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