Land Privatization

 

Between the route to capitalism taken by most post-Communist nations and the West European and American experience, two distinctions stand out. First, the former attempted a leap to modern liberal capitalism without key normative, legal, and economic attributes of its foundation in the West. These included the separation of economic possession from political power, the sanctity of the contract, the impartiality of the courts, and self-policing professional associations. Absent were such elements of the Western economic system—taken for granted in the West—as the private ownership of large industrial enterprises and the right to hire and fire workers, to charge market prices for rent and utilities, and to buy and sell land.

Second, the attempt to implement such practices occurred within a bare-bones and flawed but real democracy, often against well-organized popular opposition. Few issues illustrate this predicament more vividly than the privatization of Russian urban and agricultural land. Although the story is far from over, the events of the past few months have probably given this revolutionary transformation a decisive momentum.

The Legacy of State Monopoly

Before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, private ownership of land was well established in Russian cities. But no more than 10 percent of agricultural land was in private hands (the landed gentry, merchants, and farmers).[1] The rest belonged to the mir, the village commune, from which a male head of household received a land allotment and to which the plot reverted after his death.

On October 26, 1917, one of the first decrees of the Bolsheviks’ first day in power abolished private ownership of land. The 1922 land code nationalized all land and prohibited its purchase, sale, bequest, and mortgage. Land in cities became state property together with all buildings. In the countryside land was divided among the peasant families. The use of hired labor was banned. Leasing, however, was permitted, and allowed the more productive and ambitious peasants to increase their holdings. Even with severe limitations, between 1920 and 1928 these family farms produced an abundance of food, which Soviet Russia would not know for the rest of the twentieth century.

Between 1929 and 1933 Stalin’s murderous collectivization destroyed family farms. More than 5 million hard-working peasant families, each averaging five to seven members [2],were labeled kulaks, stripped of all their possessions, and exiled to swamps and forests of the north, where many died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion from punitive labor. Those remaining in the villages were robbed even of seed grain by state requisitions; an additional 7-8 million starved to death in 1932-1933 alone. Almost six decades of serfdom followed as peasants were denied internal passports, prohibited from leaving their villages, and forced to work in collective farms for meager—and irregular—payments in kind.

Productivity plunged. Soviet agriculture was never to reach the level of the 1920s. Shortages of most staples—meat, milk, butter, flour—tormented the country. Except for a handful of the largest cities, meat was rationed. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the country that encompassed millions of acres of the world’s most fertile black soil and which before 1917 had been known as the breadbasket of Europe, imported millions of tons of grain annually. By the 1980s every third loaf of bread sold in the USSR was made from foreign grain.[3]

Land Reform, 1990-1997

From the collapsing Soviet Union, Russia inherited almost 89 million acres of state-owned land in urban and industrial areas and 27,000 collective farms on 548 million acres of agricultural land—the latter territory four times the size of France. Forty million people, or one-fourth of the Russian population, derived their livelihood from agriculture. At least 80 percent of the collective farms were de facto bankrupt and survived with state subsidies that amounted to 10 percent of the Soviet GDP.

In November and December 1990, under Boris Yeltsin’s chairmanship, the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia, then part of the Soviet Union, adopted three laws that were to form the legal foundation for the first stage of land reform. The laws on land reform, on the peasant farm, and on private property repudiated the state monopoly on land, transferred—free of charge—the ownership of agricultural land from the state to private individuals and collective farms, and required farms to reorganize as joint-stock companies. The legislative package established the procedures for dividing land and assets among collective farm members and employees and affirmed the unconditional right of peasants to leave a state farm with their fair share of land and assets and to set up individual farms.

In addition to peasants, land was to be distributed to any other qualified individuals who requested it and intended to use it for agricultural purposes. The laws acknowledged the existence of private property and permitted the buying and selling of land. (The latter right was promptly nullified by the leftist plurality in the legislature, which pushed through a ten-year moratorium on the sale of land.) The next year an amendment to the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federated Republic recorded the right to land ownership by legal entities other than the state.

In December 1991, a few days before the demise of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin’s presidential decree ordered collective farms to expedite the transfer of land to their members, who were to hold the number of shares commensurate with the length of their work on the farm. The decree also allowed the sale and lease of land shares to other collective farm members (though not to the outsiders).

