Encyclopedia of Russian History
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the first years of the twentieth century. Socialist
activists began large-scale efforts to organize the
industrial labor force in the 1890s, and many his-
torians have seen the steady fall in violence and in-
crease in political demands during strikes as the
result of politically motivated organizers. Whether
workers were more led by the political parties, or
rather utilized the parties’ organizational capabili-
ties for their own ends, remains a debatable issue.
Independent labor unions have never played a
large role in Russia, in part because they were ille-
gal until 1905. The state attempted to organize
some unions before 1905 to counteract the influ-
ence of the socialists. This backfired in January
1905, when one of these officially sanctioned
worker organizations led protests that were re-
pressed by the state in the massacre known as
Bloody Sunday. During the subsequent year of rev-
olution, workers played a visible role. Their par-
ticipation in a general strike in the fall led directly
to the October Manifesto. In 1917, industrial work-
ers, especially in Petrograd, help set the tone for the
revolution. This was especially apparent in their
support of the soviets as an institution and, even-
tually for the Bolsheviks, who not only advocated
soviet power, but also spoke out for the workers’
favorite parochial concern: worker control of the
factories.
THE SOVIET PERIOD AND BEYOND
During the Civil War, however, working class in-
fluence weakened significantly. The regime banned
strikes, and natural worker leaders were co-opted
into the party and state bureaucracies and the mil-
itary. Furthermore, economic collapse caused most
workers with peasant ties to flee the starving cities.
General strikes in Moscow and Petrograd in early
1921 helped usher in the New Economic Policy
(NEP), although the NEP would produce its own
labor discontent. Workers resented that prewar
technical elites retained supervisory roles and the
state’s attempts to increase worker productivity.
There was chronic underemployment and peasant
competition for jobs.
This discontent provided much popular sup-
port for the radical measures of the First Five-Year
LABOR
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Woman working in Soviet electronics factory in Moscow. © P
ETER
T
URNLEY
/CORBIS
Plan, which in turn brought millions more peas-
ants into new factories. The chaos of the early
1930s led to the imposition of very strict labor
laws, removing strikes as a viable weapon for la-
bor until the late 1980s. The stabilization of the
planned economy produced the first unmistakably
hereditary working class in Russian history, as mi-
gration from the countryside slowed significantly
and educational policies restricted social mobility.
This was also a very docile period in labor relations,
with very few strikes or viable protests. One
major wave of labor discontent did occur from
1962 to 1964, which helped bring down Nikita
Khrushchev when he tried to attack the status quo
with price hikes and demands for increased pro-
ductivity. Workers were guaranteed a job, were
rarely fired, and were seldom threatened with
demands for greater productivity, while being
granted a lifestyle that could be considered com-
fortable by historical standards. As a popular epi-
gram expressed it, “We pretend to work, and they
pretend to pay us.” This situation changed in the
Mikhail Gorbachev era. The massive dislocations
that accompanied the shift from a planned to free
market economy at first produced massive strikes,
followed by sullen quiescence, as those who still
had jobs did not feel secure enough to strike. La-
bor discontent in the 1990s manifested itself pri-
marily in a steady sizable vote for the Communist
Party. Political and economic stability in the early
twenty-first century led to normalization of labor
markets and more consistent payment of wages
than after the shock therapy of the early 1990s.
See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY;
PEASANTRY; SERFDOM; SLAVERY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chase, William J. (1987). Workers, Society, and the Soviet
State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Ekonomakis, Evel G. (1998). From Peasant to Petersburger.
London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Filtzer, Donald. (1992). Soviet Workers and De-Staliniza-
tion: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet
Production Relations, 1953–1964. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Haimson, Leopold. (1964–1965). “The Problem of Social
Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1914.” Slavic Review
23:619–642, 24:1–22.
Johnson, Robert Eugene. (1979). Peasant and Proletarian:
The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth
Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1988). Stalin’s Industrial Revolution:
Politics and Workers, 1928–1932. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
McDaniel, Tim. (1988). Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolu-
tion in Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zelnik, Reginald E. (1968). “The Peasant and the Fac-
tory.” In The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed.
Wayne S. Vucinich. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Zelnik, Reginald E. (1971). Labor and Society in Tsarist
Russia. The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg,
1855–1870. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
D
AVID
P
RETTY
LABOR BOOKS
Labor Books were issued to all officially employed
persons in the Soviet Union and were used to keep
a written record of the daily work behavior of each
worker. These labor books were introduced in the
Soviet Union in late 1938. Labor books are of his-
torical interest as one of several drastic changes in
labor regulations implemented in the late 1930s in
an effort to develop and to sustain labor discipline.
