Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  818

  CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS See also: AUTOCRACY; PEASANTRY

  LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Zaionchkovskii, Petr Andreevich. (1976). The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  OLEG BUDNITSKII

  LANDSBERGIS, VYTAUTAS

  (b. 1932), Lithuanian musicologist and political leader.

  Vytautas Landsbergis, a musicologist by training, emerged as a political leader in Lithuania in the fall of 1988. One of the founding members of the Movement for Perestroika in Lithuania, better known as Sajudis, he quickly became one of the Sajudis Initiative Group’s most prominent public spokespersons. In the fall of 1988 he became Sajudis’s President when the organization began openly to advocate political goals and to demand the restitution of the independent Lithuanian state. In 1989 he won note throughout the Soviet Union as a deputy in the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, where he led the campaign to force the Soviet government to recognize the existence of the Secret Protocols to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, and to renounce them as having been immoral. As an uncompromising Lithuanian leader, he became one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s best-known political opponents, and for a time he found common cause with Gorbachev’s major Russian opponent, Boris Yeltsin.

  In March 1990, after Sajudis had won an overwhelming majority in the elections to the Lithuanian parliament, Landsbergis was elected President of the Supreme Council’s Presidium, and as such became the Lithuanian chief of state. On March 11, 1990, the Supreme Council proclaimed Lithuania’s reestablishment as an independent state, and Lands-bergis focused on Lithuania’s drive to win international recognition of its independence. Toward this goal he followed a policy of harsh confrontation with the Soviet government, and he traveled widely abroad seeking support. Posing the question of Lithuanian independence as a moral more than a political issue, he appealed to world public opinion over the heads of what he saw as unresponsive foreign governments. In January 1991, when Soviet troops seized key buildings in Vilnius, Landsbergis remained at his office in the parliament and became the prime symbol of Lithuanian resistance to Soviet rule. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991, Landsbergis’s political fortunes began to wane, although he continued to be a popular figure among Lithuanian ?migr?s in the United States, from whom he received considerable moral and financial support. A referendum aimed at strengthening his authority failed in the spring of 1992, and in the fall he was forced out of office by the overwhelming victory of the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (the former Communist Party) in the elections to the new parliament, now called the Seimas. For the next four years, Landsbergis held the post of Leader of the Opposition. In 1996, after the victory of his political party, the Homeland Union, in parliamentary elections, he became President of the Presidium of the Seimas, a post he held until new elections in 2000. In 1997 he failed in his bid to become President of the Republic. See also: LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Landsbergis, Vytautas. (2000). Lithuania Independent Again. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lieven, Anatole. (1993). The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Path to Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

  ALFRED ERICH SENN

  LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA

  Two themes predominate in historical literature on land tenure in the imperial era: first, the fragility of private property rights and their association with Russian economic “backwardness”; and, second, the problem of agrarian reform after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. From the medieval era, two competing conceptions of property coexisted in Russian law. The first concerned inherited (patrimonial) forms of landed property, which privileged the rights of the kin group, or clan (rod), over those of the individual. Although individuals controlled inherited property, their right to alienate patrimonial land was restricted. Proprietors acted as custodians, rather than absolute owners, of immovable assets: If they chose to sell an estate without the consent of family members, the latter enjoyed the right to redeem the estate at its

  819

  LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA

  purchase price. Testamentary freedom over patrimonial estates was also severely circumscribed.

  Alongside the institution of patrimonial property, a second conception of property emerged in the early modern era that invested far greater rights of ownership in the individual. Muscovite law codes allowed for the special status of the acquired estate, or land purchased from another clan. Proprietors of acquired land could alienate and bequeath such assets as they wished. After a family member inherited acquired property, however, this land became patrimonial and was subject to the laws governing lineage land. The notion of acquired property surfaced as early as the twelfth century; nonetheless, many legal historians argue that the concept of private property was not fully elaborated in the law until the reign of Catherine II, when the empress confirmed the status of acquired property in her Charter of the Nobility in 1785.

  Yet even the Charter of the Nobility stopped short of granting the nobility unfettered rights over their landed estates. Patrimonial property continued to be governed by the rules of partible inheritance, according to which surviving spouses received one-seventh and daughters claimed one-fourteenth of the immoveable estate of the deceased; sons then divided the remaining land equally. In the absence of sons, each daughter received an equal share of the estate. The result of partible inheritance was estate fragmentation: In contrast to landowners in Western Europe, Russian proprietors often held land in small parcels, scattered in several districts, rather than consolidated holdings.