Over the next five years twelve presidential decrees and government resolutions confirmed the right of and outlined procedures for former collective farm employees to obtain their share of land and property, to exchange those shares for physical assets, and to leave kolkhozy and sovkhozy for private farms. Adopted in a national referendum on December 12, 1993, the Constitution of the Russian Federation declared that land could be private property (article 9) and affirmed the right of citizens and their organizations to “to have land in private ownership” (article 36).

In this gradual but steady legislative advance toward private land, two documents may be considered radical breakthroughs. Signed seventy-six years plus one day after the Bolshevik decree that abolished private ownership of land, the October 27, 1993, presidential decree, “On the Regulation of Land Relations and Development of Agrarian Reform,” annulled the moratorium on the sale of land and specified procedures for the registration of private ownership of land and the issuance of land deeds. The decree gave collective farmers the right to use their land shares however they chose without the approval of their fellow-shareholders.

The March 7, 1996, decree, “On Realization of the Constitutional Rights of Citizens Concerning Land,” gave the peasants complete freedom to dispose of their land shares. Their shares could be sold, exchanged, bequeathed, leased, and given away. The procedures for leaving the collective farm were simplified, and local authorities and collective farm chairmen were ordered to complete the issuance of deeds. A year later, the May 16, 1997, presidential decree allowed industrial enterprises to privatize the land on which they were located. [4]

By 1998 three-quarters of the Russian population owned a piece of land, no matter how small. Twenty-two million urban families became legal owners of garden and dacha (country house) plots.[5] In the countryside 90 percent of the former collective farms became joint-stock companies or cooperatives. Some 345 million acres of state-owned agricultural land (63 percent of the total) became the private property of individuals or the joint-stock companies, in which 12 million members of former collective farms held shares.[6] In addition, 16 million rural families held the deeds for household (priusadebnye) plots, on which they grew food for personal consumption and produced most of Russia’s vegetables and fruit for sale. Private farms numbered 270,000. Relative to the size of the land owned by the state before 1990, Russia redistributed much more land than Mexico or Venezuela did—the countries whose land reform has been considered among the most successful.[7]

The Civil and Land Codes

The 1990-1997 reforms denationalized most of Russia’s urban and arable land. In the cities the presidential decrees gave privatized industrial enterprises the right to own the land under their plants and factories and endowed millions of city residents with deeds to their beloved dacha plots. In the countryside, as mentioned, collective farms were transformed into joint-stock companies from which the peasants could leave with their share of land and property.

Yet without detailed federal laws approved by the national parliament, the land, though denationalized, had not become bona fide private and thus an integral part of the fledgling market economy. Many Soviet laws remained on the books. Absent was even the memory of private ownership of land, which was so instrumental in the successful privatization of land in most post-Communist nations of Central and Eastern Europe. (Land there had been privatized not by equal distribution, but by restitution to former owners or their heirs.)

As usual, the gray legal area was filled with local improvizations about interpretation and implementation of Yeltsin’s decrees on ownership for commercial and residential purposes. Thus, the privatization of land belonging to industrial enterprises and firms in the cities proceeded apace in St. Petersburg, Novgorod, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Tver’. At the same time the politically well-connected Moscow city authorities succeeded in exempting the capital from the privatization decrees and in making the city itself the owner of all land within the city’s boundaries. That land could be leased (for up to forty-nine years) but not owned by private businesses. In most other Russian cities myriad bureaucratic regulations entangled land privatization. As a result only 3 percent of Russian private industrial enterprises owned the land under their plants.[8]

The situation with the arable land was similar. Some 12 million former collective farmers nominally held shares of land and equipment in the abolished kolkhozy and sovkhozy, and any private individual or commercial enterprise could receive land from local authorities (provided the buyer pledged to use it for agricultural purposes). But after the initial rush, when 270,000 private farms had been set up (most by migrants from cities or city commercial firms), the private farm movement came to a virtual standstill. There were serious economic obstacles: a weak banking sector, difficulties in obtaining loans, and the peasants’ de facto inability to use land as collateral (a presidential decree notwithstanding). But, most important, family farming had been dead for four generations, while the memory of the kulaks’ fate was very much alive. Few Russians were willing to risk their families’ future without strong legal guarantees in the form of federal laws.