Moreover, these regulations, which included the re-
quirement of internal passports, limitations on mo-
bility, and the organized and controlled placement
of labor, were significant elements of the general
process of labor allocation reducing the influence
of market-type forces and incentives and were more
generally important as restrictions on the freedom
of the population.
Throughout the Soviet era, the mix of mecha-
nisms used for labor allocation changed consider-
ably. Beginning in the 1930s, the system of controls
was expanded in many directions. These controls,
including the widespread use of forced labor, were
a fundamental systemic component of the Soviet
economic system. However, during the post-Stalin
era, the use of direct controls over labor allocation
was reduced and began to be replaced by market-
type forces and direct incentive arrangements.
These incentives were increasingly used to allocate
labor in a variety of dimensions, for example by
sector and region of the economy.
The use of labor books in the Soviet Union is
an important component of the more general
process of replacing market mechanisms with state
directed nonmarket mechanisms during the com-
mand era. The impact of these controls on labor al-
LABOR BOOKS
814
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
location and labor productivity in an economy ar-
tificially characterized as a full employment econ-
omy (an economy with a “job right constraint”)
remain controversial in the overall judgement of la-
bor allocation procedures and results during the So-
viet era.
See also: LABOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian
and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed.
New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the USSR. New
York: Penguin Books.
R
OBERT
C. S
TUART
LABOR CAMPS See GULAG.
LABOR DAY
The labor day (trudoden) was a mechanism for cal-
culating the labor payment of peasants belonging
to collective farms. In theory the collective farm
was a cooperative form of organization, and thus
peasants divided among themselves a residual pay-
ment for work rather than a contractual wage. The
latter was reserved for the payment of state work-
ers (rabochii) in industrial enterprises and on state
farms.
Each daily task on a collective farm was as-
signed a number of labor days, according to the
nature of the task, its duration, difficulty, and so
forth. Peasants accumulated labor days, which
were recorded in a labor book. Although a peasant
might have some sense of the value of a labor day
from past experience, the value of a labor day in
terms of money or product would not be known
until the end of the agricultural season. Valuation
would be determined by the following general for-
mula: To calculate the value of a labor day, the
compulsory deliveries to the state would be sub-
tracted from the farm output, and the result di-
vided by the total number of labor days.
After the completion of the harvest, the value
of each labor day could be known, and each peas-
ant rewarded in kind (for example, grain) or in
money (rubles). With the magnitude of compul-
sory deliveries at low fixed prices set by the state,
the state wielded significant power by extracting
products from the farm. Moreover, even though
changes in the frequency and form of payment
were made over time, the labor day system was a
very crude mechanism of payment, with severe
limitations as an incentive system.
See also: COLLECTIVE FARM; PEASANTRY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davies, R. W. (1980). The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929–1930.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stuart, Robert C. (1972). The Collective Farm in Soviet Agri-
culture. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
R
OBERT
C. S
TUART
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE
The labor theory of value may be traced to the writ-
ings of John Locke, an English philosopher of the
late 1600s. While Locke assumed that all the re-
sources that were found in nature had been pro-
vided by God and therefore were common property,
he argued that when people took things that had
been present in a natural state and reshaped them
into products of use for human beings, they mixed
their labor with the raw materials, and thus had
the right to personal ownership of the resulting
products. Indeed, the products that a worker pro-
duced became an extension of that worker. Locke
employed the labor theory of value to justify pri-
vate ownership of property, the cornerstone prin-
ciple of capitalism. He planted the seeds of the ideas
that human labor is the unique factor that creates
value in commodities, and that the value of any
product is approximately determined by the amount
of labor that is necessary to produce it.
Karl Marx became familiar with the labor the-
ory of value through his extensive reading of the
works of British economists, including Adam Smith
and David Ricardo, whose works reflected the per-
vasive influence of Locke’s ideas and accepted the
labor theory of value. Ironically, in Marx’s hands,
the Lockean premises became the basis for an rad-
ical critique of capitalism and an implicit justifica-
tion of socialism. In Marx’s theoretical model of a
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE
815
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
capitalist economy, the workers or proletarians la-
bor with means of production, such as industrial
plant and machinery, which are owned by a capi-
talist. Since the workers own no share of the means
of production, they are driven by necessity to work
for someone who does own productive property.
During the hours of each worker’s labor, the
worker produces commodities, or products that are
bought and sold in the market. The capitalist sells
those commodities in order to receive income. The
price for which each commodity is sold is called
“exchange value” in Marxist terminology. The cap-
italist must return some of that value to the worker
in the form of wages, since workers will not work
without some material reward. It is axiomatic in
Marx’s theory that the value that is returned to the
worker is less than that which has been created by
the worker’s labor. That portion of the value that
has been created by the labor of the proletarian, but
is not returned to the proletarian, obviously flows
to the capitalist, and constitutes “surplus value” in
Marx’s words.
