Land tenure system
Land tenure system. The system of holding and using land that defines the rights and obligations of the owner, occupant, and cultivator of the land. In ancient Rus’ clans settled and took possession of virgin lands. As extended families separated from the clan, they established with the clan’s consent their own dvoryshche, which usually consisted of several dym or farmsteads held by blood-related families. The dvoryshche collectively owned all the fields, forests, meadows, and water sources that had been occupied and worked in some way by the members of the family. Working members of the family (potuzhnyky) were allotted shares of the dvoryshche’s land for their use. Land that did not belong to any dvoryshche was used by the clan for its general needs.
The idea of private land ownership first arose in the Princely era. The concept took root when the population began to shift west and north to territories that were safer from the steppe nomads. Officials of the princes began to fence off free and communal lands, at first claiming only exclusive use of them in exchange for services. Eventually they claimed full ownership. In the 12th and 13th centuries the claims to the land of princes, boyars, hromady , and free peasants expanded. The larger estates owned by princes, boyars, or the church were surrounded by service villages or were worked by semifree zakupy and izhoi. Apart from the obligatory tribute to the prince, the peasants had free use of their property. There is no evidence that the princes of Kyivan Rus’, unlike the rulers in Western Europe, ever claimed title to all the land. Like any other individual the prince had a right to the land he used for the needs of his own court. References to princely grants of villages probably concern villages owned by the princes. Transfers of princely land to heirs and purchases of boyar estates are also mentioned in early documents. The reports of land grants in return for services, which appear in the chronicles, indicate that feudal relations were introduced in the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia only when it began to decline.
A feudal system of land tenure similar to that in Western Europe was established in Ukraine in the 15th and 16th centuries under Lithuanian and Polish rule. In that period land tenure was tied to compulsory military service. The ultimate right to all the land belonged to the Lithuanian grand duke, who divided the land among his princes and boyars in exchange for services. They, in turn, gave others use of their land in return for military service or tribute. Even large economic units, such as the dvoryshche, are often referred to as ‘services.’ Free peasants worked land that was held directly by the grand duke or by princes, boyars, or the church. The peasants could freely dispose of their use of the land (buy, sell, and inherit), provided their obligations to the landholders were met.
The first two editions of the Lithuanian Statute (1529, 1566) indicate that there were attempts to introduce the kind of social and economic relations found in Poland: to set off the privileged and unprivileged estates, to separate military service from land tenure, and to limit the right to own land to the grand duke, the gentry, and the church. At the end of the 15th century the old dvoryshcha were broken up and divided into voloky (see Voloka land reform).
During the 15th century Polish law was introduced in Galicia, the Kholm region, and Podlachia. Previous distinctions among free, semifree, and bonded peasants were gradually erased: all peasants became serfs bound to the land without the right of movement and, besides making payments in kind, increasingly forced to do corvée. The nobles became not merely the ruler’s stewards but outright owners of the land.
These changes were hastened by the growth of the Polish grain trade. In 1466 Poland gained a Baltic port, which gave it access to western and northern European markets. The magnates and wealthier gentry set up large grain farms, called filvarok, on the best land and increased corvée. By the end of the 16th century 78 percent of the land belonged to the nobility, 3 percent to churches and monasteries, and 19 percent to the crown.
After the Union of Lublin (1569) Polish law was extended to other parts of Ukraine. Polish magnates and gentry began to accumulate large landholdings in Ukraine, acquired parts of the crownlands for their services, and gradually enserfed the rural population. These processes met with resistance, however. It was difficult to establish filvarok in the steppe, and settlers rejected the expiry of their short-term leases with the landowners. The social unrest arising from such conditions finally exploded, in Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s social and political revolution.
In Transcarpathia the obligations of the peasants and the privileges of the gentry were codified in the Tripantitum of 1546. In Bukovyna at that time, the Moldavian voivodes distributed latifundia among their gentry and boyars. The vulnerability of those regions to Turkish and Tatar raids made it impossible for the landowners to exploit the peasants as severely as in Galicia.
Under the Hetman state there were several forms of land tenure. The few members of the gentry who had supported Bohdan Khmelnytsky retained their ownership rights. The emerging Cossack starshyna gained access to large landholdings, which were tied to certain offices in the state. The starshyna did not acquire the same rights as the gentry until the reign of Hetman Danylo Apostol, when its inheritance right was recognized. The Cossack estate secured the right of perpetual ownership and unrestricted enjoyment of its lands.
