Two Russian Agrarian Reforms: Historical and Legal Parallels

The article presents a comparative characteristic of the agrarian reform of P. A. Stolypin and the agrarian reform in post-Soviet Russia; the reasons for these reforms are analyzed, their goals and objectives are compared. The authors determine problematic aspects of both reforms and their strong features. The study highlights the relevance of this comparative characteristic. It identified positive aspects of the reform of P. A. Stolypin. According to the authors, positive aspects demonstrate how far-sighted the reformer was in solving the agrarian issue and in general softening the political situation in the country, which was facilitated by the «resettlement policy». The paper pays special attention to the post-Soviet development of the agricultural sector of the economy that took place due to the need to establish ways of transferring state property that was used by the population on the ground of the right of usage that was the embodiment of market transformations that affected the economy in the 1990s during the collapse of the USSR. The authors highlight that a common positive feature of both reforms is the expansion of the rights of land users. Under the Stolypin reform, peasants could become landowners, and in this case they became motivated to work. The same thing happened in post-Soviet Russia: citizens of the Russian Federation in the 1990s also became landowners, they had the right to independently dispose of their land. The shortcomings of the reforms are not at all similar — in the first case, the state was not ready for the mass resettlement of peasants to the East, the reactionary and conservative thinking of the community, and in the second case, it could not create a single body controlling the sphere of land relations.

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