  Some historians maintain that partible inheritance was instrumental in the decline of the Russian nobility and discouraged individual proprietors from improving their estates. Certainly this was the view of Peter the Great, who attempted to overturn inheritance practice with the Law of Single Inheritance in 1714. The new law instructed parents to bequeath land in its entirety to one son or daughter. From the perspective of the nobility, the Law of Single Inheritance not only violated centuries of tradition but also undermined their children’s welfare. Many nobles circumvented the decree through illegal transactions, fabricating debts and selling land in order to redistribute the proceeds among their heirs. When Anna Ivanovna ascended the throne in 1730, she quickly succumbed to noble demands to reinstitute partible inheritance. Devotion to partible inheritance did not preclude acknowledgement of its harmful effects, however. Until the eve of the Revolution, tension persisted between the nobility’s conviction that landed property should be divided among all sons and daughters, and the conflicting desire to prevent disintegration of their patrimony.

  Historians also blame absentee ownership and the insecurity of property for poor productivity on noble estates. The broad consensus is that Russian nobles were chronically in debt, preferred life in the city to residing on their estates, and were far more likely to engage in conspicuous consumption than to invest in the development of their holdings. Moreover, until the late eighteenth century, Russian nobles risked confiscation of their land for a whole series of misdemeanors. Although Catherine II’s Charter of the Nobility stipulated that nobles could not be deprived of their estates without due process, the charter nonetheless defined crimes meriting confiscation as broadly as possible. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 dealt a further blow to noble property rights, as proprietors lost their unpaid labor and were compelled to relinquish approximately half of their land to their former serfs. Although the government guaranteed the nobility generous redemption payments for the land they had sacrificed, the response of many nobles in the post-Emancipation era was to sell their land and seek other sources of income. Some ambitious proprietors moved to the country and devoted their energies to modernizing their estates. By the beginning of
the twentieth century, however, the vast majority of noble landowners were unable to support their families on the proceeds of their estates alone.

  While the nobility campaigned to bolster the institution of private property, the notion of individual property rights was largely alien to Russian peasants, even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The majority of Russian peasants lived in villages in which arable land was controlled by the repartitional commune (mir). Although regional variations existed, in most villages individual peasants owned their tools and livestock, while households controlled the land upon which they built their houses and cultivated their gardens. Arable land, however, was held jointly by the commune, which periodically redistributed strips of land among the village households. The goal of redistribution was to provide each household in the village with an equal share of resources and to ensure that each would fulfill its fiscal obligations. Redistribution by no means created perfect equality among commune members, but it allowed peasants some measure of security in an environment

  LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  characterized by a short growing season, severe weather, poor soil, and primitive transportation.

  For Russian intellectuals-in particular, the Slavophiles-the peasant commune represented the true collectivist and egalitarian nature of the Russian people, which they contrasted with Western veneration of the individual. Yet the repartitional commune did not become a feature of peasant life until the eighteenth century, when the fiscal pressures of the Petrine reforms encouraged noble proprietors to impose collective responsibility on their villages to meet tax obligations. Collective ownership nonetheless impeded the development of the notion of private property among the peasantry. While historians continue to debate what the long-term consequences of the Stolypin reforms (1906-1914) might have been, if they had not been interrupted by war and revolution, when Petr Stolypin, advisor to Nicholas II, sought to transform the Russian countryside by allowing peasant households to separate from the commune and claim a consolidated holding, only a minority of villages took advantage of this opportunity. Educated Russians were convinced that collective ownership caused low agricultural productivity, but for the majority of Russian peasants the commune offered far more benefits than private ownership. Furthermore, although land hunger remained a constant among the peasantry in the years following Emancipation, historians have begun to question the existence of an agrarian crisis in the years leading up to the Revolution and to suggest that collective cultivation of land was by no means the major obstacle to economic innovation. The village commune remained central to the peasant way of life, not only until 1917, but until Stalin succeeded in destroying rural tradition with collectivization. Significantly, when peasants during the October Revolution seized the estates of noble proprietors, they claimed the land not for individual peasants, but in the name of the village commune.