Federal legislation was urgently needed to provide the legal wherewithal for making denationalized land fully private and for making privatization irreversible. Not surprisingly, the most ferocious and intractable political battle over the privatization of land was joined over compendiums of laws collected in the civil and land codes.

Affirming the right to private ownership of land, article 36 of the constitution stipulates that rules and regulations governing the use of land are to be further elaborated by federal laws. Submitted to the Duma by the government in June 1994, chapter 17 of the civil code was to provide such laws. Yet the very title of the chapter, “The Right of Land Ownership and Other Real Estate Rights,” all but doomed the section of the civil code in a parliament dominated by the hard-line Left. The leftist deputies succeeded in deleting the words private property from all but one article, where the mention survived only as a quote from the constitution. The code was about to be voted down. Confronted with a choice of no post-Soviet civil code at all or a civil code without the land chapter, the Kremlin retreated and agreed to suspend the enactment of chapter 17 indefinitely.

The stakes were higher still in the fight over the land code, without which the reform’s legal framework remained “fragile and ambiguous” and private property rights had little protection.[9] In June 1997 the Duma passed a code that prohibited the purchase and sale of agricultural land and banned foreign ownership. Yeltsin quickly vetoed the bill and added that “I have said and I will never get tired of repeating: land in Russia should be bought and sold. This is how it is in the entire civilized world. It should be the property of the peasantry, and they themselves should decide what to do with it.”[10]

Two months later the Duma overrode the veto. Citing “flagrant procedural violations,” especially absentee voting, and calling the code “the most reactionary measure ever passed by the Russian parliament,”.[11] Yeltsin refused to sign the code into law and appealed to the Constitutional Court. A reconciliation commission was established to work out a compromise version of the code. Yet in February 1998, after the Federation Council upheld the presidential veto, Yeltsin again declared that he would not sign a code that did not permit private ownership of land or land sales. The Kremlin forwarded two dozen corrections to the compromise version. The Duma rejected most of them and passed yet another version of the bill that banned the sales.

Having battled each other to a standstill, and with the financial crisis of summer-fall 1998 looming, both sides abandoned the land code fight for the remaining year and a half of the Yeltsin presidency.

In the middle of the national political stalemate, history was made in a small town of Balakovo in Saratov province. In the first week of March 1998, amid heckling by Communist protesters, Russia’s first land auction in eighty years was held in a local cinema. In two hours twenty plots of state-owned urban and farm land were sold for what was then a huge sum of money—486,000 rubles, or $80,000. The haul was five times larger than the amount organizers had anticipated.[12]

The auction took place five months after the regional legislature, spurred by Governor Dmitry Ayatskov, passed a law allowing the selling and buying of land. The Duma passed a resolution condemning Ayatskov. Yeltsin awarded him the Order for Services to the Fatherland. Since then, seventeen regions have followed Saratov in allowing the sale of agricultural land.

The Second Attempt

Although failing in the ultimate goal of privatizing Russia’s land, the panoply of laws created in the first decade laid a foundation for a final legislative breakthrough, which had to await a change in the balance of political power. As with other key liberal reforms, the moment arrived after the December 1999 parliamentary election, which shifted the legislative plurality to the Center-Right after eight years of dominance by the Left. The momentum became stronger still after the election of Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, three months later.

Although the Communists continued to command the allegiance of one-fourth to one-third of the Russian electorate and their faction was still the largest, they no longer had a plurality in the third Duma. Together with its rural allies, the Agro-Industrial group, or the Agrarians, the opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) had 131 seats in the 450-strong lower house (Federal Assembly), compared with 140 for the pro-government Unity allied with the People’s Deputy faction. This alliance plus four liberal or pro-presidential parties—Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) with 37 seats; the Union of Right Forces (SPS), 32; the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), 21; and Yabloko, 16—held a majority of 246 seats. For the first time in post-Communist Russia’s nine-year history, the parliament had a stable pro-Kremlin and pro-reform majority.