In Marx’s view, surplus value is the excess of
the value the proletarian has produced above what
it takes to keep the proletarian working, and sur-
plus value is the source of profit for the capitalist.
Marx argued that with the development of capi-
talism, competition would force capitalists to strive
relentlessly to extract as much surplus value as
possible from their workers. Initially the capitalists
would simply increase the hours of labor of their
workers and decrease the workers’ pay, but that
kind of simple intensification of exploitation would
soon reach physical limits. The capitalists would
then adopt the strategy of increasing the mecha-
nization of production, substituting machine power
for human muscle power to an ever-growing de-
gree, with the objective of getting more products
out of fewer laborers. Mechanization, by throwing
ever larger numbers of workers out of the facto-
ries, would ensure the growth of unemployment,
which would guarantee that the wages of those
who continued to work would be driven down to
the subsistence level. Marx believed that he was de-
scribing the inexorable tendency of the increasing
misery of the proletariat, which would give rise to
a progressively sharpening struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which, with the fi-
nal crisis of capitalism, would result in proletarian
revolution and the elimination of capitalism.
In the first volume of Capital, which he pub-
lished in 1867, Marx clearly suggested that the ex-
change value or market price of a commodity was
determined, at least on the average, by the labor
which had gone into producing it. Until the end of
his intellectual career, Marx continually struggled
with the attempt to reconcile the conception of the
intrinsic value of a product, which supposedly rep-
resented the amount of labor embodied in it, and
its exchange value, which in actuality reflected sup-
ply and demand. It could be argued that in the third
volume of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels and
published after Marx’s death, that problem was still
unresolved, as indeed it could not be resolved on
the basis of Marx’s fundamental assumptions.
The labor theory of value was wholly accepted
by Soviet Marxist-Leninst ideology as a funda-
mental theoretical assumption. The premises of
that theory explain why Soviet leaders from Lenin
to Gorbachev were extremely suspicious of the
practice of hiring laborers for wages in private en-
terprises, since any employment of workers on
privately owned property was automatically con-
sidered exploitation, the essential source of class
struggle. In fact, with the proclamation by Stalin
that the foundations of socialism had been con-
structed in the Soviet Union by 1936, hiring peo-
ple to work for private employers was prohibited
by law. In socialist society, the payment of wages
to workers and peasants in collective enterprises
was not thought to present any problem, since in
theory the means of production in the Soviet Union
belonged to those same workers and peasants. In
light of the labor theory of value, it is not difficult
to understand why, in the late 1980s, when
Mikhail Gorbachev finally began to allow limited,
small-scale private enterprises, such endeavors
were officially termed “individual labor activity”
and “cooperatives,” avoiding the admission of a re-
lationship between employers and employees in the
private sector.
See also: MARXISM; SOCIALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baradat, Leon P. (1984). Political Ideologies: Their Origins
and Impact, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The
Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger.
McClellan, David. (1980). The Thought of Karl Marx, 2nd
ed. London: Macmillan.
A
LFRED
B. E
VANS
J
R
.
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
LAKE BAIKAL
Known as the “Pearl of Siberia,” Lake Baikal is the
oldest and deepest lake on earth. Home to more
than one thousand endemic species of aquatic life,
it is a focal point for environmental activism and
Siberian national pride.
Located in south central Siberia, Baikal is 636
kilometers (395.2 miles) long, 80 kilometers (49.71
miles) wide, and 1,637 meters (5,371 feet) deep. A
watershed of 55,000 hectares (212.4 square miles)
feeds the lake through more than three hundred
rivers. Only the Angara River drains Baikal, flow-
ing northwest from the southern tip of the lake.
The lake probably began to form about 25 million
years ago, at the site of a tectonic rift. The fault
continues to widen and there are thermal vents in
the lake’s depths.
Baikal’s zooplankton, called epishura, is at the
base of a unique food chain, with the prized Omul
salmon and the nerpa, the world’s only freshwa-
ter seal, at its top. Epishura is also a biological fil-
ter, contributing to the lake’s extraordinary clarity
and purity. The Baikal Ridge along the northwest
shore of the lake is heavily populated by birds and
animals and contains deposits of titanium, lead,
and zinc. The Khamardaban range, lying to the
south of the lake, contains gold, tungsten, and coal.
