Land reforms. Legislative and administrative measures aimed at redistributing land among various social groups. They have been known in Ukraine since medieval times. Some, such as the voloka land reform of the mid-16th century, radically altered the relation of different social strata to the land. Great socioeconomic changes such as the limiting or abolition of serfdom (1783 and 1848 in Austria, 1861 in Russia) involved significant changes in land tenure and land use. The modern concept of land reforms, which is tied to a political and economic struggle for a fairer distribution of land among groups of individual landowners or land users, is of recent origin.
The land reforms which followed the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire left Ukrainian peasants with less land at their disposal: 30.8 percent of the land formerly used by the peasantry was detached and retained by the landowners. Of a total land fund of 48.1 million ha in the nine Ukrainian gubernias, 21.9 million ha (45.7 percent) were transferred to the peasants, 22.5 million ha (46.6 percent) were retained by the large landowners, and the remaining 3.7 million ha (7.7 percent) belonged to the state or the church. The peasants had to pay the former owners for the land through a system of redemption payments: the state bought the land from the landowners and sold it to the peasants on credit. This land reform failed to appease the peasant’s land hunger. The small size of peasant holdings and, hence, the low productivity of most peasant farms, the land shortage, and rural overpopulation, which became acute in Ukraine by the end of the 19th century, had a marked influence on the Revolution of 1905. The Stolypin agrarian reforms (1906) were an attempt to alleviate the crisis. These measures, however, benefitted only the middle and wealthier peasantry. The poor peasants could not improve their lot and had to sell their remaining holdings, and thereby swelled the ranks of the rural proletariat.
The Revolution of 1917 also included land reforms. Ukraine’s national governments worked out the principles of land reforms but were not able to carry them out (see Land law). The reforms that were put into practice were either local or temporary. Bolshevik land policy amounted to land revolution rather than reform, in that it involved the expropriation and nationalization of land (see War communism, New Economic Policy, Collectivization, Land tenure system, and Land law).
After the abolition of serfdom on Ukrainian territories controlled by Austria, peasants could own the land they had used. At the time, landowners owned 2,461,000 ha (44.4 percent), and peasants owned 3,069,000 ha (55.6 percent). The landowners were reimbursed by the state, and the peasants were given 40 years to settle their debt to the state. Despite the reduction of large estates by parcelation, the land crisis continued, just as it did in eastern Ukraine. In fact, there were no fundamental land reforms in Ukrainian territories under Austria-Hungary. The Galician Diet, which had the power to pass land laws, was controlled by Polish landowners who rejected reform. Some political parties in Galicia included land reform in their platforms.
In the interwar period the Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian regimes in Western Ukraine introduced land reforms in the modern sense. In Poland a law was passed on 15 July 1920 by which large estates were expropriated at prices set by land administrations. Landowners were allowed to retain up to 180 ha (60 ha near the cities); on Ukrainian territories the maximum size of an estate was 400 ha. Excess land was parceled out among small farmers and landless peasants, primarily soldiers and invalids of the Polish army. In 1919–23 the Polish authorities conducted extensive land reforms: about 450,000 ha in Western Ukraine were parceled out to colonists, particularly veterans, from the Polish heartland. Ukrainian peasants received scarcely 6 percent of the distributed land. The parcelation was conducted, with the approval of the Polish Ministry of Agriculture, either by the owners themselves or by select Polish banks. The Ukrainian parcelation society in Lviv, Zemlia, did not get a concession to parcel land. The Polish law of 28 December 1925 restricted further access of Ukrainian peasants to parceled land. In 1934 state bodies (voivodeship governments) took over the implementation of land reforms from land administrations.
In Bukovyna and Bessarabia, land reform was based on the law of 30 July 1921, which limited the estates of non-Romanians to 100 ha and of Romanians to 250 ha, and expropriated all the lands of the Orthodox Religious Land Fund. Of the 144,000 ha designated for distribution, only 63,000 ha were distributed by the end of 1926. One-third of it went to Ukrainians. The state reimbursed the former landowners at a rate set by a special commission, while the peasants paid the state half the rate plus the costs of surveying and registration. A large part of the undistributed land was leased by the government or was reserved for settling Romanian colonists among the Ukrainian population.
In Transcarpathia, the Czechoslovak government effected a partial land reform in 1922–8. Expropriated parts of estates were distributed among the small farmers and landless peasants, 86 percent of whom were Ukrainian. State lands consisting of forests, pasture, and meadows, however, were not subject to redistribution. Thus, this reform did little to alleviate the plight of the Transcarpathian peasantry.
With the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, the land tenure system was altered radically.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zalozets'kyi, R. Zemel'na reforma na Ukraïni (Vienna–Kyiv 1918)
Pavlykovs'kyi, Iu. Zemel'na sprava u Skhidnii Halychyni (Lviv 1922)
Mytsiuk, O. Agrarna polityka, 2 vols (Poděbrady 1925)
Karpats'ka Ukraïna (Lviv 1939)
Bukovyna, ïï mynule i suchasne (Paris–Philadelphia–Detroit 1956)
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]