According to unwritten customary law, peasants could take possession (zaimka) of unoccupied lands. They also had the right to choose their master or to become landless peasants (pidsusidky). Thus, peasants had full disposal of the land they used. Also, peasants on gentry or monastery estates initially had the right to dispose of the land they cultivated, although they were indentured. The peasants who lived on the free military estates, which belonged to the Hetman state, retained the right to dispose of the land they used longest. When at the end of the 17th century the Muscovite tsar began to interfere in land affairs in Ukraine by granting estates to officers and monasteries without the hetman’s approval, the land rights of the peasantry began to diminish as well.
From the mid-18th century more and more of the land and peasants in Ukraine fell into the hands of Russian nobles and officials. As Russian power in the Hetman state increased, the number of free peasants decreased: according to the General Survey of Landholdings conducted by Hetman Danylo Apostol in 1729–31, only a third of the peasants were free commoners. Under pressure from Russian authorities Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky enserfed even some Cossacks. Serfdom was established officially in Left-Bank Ukraine in 1783 by an edict of Catherine II, and in Southern Ukraine in 1796.
In the Russian Empire most land was owned by landowners, the state, and the church. Of the other estates only Cossacks retained the full right to own land. The peasants were serfs either of the landlords (2,493,000 in 1858) or of the state (1,682,000). Their legal tie with a certain plot was dissolved: the 1808 law prohibiting the sale of peasants without land was repealed in 1841. Henceforth, peasants and land could be sold separately. The development of commercial farming and of agricultural processing industries accelerated the separation of peasants from the land. A monthly payment for labor in foodstuffs became more common. In Ukraine serfs almost universally provided corvée rather than quitrent.
The emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire in 1861 entailed basic changes in land tenure. Of 48.1 million ha of land in the nine Ukrainian gubernias the peasants received 21.9 million ha, the landowners retained 22.5 million ha, and the church and state held on to 3.7 million ha. The state compensated the landowners for the land transferred to the peasants and then collected redemption payments spread over 40 years from the peasants. Servitudes, such as meadows and forests, were left intact until 1886 for use by the village and the landlord.
The amount of land allotted to each peasant household varied with the region, the size of the plot previously used by the peasant, and the type of farmer-owner. State serfs received on average 7.5 desiatins per household, landlords’ serfs only 5 desiatins. Of the households that got land, 3 percent received less than 1 desiatin, 16 percent from 1 to 3 desiatins, 67 percent from 3 to 10 desiatins, and 14 percent over 10 desiatins. Only some of the transferred land went to individual households: in the steppe region of Ukraine the Russian obshchina system of land tenure prevailed. By the end of the 1870s, 45 percent of all farms in Ukraine had come under the obshchina system: 95 percent of the allotted land in Katerynoslav gubernia, 95.3 percent in Kharkiv gubernia, and 88.8 percent in Kherson gubernia, but only 5.4 percent in Podilia gubernia, 5.9 percent in Poltava gubernia, and 6.7 percent in Kyiv gubernia. The inadequate parcels of land received by the peasants were reduced even further by division among heirs. As a result, although the total land owned or rented by peasants grew somewhat, the average peasant holding declined from 12.3 ha in 1877 to 9.4 ha in 1905. The land shortage increased social tension in the countryside. In response to peasant unrest the Stolypin agrarian reforms allowed peasants to leave the obshchina system with an allotment of their own land. They could also consolidate their parcels of land into one holding contiguous to (khutir) or at a distance from (vidrub) the farm buildings. Land banks and other credit institutions encouraged the spread of individual farmsteads of either type. Peasant unrest in 1902–6 aroused insecurity among landowners and accelerated the transfer of land to the peasants. At the outbreak of the First World War, peasant landholdings in the Ukrainian gubernias increased to 32 million ha, or 65 percent of the total land fund. More than half of all peasant households, however, lacked enough land to support themselves (see table 1).
The Revolution of 1917 opened a new period in agrarian relations. The social and political demands of the Ukrainian people were rejected by the Provisional Government; hence, Ukraine began to develop its own agrarian legislation only after its proclamation of independence. The Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21, and the rapidly changing political situation made it impossible for the government to implement its land law.
In Soviet Ukraine a new land law was passed only in October 1922. Maintaining the principle of the nationalization of all land, it recognized the peasants’ right to use the land in perpetuity. The land was not distributed directly to the peasants but was handed over to land communities for distribution. The land communities could decide the terms of tenure; they usually chose the traditional form of farming for Ukraine, the individual farmstead. The state retained use of the forests (3.7 million ha) and a small portion of arable land (1.4 million ha), on which it set up state farms and communes. In 1927, peasant farms had 36.8 million ha at their disposal. The number of peasant households increased, from 3.5 million in 1916 to 5.2 million in 1928. The collectivization in 1930–1 made fundamental changes in the land tenure system of Soviet Ukraine. Individual farms were abolished, and use of the land was given to collective farms, state farms and state enterprises (see table 2).