In January 2001 the government brought to the Duma floor an updated version of chapter 17 of the civil code. Its opening article declared that “individuals having in their possession a plot of land have the right to sell, gift, mortgage, and lease it or dispose of it in any way they wish.”[13] Many experts saw the code’s main achievement as precisely this “absolute and unconditional acceptance of the right of individuals and private entities to own land.”[14]

But unlike the 1991-1997 presidential decrees, the code went well beyond declarations. Its purpose, amply fulfilled, was to provide a detailed and practical guidance to commercial land transactions.[15] With the agricultural land excluded to facilitate passage in the Duma, the code’s twenty-eight articles described ownership rights of private citizens, corporations, municipalities, and the federal state. The document set forth norms and rules for relations between landowners on the one hand and all other legal entities, including the state, on the other.[16]

The code clarified a number of previously ambiguous areas of the real estate law, including the property rights to the land under purchased buildings. Article 273 stated that the transfer of property rights to such structures automatically presupposed the transfer of land ownership. Other articles established mechanisms for the purchase of land by city authorities and the norms governing the relationship between cities as landowners and private owners of buildings. In all such transactions the code granted private citizens the same rights as it did municipal governments.

In the words of Pavel Krasheninnikov, one of the code’s authors and legislative sponsors and the chairman of the Duma’s Legislative Committee, an updated chapter 17 provided a “legal foundation for and defense of the right to own land both for private citizens and legal entities.”[17] The law’s enactment would “stimulate not only the economy of Russia but the also the emergence of a civilized, lawful state in our country.”[18]

Although agricultural land was excluded, the Left opposition was every bit as determined as in 1994. In the first reading, on January 25, the legislation cleared the Federal Assembly by three votes and the upper chamber (the Council of the Federation) by one vote. After the passage of the bill, the Communist-Agrarian faction walked out of the chamber in protest.[19]

The Land Code. Stating that it was “time for Russia to review a blanket ban on land sales,”[20] President Putin gave strong support to land reform in his first annual state-of-Russia address to the Duma on April 3, 2001. He endorsed a new land code and called for “not impeding the development of land market” and for “formalizing the most modern forms and methods of regulation of land relations.”[21]

Public opinion was sharply divided: at the end of March 2001, 48 percent of Russians supported buying and selling agricultural land with or without restrictions, and 45 percent thought that such transactions ought to be banned (as with other liberal reforms, age and education were the variables most responsible for the difference in attitudes).[22] As is his wont, Putin proceeded cautiously. At a Kremlin meeting, he promised the Communist and Agrarian leaders to exclude agricultural land from the code. The promise was given, in the words of an unnamed Kremlin official, so as “not to stir up public opinion.”[23]

At the same time Putin instructed the government to draft a federal law on the sale of agricultural land and to submit it to the Duma this summer. The president also suggested letting the regions “decide for themselves when they can start selling and buying agricultural land.”[24] Putin’s chief economic adviser Andrei Illarionov dismissed the exemption of agricultural land from sale as a mere “temporary compromise.”[25]

Describing the essence of the land code, Krasheninnikov said to the author of this essay in Moscow in May 2001 that the document “develops chapter 17.”[26] Indeed, in the code’s nineteen chapters and 106 articles, land is a commodity. The document defines different categories of nonagricultural land—for instance, forests, water-covered, industrial, transportation-zoned, environmentally protected, reserved for state purposes or withdrawn from market (museums, national parks, endangered species habitats, or access to coastal strips)—and provides rules for their custody or sale.

The code greatly simplifies the privatization of land. Deadlines are established for the examination of privatization applications by local authorities. The latter cannot refuse to sell land to private individuals or corporations unless the land was specifically designated by federal law as withdrawn from the market or reserved for municipal needs.[27] The code provides safeguards for private owners at all stages of a transaction: acquisition, use, or buy-back by the authorities for public needs.

There are no limits on the amount of land that individuals or corporations can own and no restrictions on foreign ownership. Reinforcing the civil code, the land code views a building and the land on which it stands as a single real estate entity. Industrial enterprises, which together with roads occupy almost 43 million acres, can choose whether to buy the land on which they are located or to continue to rent it from local municipalities. In accordance with Putin’s plan, the code omits agricultural land, yet the document contains no ban on buying or selling such real estate.

