Soviet bureaucracy in a striking fashion in connection with the attempt to
formulate general principles of land law for the whole of the U.S.S.R.
The point is, the existing legislation with regard to land had been codified
for separate republics; the specific legislation which we have discussed above
refers to the R.S.F.S.R. (Great Russia), but it has been reproduced
without any considerable alterations in other parts of the U.S.S.R.
Considering that the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. provides for the
establishment of “general principles” of land law for the Union as a
whole, drafts of such general law had been worked out more than a year
ago. And these drafts provoked a controversy which has not yet subsided)
and the kernel whereof constituted the same fundamental problem: Personal
ownership, or community with egalitarian redistributions? Of course, the
principle of personal ownership was here advocated under all sorts of
assumed names, and sometimes this defense took very curious forms. Thus,
e. g., one of the militant arguments was as follows: cooperation is a way
to Socialism; statistics show that there is an infinitely greater percentage
of “khootor’-settlers, than of communal holders, in the cooperative
movement; ergo, by admitting free formation of khootor-holdings the way
to Socialism is shortened. And such a proposition was seriously debated
in the Communist Academy, and is advocated e. g., in one of the last
numbers of the “Bolshevic”’, the official organ of the Communist party**).
Yet, however enticing such arguments may be, the policy of the Soviet
Government has not abandoned its Populist tendency. The just published
leading instructions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
go back to the seemingly forgotten question of single land legislation and
announce a whole programm of restrictions of personal farming, parallel
with the strengthening of equalising tendencies.
Considering the struggle which the living forces of the village are
leading against the constantly renewed equalising partitions of land, and
the legislation which frobids all free transactions with land, the actual land
relations must of necessity be essentially different from what their legal
appearance is. In the first place, according to the unanimous evidence of
the Soviet specialists, various disguised forms of hired labour and lease of
lands are widely spread. Seeing that such transactions are formally
forbidden and at all events disadvantageous from the point of view of
relations with the authorities, they escape any statistical estimation, and
this is well realised by the Soviet economists themselves. Yet it is precisely
*) This most curious discussion fills the pages of the review “On the agrarian
front”,
**\ “Bolshevic”, October 31, 1927, No. 19—20, article of M. Ustinov: “To the
question of the forms of land tenure. Crisis of the Populist defence of the
community”
a