Western Ukraine. After Austria’s annexation of Galicia and Bukovyna, some changes in the land tenure system were made by Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the spirit of enlightened absolutism and physiocratic doctrine. Cadastres were conducted, and corvée was regularized. In 1787 a legal distinction between the demesne or tabular land belonging to the landlord and rustical lands belonging to the peasantry was introduced, and the latter category of land could no longer be appropriated by landowners and added to their filvarky (see Filvarok). Under Joseph II a cadastre was prepared to serve as the basis of tax reform and urbarium standardization, which was to replace corvée with monetary rents. According to the preliminary cadastre of 1819, 61 percent of peasant farms could not be self-sufficient in the prevailing economic system. The Napoleonic Wars and the chaos in their wake put an end to reforms and strengthened the position of the filvarok owners, who provided the army with supplies. Ignoring the law of 1787, they managed to annex 1 million morgs (580,000 ha) of rustical lands by 1848.
Although the land reform of 1848 gave peasants ownership of the land which previously they had had the use of, it did not provide for the economic development of the peasant farms. Restrictions on the division of peasant holdings, their mortgaging, and their sale to nonpeasants were rarely observed. Consequently, in 1819–59 the number of peasant farms grew by 55 percent, and the number of small holdings under 5 morgs almost doubled. When the restrictions were removed in 1868, and new laws, such as the law on unrestricted credit, which legalized usury, were introduced, peasant land became subject to speculation. From 1875 to 1884 some 23,650 peasant farms were auctioned off. Some farmland was withdrawn from production, and many peasant holdings were subdivided to the point at which they could not support their owners. In 1902, 42.3 percent of farms consisted of less than 2 ha, 37.3 percent of 2–5 ha, 14.9 percent of 5–10 ha, and barely 5.5 percent of over 10 ha.
In 1852–60, large landholdings accounted for 44.8 percent of the land fund. By 1912 they accounted for 37.8 percent of the land, 16.3 percent of which belonged to latifundia of over 10,000 morgs. Thus, within 50 years 275,700 ha of the large estates were divided and sold to small holders, most of whom were Polish. Only 38,000 ha of that land was bought by Ukrainian peasants. The proletarianization of the Ukrainian peasantry grew rapidly, restrained only to some extent by immigration, spreading education, and rising national consciousness.
In Ukrainian territories under Polish control, the land reforms of 1920 and 1925 brought some changes in the land tenure system. Some large estates were broken up, and certain limitations were imposed on the sale of land. Ukrainian peasants gained hardly anything from the distribution of the parceled lands. Almost half of the farms (42 percent) in Western Ukraine were under 2 two ha, 39 percent were 2–5 ha, 14 percent were 5–10 ha, and 5 percent were over 10 ha. Landholders of the last category owned 44 percent of the land. Ukrainian peasants were hit hardest by the land shortage.
Changes in the land tenure systems of Bukovyna and Transcarpathia paralleled those in Galicia. Most farms were very small: at the turn of the 20th century in Bukovyna 56 percent of farms consisted of less than 2 ha, 29 percent of 2–5 ha, 10 percent of 5–10 ha, and only 5 percent of farms, occupying 61 percent of all the land, of over 10 ha. Romanian agrarian reforms did little to alter the picture. In Transcarpathia under Czechoslovak rule, peasants owned only 36 percent of the land (but 88 percent of the arable land). Forty-five percent of the farms were under 2 ha, 30 percent were 2–5 ha, and 17 percent were 5–10 ha. The 8 percent of farms over 10 ha accounted for 77 percent of the land area.
During the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine in 1939–41, the property of the church and large landowners was nationalized. According to Soviet data 45 percent of the confiscated lands in Galicia and Volhynia was distributed among landless peasants and small landholders. Private ownership of up to 40 ha was permitted. In the summer of 1940 collectivization commenced in Western Ukraine, and by the outbreak of the German-Soviet War 14 percent of the farms had been collectivized. During the occupation in 1941–4 the Germans nationalized all Soviet government property and converted state farms and some of the collective farms into state farming enterprises. In 1944–5 the Soviets again distributed some of the confiscated land among peasants. In the summer of 1948 they launched a massive collectivization drive, which was completed in 1951. From that time one tenure system prevailed throughout Soviet Ukraine.
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[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]