  Ultimately, the concept of private property was fraught was inconsistencies in imperial Russia, for nobles and peasants alike. As Richard Wortman has noted, property rights remained “an attribute of privilege ” (p. 15), associated with despotism and oppression, rather than the foundation for political and civil rights. Educated Russians on the eve of Revolution remained divided in their belief that peasant loyalty to the repartitional commune was a sign of their “backwardness,” and their own suspicion that the defense of private property would benefit only the landowning nobility. Under these conditions, the Bolshevik agenda to nationalize the land in 1917 initially met with little opposition. See also: DVORIANSTVO; EMANCIPATION ACT; LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; SERFDOM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crisp, Olga. (1989). “Peasant Land Tenure and Civil Rights Implications before 1906.” In Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmond-son. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kingston-Mann, Esther, and Mixter, Timothy, eds. (1991). Peasant Economy, Culture, and the Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marrese, Michelle Lamarche. (2002). A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wagner, William G. (1994). Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wortman, Richard. (1989). “Property Rights, Populism, and Russian Political Culture.” In Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yaney, George. (1982). The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

  MICHELLE LAMARCHE MARRESE

  LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  A central idea of communist ideology was opposition to private ownership of the means of production. This prohibition against private property was manifest first and foremost in land relations. Guided by their ideological beliefs, the new Bolshevik regime, the day after seizing power from the Provisional Government in October 1917, issued a decree “On Land” that abolished private ownership of land and introduced the nationalization of land. The October decree was followed by land legislation in January 1918 that forbade the renting or exchange of land.

  Following the end of the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), the first Soviet Land Code was adopted in 1922. It regulated land use and stayed

  821

  LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  in force until the early 1990s. The first Soviet Land Code affirmed the nationalization of land and abolished private ownership of land, minerals under the soil, water, and forests. Article 27 of the 1922 Land Code forbade the purchase, sale, bequeathing, or mortgaging of land. The 1922 Land Code did allow land leasing from the state until 1928. Starting in 1928, legal changes were introduced that eroded the liberties contained in the 1922 Land Code. Restrictions on land leasing laid the basis for the collectivization of agricultural land starting in 1929. Family farms, which were based on leased land, were aggregated into large state and collective farms based on state ownership of land. Restrictions on land leasing remained in force until the late 1980s.

  The prohibition on private land ownership did not mean, however, that Soviet citizens were deprived of land use. Rural and urban households were able to use small land plots, which were used for the growing of food for family consumption and to supplement family income. These plots of land were called “auxiliary plots,” sometimes translated as personal subsidiary plots or simply “private plots.” In general, food production and food sales from state and collective farms were planned and regulated by the central government. Auxiliary plots were not based upon private ownership of land, but they did lie outside the scope of state planning. Auxiliary plots could be assigned to a family or an individual. Although communist ideology was opposed to these private uses of land and considered those land plots remnants of capitalism, the food produced from these plots contributed significant percentages of the nation’s food, in particular meat, milk, eggs, vegetables, and potatoes. For rural dwellers, the food produced from auxiliary plots and sold at urban food markets accounted for nearly one-half of the family income well into the 1950s. Given these circumstances, the Soviet leadership had to put pragmatism above ideology and permit auxiliary plots to exist. Successive Soviet leaders had different ideas concerning the treatment of auxiliary plots. During difficult economic times, the Soviet regime adopted more lenient attitudes. However, among the political elite the supremacy of large-scale collective agriculture was not and could not be doubted, and, prior to the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, no Soviet leader considered allowing independent farms based on land leasing.

  When Gorbachev became General Secretary, he wanted to revitalize Soviet agriculture, which had experienced stagnation in its food production during the early 1980s. His idea was to allow individuals who desired to start independent farms to lease land from state and collective farms. In February 1990, the USSR Law on Land was adopted. It lega
lized the leasing of agricultural land in order to create independent individual farms, but did not legalize land ownership. In April 1991, a new Land Code was adopted, replacing the 1922 Land Code, and this new version codified the right of land leasing.

  The Law on Land also allowed individual republics of the USSR to pass their own land laws. In December 1990, the Russian Republic reversed the 1922 legislation regarding land ownership by adopting a Law on Property that distinguished between private (chastnaya) and state ownership of land. The passage of a number of other laws, including On Land Reform, meant that, for the first time since the Communists came to power in 1917, private ownership of land was permitted, although the purchase of land was heavily regulated and a ten-year moratorium placed on land sales.

  When the Soviet Union dissolved in late December 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin moved decisively to reaffirm his commitment to private land ownership, which had already been legalized during the Soviet period. In late December 1991, Yeltsin issued government resolutions and presidential decrees ordering large farms to reorganize and distribute land shares to all farm members and allocate actual land plots to those who wanted to leave the parent farm. He also restated the right to private ownership of land and encouraged the rise of a new class of private farmers based on private ownership of land. Despite these steps, during the 1990s the issue of private land ownership and the right to buy and sell land were heavily contested and were key aspects of the policy conflict between reformers and conservatives.