their members the right of separating themselves with their land without the 
consent of the collective. 
Thus the Communist principle with regard to land relations has practi- 
cally assumed these comical forms, covering up, on the one hand, small 
(though not always small!) and not too scrupulous farmers who are hiding 
themselves behind the screen of kolkhoses, and on the other hand favouring 
the parasitic existence of the loafers who contrive to live at the expense 
of others in the Socialist State. 
Much more serious and important is the part practically played by the 
egalitarian principle. Here practice diverges acutely from the law. Far 
from allowing free choice of land tenure proclaimed in the Code, the 
Government largely exercises coercive equalisation of land tenure. This 
last tendency is relying upon a rather artificial interpretation of certain 
clauses of the Code which permitted, in direct contradiction with the 
principle of purely technical land regulations (zemleoostroistoo) proclaimed 
by the “fundamental law about working land tenure”, to regard land 
regulations as an act revising land relations in the sense of general equalising 
repartition. If you want to effect land regulation, i. e. to give a certain 
definite shape to land relations and limits — you must accept preliminary 
equalisation of land holdings. Such a principle, inasmuch as it is brought 
into life, leads to the systematic egalitarian redistribution of land parallel 
to the land-regulating activities. It is difficult to say to what extent 
this principle is really carried out in practice, but in any case there are 
several concrete indications in monographic researches referring to various 
parts of Russia as to the existence there of such practice aiming at equal- 
isation under the mask of technical land reglatuions. 
Apart from this maximum programme of equalisation, it is necessary 
to emphasise once more that the right of land tenants to choose freely the 
form of land tenure was practically abolished by the governmental instruct- 
ions as to the undesirability of forming separate enclosed holdings, as well 
as by privileges granted to collective land tenure. This does not imply, 
of course, that personal forms of farming are practically non-extant or 
that the pace of their growth has been greatly retarded. It means merely 
that as a result of these prohibitions and privileges numerous ways of 
defrauding and evading the regulations have been discovered, enabling 
personal ownership of land in Soviet Russia to take shape irresistibly. One 
striking example of it we have seen above in the shape of agricultural 
communes. artels and societies with collective tilling of land. Similar 
*) Cp. M. Y. Phenomenov. Modern village. 2 parts. Moscow 1926. K. Vorobiev. 
Land sketches of the Rybinsk region. On the agrarian front. 1926. N. Silvestrov. 
Conditions of land tenure in the Karachaevo-Tcherkassky Autonomous Region. Ibid. 
Oy