Given potential state and local revenues from taxation or direct sales, the economic stakes are huge. Last year the Saratov region received over 300 million rubles, or $11.5 million,[28] from land sales and taxes. “We are paupers,” wrote Russian experts, “largely because our main wealth, land, is not appraised, and normal land taxes are not being paid.”[29]

According to Krasheninnikov, in the year 2000 more than 1 million land transactions had taken place in Russia.[30] The absence of legislation had forced those land sales into the shadow economy, where the land market existed for years and included some of the most fertile arable land.[31] A report prepared by the Moscow State Legal Academy pointed to the existence of “an illegal, criminal turnover of land” and the “enormous criminalization” of the real estate market.[32] In all, the new code covers industrial and municipal land worth an estimated $1 trillion—the sum more than three times larger than the country’s officially recorded GDP.[33] (At least 40 percent of the Russian economy is in the gray and black areas.)

The Opposition

The exclusion of agricultural land from the land code did not deceive the Left. What mattered was the principle: for the first time the constitutional right to private ownership of land was to be backed by the Russian parliament and endowed with enabling legislation. Once private ownership and residential and industrial real estate became the object of commercial transactions, in time—perhaps a short time—agricultural land would follow suit. As the leader of the Agrarians, Nikolai Kharitonov, put it, “The problem is that the draft opens a door, gives a loophole that could be widened later.”[34]

In the Left’s opposition to the bill, ideology blended with powerful political imperatives. The Communists’ lobbying and political blackmail had extracted trillions of rubles—amounting to 2-3 percent of the Russian GDP annually over the past ten years— in “loans” and outright grants to bankrupt collective agriculture. As with industrial subsidies, most of the money never reached the peasants but was stolen along the way by local authorities and collective farm management.

In turn the collective farms’ “red chairmen,” who lorded over their villages because of their complete control of the meager but vital resources on which the daily subsistence of the villagers depends (tractors, granaries, schools, fuel, wood for heating and cooking, pastures for cows and sheep), spared no effort to ensure that the peasants voted the “right,” that is, Left, way. Next to the rapidly dwindling cohort of World War II veterans, no other segment provided as reliable a political base for the Communists as the collective farm villages, many of them impoverished, mired in alcoholism, and populated largely by older men and women.

In the words of a leader of the centrist Fatherland-All Russia faction in the Duma, unprivatized land is the KPRF’s “last ideological bastion: if it falls, [the Communist Party] simply will have nothing to say to the people.”[35] The leader of the liberal Yabloko faction, Grigory Yavlinsky, attributed the Communists’ resistance to the “fear of losing the votes of the downtrodden peasants” and predicted that after the code’s implementation the Agrarian faction in the next Duma would no longer be Communist in its orientation.[36]

For the first time since Putin’s election in March 2000, the Communists began attacking the government and even the popular president. In the months leading to the Duma vote, the Left loosed a rhetorical barrage unequalled in hysteria and crudity since the castigation of Yeltsin during the 1996 presidential campaign. Adopting the land code would be “a crime against the nation,” the Communist Party (KPRF) chairman, Gennady Zyuganov, charged after the debate on the code began in the Duma. “It would be war.” [37]

After Putin endorsed land reform in the state-of-Russia address, the Communists accused the president of pushing Russia further into poverty and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. In early May the KPRF led a protest march in Moscow and called for a “struggle against the anti-people regime of President Putin.”[38] Three weeks later, with the Duma vote looming, Zyuganov said in a radio interview that “[the former acting prime minister Egor] Gaidar’s people were there [writing the code] and I suspect there were some CIA people, and they built into the code some articles whereby the whole country can be sold out. If this code is adopted the country will go under.”[39]

A week later Zyuganov called on his party to “wage an all-out offensive” against the Kremlin, which had “camouflaged” its “devastating liberal approach” and “anti-people essence.” [40] On the same day the leader of the Agrarian faction of the Duma, Nikolai Kharitonov, announced that the faction’s deputies might resign from the parliament if the code passed.[41] At a press conference on the eve of the vote, Zyuganov warned of a civil war the moment a foreign owner stepped onto Russia’s black-earth soil.[42]

The Vote. On June 15, the day of the vote, leftist demonstrators surrounded the Duma and temporarily blocked traffic along Okhotny Ryad Street, a few hundred yards from Red Square. The protestors held a streetwide banner reading “We won’t allow trading in Russian land” and signs of “No to private property.” Red flags were waved and cries of “Putin traitor!” and “Shame! Shame!” were heard. Addressing the crowd, Zyuganov called for civil disobedience, including the blocking of the country’s roads, if the bill passed.[43]

Inside, the Communist and Agrarian deputies—clenched fists in the air and the banner reading “Selling land means selling Russia” aloft—blocked access to the rostrum to prevent the minister of trade and economic development, German Gref, from introducing the legislation. Unable to restore order, Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, a Communist, called for a break in the proceedings.