Humans have inhabited the area around Baikal
at least since the Mesolithic period (ten to twelve
thousand years ago). The dominant native peoples
in the area since the twelfth to fourteenth centuries
C.E. are Buryat Mongols. Another local tribe is the
Evenks, a Tungus clan of traditional reindeer no-
mads of the taiga. Many native peoples consider
Baikal sacred, and some believe that Olkhon Island,
the largest on the lake, was the birthplace of Genghis
Khan.
Russian explorers first came to the shores of
Baikal in 1643, and by 1650 Russia had completed
its annexation of the area around the lake. Russians
met little resistance from indigenous peoples in the
area, and Russian populations gradually increased
over the following centuries, attracted by the fur
trade and mining. The city of Irkutsk, on the An-
gara River, was a destination for convicts, includ-
ing political exiles, during the nineteenth century.
The Trans–Siberian Railway, which runs around
the south tip of the lake, brought more settlers and
more rapid economic development to the area dur-
ing the 1890s. A Circum–Baikal Railway opened in
1900. Construction of the Baikal–Amur Mainline
(BAM), a second trans–Siberian rail line that passes
just north of the lake, took place from 1943 to
1951 and resumed in the 1974.
The fragile ecology of Lake Baikal faces many
threats. The two large rail lines at either end of the
lake have compromised the watersheds through
logging and erosion. Lumber mills and factories
near Ulan–Ude send thousands of tons of contam-
inants annually into the lake. The Baikalsk cellu-
lose combine has altered the ecology of the southern
part of the lake, killing off epishura and account-
ing for high concentrations of PCBs and other
toxins. Large die–offs of nerpa seals have been at-
tributed to dioxin contamination. Environmental
activists have vigorously opposed industrial devel-
opment, and have focused international attention
on the lake. Two nature reserves (zapovedniks) and
two national parks protect portions of the lake-
shore. The entire lake and its coastal protection zone
became a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in
1996.
See also: BURYATS; ENVIRONMENTALISM; EVENKI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matthiessen, Peter. (1992). Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia.
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia: Worlds Apart. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
United Nations Environment Programme World Conser-
vation Monitoring Center (UNEP–WCMC). (1996).
“Protected Areas Programme: Lake Baikal.” <http://
www.unep–wcmc.org/sites/wh/baikal.htm>.
R
ACHEL
M
AY
LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY
There were two revolutionary groups named “Land
and Freedom” (Zemlya i Volya). The first was a
phenomenon of the early 1860s, with a member-
ship largely of intellectuals in Moscow and the
Russian provinces. It maintained contacts with
émigrés living abroad (most notably Alexander
Herzen) and was supported in Russia by the anar-
chists Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
Repressed by the government, it ceased to exist by
1863 or 1864.
The second and better-known Land and Free-
dom group emerged after the failure of the “Going
to the People” experiments in the early 1870s.
LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY
817
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Forced to review their strategy and activities, Russ-
ian populists realized that the peasants were hos-
tile to intellectuals and that the state would not
change of its own accord. In 1876, in St. Peters-
burg, they organized a new Land and Freedom
group as a secret political organization. The lead-
ers of the group, whose members included
Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, and Lev
Tikomirov, reasoned that revolutionaries would
have to go among and work through the Russian
people (narod). They were well aware, however,
that many Russian activists had idealized the peas-
ants and overestimated their willingness to revolt.
Thus, if Land and Freedom was to achieve its goals
of giving peasants collective ownership of the land
through the obshchina, promoting freedom of the
individual so that the peasants would be able to
regulate their own affairs, and bringing about the
abolition of private property, it would have to be
better organized (through a more centralized struc-
ture) and, above all, would have to use agitprop
(agitation and propaganda) in both word and deed
to win the people over.
To this end, members of Land and Freedom
went out in the Russian countryside, concentrat-
ing on the Volga region, where there had been peas-
ant uprisings in the past. They also agitated among
rebellious students in the winter of 1877 to 1878.
In the late 1870s, Land and Freedom decided to dis-
rupt the Russian state by carrying out terrorist acts
targeting landowners, the police, and government
officials. When the state responded by restricting
its activities and arresting many of its members,
Land and Freedom split into two other groups, Nar-
odnaia Volya (People’s Will) and Chernyi Peredel
(Black Petition), both of which left a mark on Russ-
ian history when Alexander II was assassinated in
1881.
