Land Ownership in Russia: Before and After Communism

The right of individuals to own land is taken for granted in Western capitalist countries, but in Russian, in both Tsarist and Soviet times, the rights of individuals to own land was severely restricted. Legal reforms, enabling individuals to become landowners, have been seen as a crucial part of the reform process of the 1990s, underpinning the shift in Russia to a capitalist economy the idea being that, by enabling individuals, rather than the state or collectives, to own land, individual economic activity would be stimulated. Changes in the right to own land were also part of the attempts by the Tsarist regime to reform itself in its last decades. This book examines both the first and last decades of the twentieth century, discussing legal reforms concerning land ownership, showing how this was critical to ideas about property, law, the state, the individual and economic incentive, and showing who limits to legal reforms about land acted as a brake on reform more generally.