Shielded by pro-reform deputies, who formed a protective circle around him, Gref spoke from the floor through a hand-held microphone, while the chanting Communists and Agrarians attempted to drown out his speech. In the end the leftists marched out of the chamber. The code passed by a 251-22 vote. The legislation’s passage in the third and final reading in July was ensured.

Following the June 15 vote, a statement by Zyuganov charged that “all Russia is being put for shameful bargaining, in which foreigners, stateless people [the code words for Jews] and anyone with a fat purse can take part. We will not allow mercenaries and unscrupulous oligarchs to be the proprietors of our land.”[44] An ardent supporter of the reform and chairman of the Peasant’s Party of Russia, Yuri Chernichenko—who began advocating land privatization at the dawn of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1987—described the fight over the code as the Communists’ “last real battle in Russia. Today they felt quite vividly for the first time that land is literally slipping from under their feet.”[45]

Toward a Different Country

In April 2001, as Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov urged the Duma to pass a package of reform bills—judicial, land, pension, tax, labor relations—he promised that their adoption and implementation would make Russia “a different country—more advanced, free-market and democratic.”[46] Thanking the parliament the day after the land code passed, Kasyanov called the vote “one more serious brick in the economic foundation” of a new Russia.[47]

For the past ten years post-Communist Russia has been engaged in an epic struggle to turn 89 million acres of urban and industrial land and 548 million acres of agricultural land into market commodities capable of enriching millions of Russians, boosting state and local revenues, securing urban renewal and new housing, and providing the country with an abundance of food. The road has been rocky and will still be lengthy. The adoption of chapter 17 of the civil code and of the land code—to recall Churchill’s famous phrase—is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. Yet it may well prove to be the end of a long and painful beginning.

Notes

1. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 494.

2. Alexander Yakovlev, Omut pamyati (The maelstrom of memory) (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), p. 396.

3. A. Sizov, “Sverim tsifry” (Let’s compare the numbers), Kommunist 15 (October 1989): 63.

4. Stephen K. Wergen and Valdimir Belen’kiy, “The Political Economy of the Russian Land Market,” Problems of Post-Communism, July-August 1998, p. 59.

5. Vasily Uzun, “Agrarian Reform in Russia in the 1990s: Objectives, Mechanisms, and Problems.” In L. Alexander Norsworthy, ed., Russian Views of the Transition in the Rural Sector (Washington: World Bank, 2000), p. 34.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., and Wergen and Belen’kiy, “Political Economy,” p. 65.

8. Andrei Lazareveskiy, “Nes’edobniy buterbrod”(The inedible sandwich), Ekspert 15 (April 16, 2001). Accessed at www.expert.ru on April 16, 2001.

9. Zvi Lerman and Karen Brooks, “Russia’s Legal Framework for Land Reform and Farm Restructuring,” Problems of Post-Communism, November-December 1996, p. 58.

10. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, September 20, 1997, p. 1.

11. “Yeltsin Criticizes Duma’s Stance,” RFE/RL Newsline, September 30, 1997.

12. Bronwyn McLaren, “Russia Holds First Sale of Private Land,” Moscow Times, March 6, 1998, p. 2.

13. Grazhdanskiy Kodeks Rossiyskoy Federatsii, Glava 17: Pravo sobstvennosti i drugie veshchnye prava na zemlyu (The Civil Code of the Russian Federation, Chapter 17: The right of land ownership and other real estate rights on land). In Pavel Krasheninnikov, Pravo sobstvennosti i inye veshchnye prava na zemlyu. Vvodnyi commentariy k glave 17 Grazhdanskogo Kodeksa RF (The right of ownership and other real estate rights. An introduction to chapter 17 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation) (Moscow: Statut, 2001), p. 10.

14. Yegor Chegrinetz, “Land and the law: Chapter 17 on the statute book,” Russian Property Online, May 3, 2001. Accessed at www.rupron.com/static on June 20, 2001.