See also: AGITPROP; ANARCHISM; PEASANTRY; PEASANT
UPRISINGS; TERRORISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hardy, Deborah. (1987). Land and Freedom: The Origins
of Russian Terrorism, 1876–1879. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
Kelly, Aileen. (1982). Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psy-
chology and Politics of Utopianism. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Offord, Derek. (1987). The Russian Revolutionary Move-
ment in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
C
HRISTOPHER
W
ILLIAMS
LAND CAPTAIN
Land captains were representatives of the adminis-
trative and judicial authority in Russian villages
from 1889 to 1917.
The Statute Concerning Land Captains was
passed on July 12, 1889, and was one of the counter-
reforms made during the rule of Emperor Alexan-
der III. The purpose of this law was the partial
restoration of the control of provincial nobility over
the peasants. In 40 provinces, 2,200 land districts,
headed by land captains, were formed. Land cap-
tains were appointed by the Minister of Interior,
usually from local hereditary nobles at the recom-
mendation of governors and provincial marshals
of nobility. They had extensive administrative and
judicial power, controlled the activity of peasant
communities, and formed the primary judicial au-
thority for peasants and other taxpayers. A land
captain had to have a higher education and three
years of experience in serving as a peace mediator
(mirovoy posrednik), a mirian (mir-peasant com-
mune) judge, or member of a provincial council of
peasant affairs. Moreover, he had to possess at least
200 desiatinas (approximately 540 acres of land)
or real estate worth at least 7.5 thousand rubles.
When candidates with records sufficient for the po-
sition were unavailable, local hereditary nobles
with primary and secondary education were eligi-
ble. In special cases any local noble could be ap-
pointed. A land captain had the right to cancel any
decision made by the village or the volost gather-
ing (skhod) of the district, order the physical pun-
ishment of a taxpayer for minor misdemeanors,
and order a three–day arrest or a six–ruble fine. The
land captain appointed volost courts, which had
been previously elected by the peasants, from a
number of candidates selected by village commu-
nities (the volost was the smallest administrative
unit in tsarist Russia). He could cancel any decision
of a volost court, remove a judge, arrest, fine, or
order physical punishment. The decisions of a land
captain were considered final and did not allow
for revision or complaints. In accordance with the
reform of 1889, District (Uyezd) Bureaus of Peas-
ant Affairs and mir (communal) courts were can-
celled. The mir courts were reinstalled in 1912.
The post of a land captain was cancelled by a de-
cision of the Provisional Government on October
14, 1917.
See also: AUTOCRACY; PEASANTRY
LAND CAPTAIN
818
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zaionchkovskii, Petr Andreevich. (1976). The Russian Au-
tocracy under Alexander III. Gulf Breeze, FL: Acade-
mic International Press.
O
LEG
B
UDNITSKII
LANDSBERGIS, VYTAUTAS
(b. 1932), Lithuanian musicologist and political
leader.
Vytautas Landsbergis, a musicologist by train-
ing, emerged as a political leader in Lithuania in the
fall of 1988. One of the founding members of the
Movement for Perestroika in Lithuania, better
known as Sajudis, he quickly became one of the
Sajudis Initiative Group’s most prominent public
spokespersons. In the fall of 1988 he became
Sajudis’s President when the organization began
openly to advocate political goals and to demand
the restitution of the independent Lithuanian state.
In 1989 he won note throughout the Soviet Union
as a deputy in the Soviet Congress of People’s
Deputies, where he led the campaign to force the
Soviet government to recognize the existence of the
Secret Protocols to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression
Pact of August 23, 1939, and to renounce them as
having been immoral. As an uncompromising
Lithuanian leader, he became one of Mikhail Gor-
bachev’s best-known political opponents, and for a
time he found common cause with Gorbachev’s
major Russian opponent, Boris Yeltsin.
In March 1990, after Sajudis had won an over-
whelming majority in the elections to the Lithuan-
ian parliament, Landsbergis was elected President
of the Supreme Council’s Presidium, and as such
became the Lithuanian chief of state. On March 11,
1990, the Supreme Council proclaimed Lithuania’s
reestablishment as an independent state, and Lands-
bergis focused on Lithuania’s drive to win interna-
tional recognition of its independence. Toward this
goal he followed a policy of harsh confrontation
with the Soviet government, and he traveled widely
abroad seeking support. Posing the question of
Lithuanian independence as a moral more than a
political issue, he appealed to world public opinion
over the heads of what he saw as unresponsive for-
eign governments. In January 1991, when Soviet
troops seized key buildings in Vilnius, Landsbergis
remained at his office in the parliament and became
the prime symbol of Lithuanian resistance to So-
viet rule.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the fall
of 1991, Landsbergis’s political fortunes began to
wane, although he continued to be a popular fig-
ure among Lithuanian émigrés in the United States,
from whom he received considerable moral and fi-
nancial support. A referendum aimed at strength-
ening his authority failed in the spring of 1992,
and in the fall he was forced out of office by the
overwhelming victory of the Lithuanian Democra-
tic Labor Party (the former Communist Party) in
the elections to the new parliament, now called the
Seimas. For the next four years, Landsbergis held
the post of Leader of the Opposition. In 1996, af-
ter the victory of his political party, the Homeland
Union, in parliamentary elections, he became Pres-
ident of the Presidium of the Seimas, a post he held
until new elections in 2000. In 1997 he failed in
his bid to become President of the Republic.
