonen has shown that Chernov had little to do with the working out of the details, which was done largely by experienced agronomists and not at all the result of “demagogy.”^[1] In addition, Zhuravlev goes on to describe how easily the Kadets abandoned their radical program in the face of tsarist repression and the waning of revolutionary activity.
Echoing the notion that government reforms in agriculture were never accurately based on a true understanding of the peasants, A. P. Korelin, in his assessment of the impact of Stolypin’s reforms, suggests that they may have even strengthened the commune, as they freed it from its richest and poorest layers, therefore increasing its stability. Yet despite this, Stolypin’s agrarian reforms were the most progressive and realistic possible. If they had been given time and proper support, they could have helped avoid the October Revolution. Again, the Tsarist regime’s blinkered agrarian policies since 1861 robbed Russia of the time it needed to give a capitalist impulse to the development of agriculture.
In his overview of the Soviet government’s land policies, V. N. Kolodezhnyi shows how the Bolshevik regime briefly adopted the SR program of the socialization of the land in order to win peasant support, but then as soon as it tried to move toward its own program of the nationalization of the land, putting it under central state control. A parallel development throughout NEP was the support for collective forms of agriculture, which was not confined to the Party, but widespread among agrarian specialists, particularly after 1925, who, he implies, may have also been the ones really pushing for all-out collectivization in 1929.
The final contributions to this book are two dramatic and informative articles about “The Land Question in the Context of the New Agrarian Reform, 1989-2002,” and the “Saratov Experiment.”
The central thesis linking many contributions to “Sobstvennost’ na zemliu” is that the failure of both the Tsarist regime and the Provisional Government to solve the land problem caused what Victor Danilov has called “the Great Peasant Revolution of 1902-1922,” during which power was assumed by a group of political actors who probably had the least worked out proposals for Russian agriculture. None of the work touches on the period 1932-1989, an omission that implies the period lacks genuine material to cover. The contemporary political slant to the book is reinforced by calls for open debate and political compromise.
The articles in this collection go well together. It would be interesting to read in conjunction with them a work on the social practices of land ownership. Even while the peasants called the land “God’s”, they were doing a brisk trade in it. And, as any student of Russian and Soviet history knows, and as is referred to in this collection, legislation and the wishes and desires of the central government were in practice often challenged, subverted, or simply ignored. Overall though, this collection presents a series of fascinating, well-written, and solidly researched overviews of a vital aspect of Russian political, economic, and social history.