15. Pavel Krasheninnikov, interview with the author, Moscow, May 31, 2001.

16. Chegrinetz, “Land and the Law.”

17. Krasheninnikov, Pravo sobstvennosti, p. 4.

18. Ibid., p. 9.

19. Two months later, in the second and third, final, reading, the legislation was passed by the lower house with solid majorities of 254 to 121 and 252 to 123, respectively.

20. “Putin Backs Russian Land Reform,” Washington Post, January 31, 2001, p. A16.

21. Vladimir Putin, “President Putin’s Address to the Federal Assembly,” April 3, 2001, Federal News Service, Inc., p. 7. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on June 1, 2001.

22. “Svobodnaya kuplya-prodazha: za i protiv” (Freedom of buying and selling: for and against) and “Vopros o zemle” (The land question) (Moscow: Public Opinion Foundation), March 29, 2001. Accessed at www.fom.ru on April 10, 2001. In the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old group, 63 percent were for buying and selling land with or without restrictions while 28 percent supported the ban on all such transactions. For those older than fifty, the corresponding figures were almost exactly the opposite: 32 percent and 59 percent. Of college graduates 68 percent approved of the buying and selling and 27 percent were for the ban. Among those with less than high school education, the respective numbers were 24 percent and 66 percent.

23. “Russia: Official Says Land Use Decisions May Be Given to Regions,” ITAR-TASS, January 30, 2001. Accessed at wnc.fedworld.gov/cgi-bin on April 11, 2001.

24. Putin, “Address,” p. 8.

25. Peter Baker, “Critic’s Voice Adds Clout to Putin’s Reform Plans,” Washington Post, May 10, 2001, p. A27.

26. Krasheninnikov, interview with the author.

27. Anatoly Epshtein, “Good and Bad in the New Code,” Russian Property Online, June 6, 2001. Accessed at www.rupron.com/static on June 20, 2001.

28. Nikolay Vladimirov, “Vyrashchivayte krokodilov!” (Raise crocodiles!”), Moskovskie Novosti, February 13-19, 2001, p. 11.

29. Vyacheslav Nikonov and Viktoria Abramenko, “Land and Freedom We Have Checked, Russia Does Have Money!” Trud, March 2, 2001, p. 2.

30. Krasheninnikov, interview with the author.

31. See, for example, Valeriy Konovalov, “Zemlya neulovimaya” (The elusive land), Izvestia, February 22, 2001, p. 6. The article reveals the existence of an illegal land market in the black-soil Stavropol region.

32. Yevgenia Borisova, “Kremlin’s Land Code Goes before Duma,” St. Petersburg Times, June 15, 2001. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on June 18, 2001.

33. Anna Raff, “Kasyanov Promises a ‘Different Country,’” Moscow Times, April 27, 2001. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on April 27, 2001.

34. Borisova, “Kremlin’s Land Code.”

35. Ivan Rodin, “Duma oboshlas’ bez kommunistov” (The Duma managed without the Communists), Nezvisimaya Gazeta, June 16, 2001. Accessed at www.ng.ru/printed/politics on June 18, 2001.

36. Ibid.

37. Yevgeniya Borisova, “Putin Asks Council for Hand with Land Code,” Moscow Times, January 31, 2001. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on January 31, 2001.

38. RFE/RL Newsline, May 10, 2001, p. 2.

39. Gennady Zyuganov, interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station on May 23, 2001. Federal News Service Inc. The transcript was accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on June 6, 2001.

40. RFE/RL Newsline, June 7, 2001, p. 3.

41. Ibid.

42. “Russian Communists in the Last-Ditch Attempt to Keep Land Sales off Agenda,” NTV International, June 15, 2001, BBC Worldwide Monitoring. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on June 18, 2001.

43. “Red Flags Fly As Russian Deputies Discuss Land Bill,” Agence France Presse, June 15, 2001. Accessed at www.nexis.com/research/search on June 18, 2001.

44. “Fists Fly as Russian Lawmakers Approve Limited Sales of Land,” Chattanooga Times, June 16, 2001, p. A3.

45. Robyn Dixon, “Capitalist Heads Prevail in Russia,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2001, p. A3.

46. Raff, “Kasyanov Promises.”

47. “Mikhail Kasyanov Thanked Deputies for Giving First Reading to Land Code,” Ria Oreanda, June 16, 2001. Accessed at www.nexis.com.research/search on June 18, 2001.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at AEI.