See also: LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALISM IN
THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Landsbergis, Vytautas. (2000). Lithuania Independent
Again. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lieven, Anatole. (1993). The Baltic Revolution: Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, and the Path to Independence. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithua-
nia. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
A
LFRED
E
RICH
S
ENN
LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA
Two themes predominate in historical literature on
land tenure in the imperial era: first, the fragility
of private property rights and their association
with Russian economic “backwardness”; and, sec-
ond, the problem of agrarian reform after the abo-
lition of serfdom in 1861. From the medieval era,
two competing conceptions of property coexisted
in Russian law. The first concerned inherited (pat-
rimonial) forms of landed property, which privi-
leged the rights of the kin group, or clan (rod), over
those of the individual. Although individuals con-
trolled inherited property, their right to alienate
patrimonial land was restricted. Proprietors acted
as custodians, rather than absolute owners, of im-
movable assets: If they chose to sell an estate with-
out the consent of family members, the latter
enjoyed the right to redeem the estate at its
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819
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
purchase price. Testamentary freedom over patri-
monial estates was also severely circumscribed.
Alongside the institution of patrimonial prop-
erty, a second conception of property emerged in
the early modern era that invested far greater rights
of ownership in the individual. Muscovite law codes
allowed for the special status of the acquired es-
tate, or land purchased from another clan. Propri-
etors of acquired land could alienate and bequeath
such assets as they wished. After a family mem-
ber inherited acquired property, however, this land
became patrimonial and was subject to the laws
governing lineage land. The notion of acquired
property surfaced as early as the twelfth century;
nonetheless, many legal historians argue that the
concept of private property was not fully elabo-
rated in the law until the reign of Catherine II, when
the empress confirmed the status of acquired prop-
erty in her Charter of the Nobility in 1785.
Yet even the Charter of the Nobility stopped
short of granting the nobility unfettered rights over
their landed estates. Patrimonial property contin-
ued to be governed by the rules of partible inheri-
tance, according to which surviving spouses
received one-seventh and daughters claimed one-
fourteenth of the immoveable estate of the de-
ceased; sons then divided the remaining land
equally. In the absence of sons, each daughter re-
ceived an equal share of the estate. The result of
partible inheritance was estate fragmentation: In
contrast to landowners in Western Europe, Russ-
ian proprietors often held land in small parcels,
scattered in several districts, rather than consoli-
dated holdings.
Some historians maintain that partible inheri-
tance was instrumental in the decline of the Russ-
ian nobility and discouraged individual proprietors
from improving their estates. Certainly this was
the view of Peter the Great, who attempted to over-
turn inheritance practice with the Law of Single In-
heritance in 1714. The new law instructed parents
to bequeath land in its entirety to one son or daugh-
ter. From the perspective of the nobility, the Law
of Single Inheritance not only violated centuries of
tradition but also undermined their children’s wel-
fare. Many nobles circumvented the decree through
illegal transactions, fabricating debts and selling
land in order to redistribute the proceeds among
their heirs. When Anna Ivanovna ascended the
throne in 1730, she quickly succumbed to noble
demands to reinstitute partible inheritance. Devotion
to partible inheritance did not preclude acknowl-
edgement of its harmful effects, however. Until the
eve of the Revolution, tension persisted between the
nobility’s conviction that landed property should
be divided among all sons and daughters, and the
conflicting desire to prevent disintegration of their
patrimony.
Historians also blame absentee ownership and
the insecurity of property for poor productivity on
noble estates. The broad consensus is that Russian
nobles were chronically in debt, preferred life in the
city to residing on their estates, and were far more
likely to engage in conspicuous consumption than
to invest in the development of their holdings.
Moreover, until the late eighteenth century, Russ-
ian nobles risked confiscation of their land for a
whole series of misdemeanors. Although Catherine
II’s Charter of the Nobility stipulated that nobles
could not be deprived of their estates without due
process, the charter nonetheless defined crimes mer-
iting confiscation as broadly as possible. The aboli-
tion of serfdom in 1861 dealt a further blow to
noble property rights, as proprietors lost their un-
paid labor and were compelled to relinquish ap-
proximately half of their land to their former serfs.
Although the government guaranteed the nobility
generous redemption payments for the land they
had sacrificed, the response of many nobles in the
post-Emancipation era was to sell their land and
seek other sources of income. Some ambitious pro-
prietors moved to the country and devoted their en-
ergies to modernizing their estates. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, however, the vast major-
ity of noble landowners were unable to support
their families on the proceeds of their estates alone.
While the nobility campaigned to bolster the
institution of private property, the notion of indi-
vidual property rights was largely alien to Russian
peasants, even after the abolition of serfdom in
1861. The majority of Russian peasants lived in vil-
lages in which arable land was controlled by the
repartitional commune (mir). Although regional
variations existed, in most villages individual peas-
ants owned their tools and livestock, while house-
holds controlled the land upon which they built
their houses and cultivated their gardens. Arable
land, however, was held jointly by the commune,
which periodically redistributed strips of land
among the village households. The goal of redis-
tribution was to provide each household in the vil-
lage with an equal share of resources and to ensure
that each would fulfill its fiscal obligations. Redis-
tribution by no means created perfect equality
among commune members, but it allowed peas-
ants some measure of security in an environment
LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA
820
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
characterized by a short growing season, severe
weather, poor soil, and primitive transportation.
For Russian intellectuals—in particular, the
Slavophiles—the peasant commune represented the
true collectivist and egalitarian nature of the Russ-
ian people, which they contrasted with Western
veneration of the individual. Yet the repartitional
commune did not become a feature of peasant life
until the eighteenth century, when the fiscal pres-
sures of the Petrine reforms encouraged noble pro-
prietors to impose collective responsibility on their
villages to meet tax obligations. Collective owner-
ship nonetheless impeded the development of the
notion of private property among the peasantry.
While historians continue to debate what the long-
term consequences of the Stolypin reforms
(1906–1914) might have been, if they had not been
interrupted by war and revolution, when Petr
Stolypin, advisor to Nicholas II, sought to trans-
form the Russian countryside by allowing peasant
households to separate from the commune and
claim a consolidated holding, only a minority of
villages took advantage of this opportunity. Edu-
cated Russians were convinced that collective own-
ership caused low agricultural productivity, but for
the majority of Russian peasants the commune of-
fered far more benefits than private ownership.
Furthermore, although land hunger remained a
constant among the peasantry in the years fol-
lowing Emancipation, historians have begun to
question the existence of an agrarian crisis in the
years leading up to the Revolution and to suggest
that collective cultivation of land was by no means
the major obstacle to economic innovation. The vil-
lage commune remained central to the peasant way
of life, not only until 1917, but until Stalin suc-
ceeded in destroying rural tradition with collec-
tivization. Significantly, when peasants during the
October Revolution seized the estates of noble pro-
prietors, they claimed the land not for individual
peasants, but in the name of the village commune.
Ultimately, the concept of private property was
fraught was inconsistencies in imperial Russia, for
nobles and peasants alike. As Richard Wortman has
noted, property rights remained “an attribute of
privilege ” (p. 15), associated with despotism and
oppression, rather than the foundation for politi-
cal and civil rights. Educated Russians on the eve
of Revolution remained divided in their belief that
peasant loyalty to the repartitional commune was
a sign of their “backwardness,” and their own sus-
picion that the defense of private property would
benefit only the landowning nobility. Under these
conditions, the Bolshevik agenda to nationalize the
land in 1917 initially met with little opposition.
See also: DVORIANSTVO; EMANCIPATION ACT; LAND
TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from
the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Crisp, Olga. (1989). “Peasant Land Tenure and Civil
Rights Implications before 1906.” In Civil Rights in
Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmond-
son. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kingston-Mann, Esther, and Mixter, Timothy, eds.
(1991). Peasant Economy, Culture, and the Politics of
European Russia, 1800–1921. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Marrese, Michelle Lamarche. (2002). A Woman’s King-
dom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Rus-
sia, 1700–1861. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wagner, William G. (1994). Marriage, Property, and Law
in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Wortman, Richard. (1989). “Property Rights, Populism,
and Russian Political Culture.” In Civil Rights in Im-
perial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yaney, George. (1982). The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Re-
form in Russia, 1861–1930. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
M
ICHELLE
L
AMARCHE
M
ARRESE
LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND
POST-SOVIET
A central idea of communist ideology was opposi-
tion to private ownership of the means of produc-
tion. This prohibition against private property was
manifest first and foremost in land relations.
Guided by their ideological beliefs, the new Bolshe-
vik regime, the day after seizing power from the
Provisional Government in October 1917, issued a
decree “On Land” that abolished private ownership
of land and introduced the nationalization of land.
The October decree was followed by land legisla-
tion in January 1918 that forbade the renting or
exchange of land.
Following the end of the Russian Civil War
(1917–1921), the first Soviet Land Code was
adopted in 1922. It regulated land use and stayed
LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET
821
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
in force until the early 1990s. The first Soviet Land
Code affirmed the nationalization of land and abol-
ished private ownership of land, minerals under the
soil, water, and forests. Article 27 of the 1922 Land
Code forbade the purchase, sale, bequeathing, or
mortgaging of land. The 1922 Land Code did allow
land leasing from the state until 1928. Starting in
1928, legal changes were introduced that eroded
the liberties contained in the 1922 Land Code. Re-
strictions on land leasing laid the basis for the col-
lectivization of agricultural land starting in 1929.
Family farms, which were based on leased land,
were aggregated into large state and collective
farms based on state ownership of land. Restric-
tions on land leasing remained in force until the
late 1980s.
The prohibition on private land ownership did
not mean, however, that Soviet citizens were de-
prived of land use. Rural and urban households
were able to use small land plots, which were used
for the growing of food for family consumption
and to supplement family income. These plots of
land were called “auxiliary plots,” sometimes trans-
lated as personal subsidiary plots or simply “pri-
vate plots.” In general, food production and food
sales from state and collective farms were planned
and regulated by the central government. Auxil-
iary plots were not based upon private ownership
of land, but they did lie outside the scope of state
planning. Auxiliary plots could be assigned to a
family or an individual. Although communist ide-
ology was opposed to these private uses of land and
considered those land plots remnants of capitalism,
the food produced from these plots contributed sig-
nificant percentages of the nation’s food, in partic-
ular meat, milk, eggs, vegetables, and potatoes. For
rural dwellers, the food produced from auxiliary
plots and sold at urban food markets accounted for
nearly one-half of the family income well into the
1950s. Given these circumstances, the Soviet lead-
ership had to put pragmatism above ideology and
permit auxiliary plots to exist. Successive Soviet
leaders had different ideas concerning the treatment
of auxiliary plots. During difficult economic times,
the Soviet regime adopted more lenient attitudes.
However, among the political elite the supremacy
of large-scale collective agriculture was not and
could not be doubted, and, prior to the coming to
power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, no Soviet
leader considered allowing independent farms based
on land leasing.
When Gorbachev became General Secretary, he
wanted to revitalize Soviet agriculture, which had
experienced stagnation in its food production dur-
ing the early 1980s. His idea was to allow indi-
viduals who desired to start independent farms to
lease land from state and collective farms. In Feb-
ruary 1990, the USSR Law on Land was adopted.
It legalized the leasing of agricultural land in or-
der to create independent individual farms, but did
not legalize land ownership. In April 1991, a new
Land Code was adopted, replacing the 1922 Land
Code, and this new version codified the right of
land leasing.
The Law on Land also allowed individual re-
publics of the USSR to pass their own land laws.
In December 1990, the Russian Republic reversed
the 1922 legislation regarding land ownership by
adopting a Law on Property that distinguished be-
tween private (chastnaya) and state ownership of
land. The passage of a number of other laws, in-
cluding On Land Reform, meant that, for the first
time since the Communists came to power in 1917,
private ownership of land was permitted, although
the purchase of land was heavily regulated and a
ten-year moratorium placed on land sales.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in late De-
cember 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin
moved decisively to reaffirm his commitment to
private land ownership, which had already been le-
galized during the Soviet period. In late December
1991, Yeltsin issued government resolutions and
presidential decrees ordering large farms to reorga-
nize and distribute land shares to all farm mem-
bers and allocate actual land plots to those who
wanted to leave the parent farm. He also restated
the right to private ownership of land and encour-
aged the rise of a new class of private farmers based
on private ownership of land. Despite these steps,
during the 1990s the issue of private land owner-
ship and the right to buy and sell land were heav-
ily contested and were key aspects of the policy
conflict between reformers and conservatives.
Following the dissolution in October 1993
of the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s
Deputies—the leftover Soviet era legislature—Yeltsin
continued to shape land relations. On October 27,
1993, Yeltsin issued a decree entitled “On the Reg-
ulation of Land Relations and the Development of
Agrarian Reform in Russia,” which had an impor-
tant impact on land relations until the end of the
decade. This decree provided for the distribution of
land deeds to owners of land and land shares,
thereby creating the legal foundation for a land
market. In December 1993, the new Russian Con-
LAND TENURE, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY