Agrarian Reform and Socioeconomic Structures of the Modern Countryside

In the second half of the 1980s, Soviet agricultural policy was subjected to revisionism. The problems in the agro-industrial complex had been accumulating for many years and were the result of many factors associated with the socialist system in the USSR. Whereas in the 1930s agriculture was subject to forced collectivisation, the new conditions proposed the revival of independent peasant farms and the adoption of Western experience associated with the development of farming. Private property and the future of collective farms were at the centre of the debate. This article attempts to find the following questions: why were the agrarian reforms necessary; what was their purpose; did the country's leadership have an agenda for reforms; how did the economic, legal and social aspects interact in the reform process; did the reforms succeed in achieving their objectives. The article uses documents from the Congress of People's Deputies, the Supreme Soviet and the Russian Government. Significant static material and data from sociological surveys should be noted. Legislative acts constitute a separate group of sources.

Practice of realization of state-imperious plenary powers of country's leader, certain a point 24 parts of the first article of a 106 Constitution of Ukraine, is analysed in the article, in relation to the appropriation of Ukraine of diplomatic grade of Emergency and Plenipotentiary Ambassador President, and also legal grounds and methods of privation of face of such diplomatic grade are certain. It is established that the presence of state power in a public authority means the possibility of adoption by him on the basis, within the powers and in the manner prescribed by the Constitution and laws of Ukraine, mandatory for the implementation of regulations. Such acts must be lawful, ie based on the right, on laws, otherwise - they must be recognized as illegal, unconstitutional. The authors substantiated the legal positions in the context of the following questions: a) whether it is legal to assign a diplomatic rank to a person who does not hold a position in the diplomatic service; b) whether the President of Ukraine has the right to assign the diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the People's Deputies of Ukraine; c) whether the newly elected President of Ukraine has the right by his decree to cancel the decrees of his predecessor and, as a consequence, to deprive of the diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Deputies of Ukraine. In the article have substantiates the illegality of the Decree of the President of Ukraine «On Assignment of Diplomatic Ranks» of May 18, 2019 № 275/2019, instead have proved the legitimacy of the Decree of the President of Ukraine «On repeal of some decrees of the President of Ukraine» of September 11, 2019 №680 / 2019. In the article have concluded that decrees of the President of Ukraine must be lawful, objective, reasonable and motivated, which requires a certain format of their content from the rulemaker. The authors made proposals to improve the content of the decrees of the President of Ukraine. Key words: legal status, civil service, diplomatic service, diplomatic rank, diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.

The history of agrarian reform is as long as the history of the world, extending back into medieval, ancient, and biblical times. Like many other socio-economic and political movements, agrarian reform movements have been sporadic and discontinuous, although the last two centuries have witnessed almost continuous reform attempts commencing with the French Revolution. These attempts have become very common during the last two decades and have become part and parcel of United Nations programs. Though the literature on reform is extensive, there has been no endeavor to review reform movements in a historical perspective, or to synthesize the knowledge that can be derived therefrom and utilize it in guiding or evaluating reform. The need for this cannot be overestimated.

Land tenure and ownership in Indonesia are marked by two interrelated structural problems: limited land availability to meet development needs and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small group of individuals or business entities. This concentration restricts access to land for much of the population, particularly marginal farming communities whose livelihoods depend on land cultivation. Accordingly, agrarian reform is necessary to restructure land tenure, ownership, use, and utilisation in a more equitable and sustainable manner. West Java Province, as Indonesia’s most densely populated region, faces acute challenges due to limited state land availability and a high proportion of low-income residents. In this context, agrarian reform must be treated as a development priority. This article examines agrarian reform as a regulatory and social engineering instrument aimed at achieving national development objectives, particularly food self-sufficiency and poverty alleviation, using West Java Province as a case study. The findings demonstrate that although agrarian reform in West Java has been relatively well planned and implemented, its effectiveness is constrained by insufficient budgetary support and limited involvement of Regional Government Agencies (Organisasi Perangkat Daerah/OPD), especially in the execution of access reform programmes such as economic empowerment initiatives for agrarian reform beneficiaries. The study argues that stronger institutional coordination and enhanced collaboration among OPD are essential to improve access reform and to realise food security as a central objective of agrarian reform.

Conflict over natural resources such as land, water and forest is ubiquitous. Societies everywhere have competed for natural resources to enhance their livelihoods. Agriculture production and forest conservation are vital natural resources in the rural land use development and closely integrated to each other in a long history of human civilization. However, the promotion of one often leads to destruction of the other. Higher agricultural production improves farmers’ well being as well as higher economic growth. In the same vein, forests are very important for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, soil restoration, timber supply and people’s livelihoods. Binary models were developed using field data collected from four states in the Southwest of Nigeria namely Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo states to assess a number of factors causing conflicts between forestry and agricultural land uses. The models predict the probability that a respondent (i.e. a stakeholder) will support or against conflicts between forestry and agricultural land uses in relation to independent variables which include Poor Documentation and Records of Admitted Farms (PDRAF), Unsustainable Agriculture Practices and Technologies (UAPT), Obsolete Land Use Decree and Lack of Land Use Reform (OLUDLLUR), High Population Growth (HPG), Forest Reservation Process (FRP), Poor Sectoral Integration among Land Use Sectors (PSILUS), Absence of Conflict Management Strategies in Agricultural and Forest Policies (ACMSAFP), High Demand for Farming and Mining (HDFFM) and Multi-Stakeholders and their Diverse Interests (MSTDI). The results of the binary logistic model for Land use conflicts between forestry and agricultural sectors in the Southwest Nigeria indicated overall significant fit to the data judging from the chi square value (df, 9) = 2032.3 that is significant at p<0.05. The final loss of the model indicated a value of 36.77. Land use conflicts between forestry and agricultural sectors in the Southwest Nigeria were best predicted by MSTDI, HDFFM and PSILUS with odds ratio of 108269E6, 3703.33 and 1.08. The higher the odds ratio, the more influential the factors causing conflicts of land use between forestry and agricultural sectors. The specific models developed for the four states in the Southwest Nigeria, depend on the locations where the data were collected; therefore the models should not be applied to areas outside the range of the data. However, the modelling approach is of general applicability and can be used to predict the conflicts of land uses between forestry and agriculture in other areas.

The Commission of the Congress of USSR People's Deputies for the Political and Legal Estimation of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of (hereafter, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Commission, or MRC) was an important landmark in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The pact and the secret protocol attached to it, signed by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939, drastically redrew the map of Eastern Europe. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, Karelia, and the eastern territories of Poland into its domain. The existence of the secret protocol was a longestablished concern of Baltic intellectuals, although Soviet authorities repeatedly denied its very existence.Perestroika changed the situation. On June 8, 1989, pressed by the Baltic republics, the first Congress of USSR People's Deputies decided to set up the MRC. As Table 1 shows, the MRC included a disproportionately large number of Baltic representatives, who earnestly debated against the MRC majority that continued to hold the traditional view of the pact's exploitation of contradictions between imperialisms to earn time. On December 24, 1989, having listened to the report submitted by the MRC, the second Congress of USSR People's Deputies declared the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocol null and void since the time of their signature. This decision facilitated the overwhelming victory of the national democrats of the Baltic republics in the republican Soviet elections held in February-March 1990.Looking at the MRC retrospectively, one would be surprised at the Caliber of its members: Aleksandr Yakovlev (chairman), Yuri Afanas'ev, Georgi Arbatov, and Chingiz Aitomatov as star ideologues of Perestroika; Baltic nationalists or grave diggers of the Soviet Union, such as Vytautas Landsbergis, the future chairman of the Lithuanian parliament Seimas and Edgar Savisaar, the future Estonian prime minister; and Metropolitan Alexy II (Alexy Ridiger), the future patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.What is less known is the role played by the MRC during the beginning of the post-Soviet era in the emergence of secessionist territories that strove to gain international recognition as independent states in their own right. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocol were the legal foundation of Soviet Moldova, which integrated the left and right banks of the Nistru River. During the interwar period, the former Tiraspol Uezd of Kherson Gubernia (in the Russian Empire) had its own autonomy, the Moldovan ASS, as part of Soviet Ukraine; the right bank, Bessarabia, belonged to Romania from 1918 to 1940. On June 23, 1990, the Moldovan Supreme Soviet confirmed the conclusion of the MRC and declared Moldova's sovereignty, identifying the territorial transfer of Romanian Bessarabia to the Soviet Union as illegal from the beginning. Responding to this, the left bank, Transnistria, organized numerous local referendums and town meetings during the summer of 1990 and declared the foundation of the Pridnestr Moldovan Republic on September 2, 1990.This idea of restoring sovereignty to territories incorporated into the union republics of the USSR, confirmed by the second Congress of People's Deputies, was transferred to other more eastern territories of the union republics of the former USSR that were never subjected to the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Georgia and Azerbaijan began to identify themselves as successor states of the democratic republics, which existed for a short period after the Russian Revolution. This restorationism made relations between secessionist territories (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh) and their mother union republics (Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) barely reconcilable. In 1989, the ethnic Polish districts of Lithuania, Gagauz, and South Ossetia only requested to have autonomous status to resist the language laws adopted by their mother union republics, but in 1990, the restorationism that the mother republics adopted as an official ideology of state building caused these territories to pursue the status of union republic. …

Land and agrarian reforms represent a key instrument of state policy in the agrarian sector. Most of these reforms have traditionally been carried out during the transition from a feudal society to a capitalist one, as well as to eliminate feudal forms of management and serfdom. Agrarian reforms usually take place against the backdrop of deep social upheavals, revolutions, and political transformations. All well-known agrarian reforms have been aimed at improving land relations in agriculture, overcoming crises, creating more efficient forms of management and ownership, establishing a competitive system, increasing the material incentives and responsibilities of economic actors, liberalizing the economy by fostering free economic relations, developing private ownership in rural areas, reducing social tensions, creating production infrastructure, enhancing the efficiency of the agrarian market, and more. Ultimately, they are intended to increase land use efficiency and address the issue of national food security. The study of global experience in land and agrarian reforms demonstrates that they are an objective necessity and serve as a fundamental instrument of state policy.

Agrarian reform in Indonesia has long been dominated by a rural-centric approach, despite the fact that state land cultivation by communities also occurs extensively in urban areas such as Jakarta. Urban cultivators rely on state land as both a place to live and a source of livelihood, yet they receive little to no legal recognition. This study aims to examine the legal politics behind Jakarta’s agrarian reform policies and their implications for the legal status of urban land cultivators. Using a normative legal method combined with a legal-political approach, this research critically analyzes existing regulations, including the Job Creation Law, Presidential Regulation No. 86 of 2018, and Jakarta Governor Regulation No. 153 of 2019. Data were collected through document studies and examined using the theoretical frameworks of agrarian justice and legal exclusion. The findings indicate that agrarian reform policies in Jakarta tend to favor capital interests and property developers, while sidelining the de facto claims of urban land cultivators. Existing legal frameworks do not grant them priority rights and instead open pathways for land privatization through selective legal instruments. These results reveal a pattern of structural marginalization against urban cultivators. Rather than serving as a means of distributive justice, agrarian reform in this context functions as a tool to restructure urban space according to market logic. This highlights the urgent need for a more equitable, participatory legal framework

Many residents of St. Petersburg and other areas say that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspires to a historical stature equal to that of Peter the Great. Putin has at least one similarity with St. Petersburg's founder: he seeks to undertake the modernization of Russia by authoritarian means. It is time to stop referring to Putin's emerging system of power as manipulated or Putin's system is better thought of as a soft-authoritarian form of rule, established and maintained by a stealth-like violation of the fundamental principles of democracy and the rule of law. One St. Petersburg observer noted that to attain Petrine status, Putin, like Peter, will have to transform the entire mouth of the Neva as well as all of (1) This is only a slight overstatement of the importance that the transformation of St. Petersburg's political matrix will have on Russia's fate. Stealth authoritarianism cannot be consolidated without first being established in St. Petersburg. The Russian president could ill afford opposition in St. Petersburg--Russia's second city, and Putin's native one--to his effort to install his twenty-first century version of Peter's modernizing authoritarianism. Russia's northern capital, with its population of five million, constitutes nearly 4 percent of Russians, and the city has been a compass for the country's political direction for centuries. In pre-communist Russia, St. Petersburg served as the country's capital. In Soviet Russia, it often competed with Muscovites for the reins of leadership in the CPSU. In 1989, under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, the former Leningrad dealt one of the greatest blows against a regional party leadership in the USSR by voting against CPSU candidates in the first semi-free elections to the USSR's Congress of People's Deputies. Along with Moscow, St. Petersburg was one of the first cities to shift power from the party to a popularly elected mayor. In post-Soviet Russia, Petersburg was ruled by one of the country's leading democrats, Anatolii Sobchak, and developed one of the most powerful parliaments in all Russia. Now, as Putin moves to restore order alter years of Boris Yeltsin's rather unruly democracy, St. Petersburg has become the focus of political struggle in Russia, at both the federal and regional levels. At the federal level, for the first time since the tsars, the country's leader is a Petersburg native. As such, President Putin has staffed much of his administration and government with former associates and acquaintances from the city on the Neva. Two of the three most powerful bureaucratic-oligarchic clans are composed of Petersburgers. The liberals--led by United Energy Systems chairman and the father of Russia's nomenklatura privatization process Anatolii Chubais, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, and Economics and Trade Minister German Gref--are made up of former Putin colleagues and acquaintances from the period when he was deputy mayor to Sobchak between 1991 and 1996. The so-called chekisty, or chekists, are made up of former Putin colleagues from his days in the KGB in St. Petersburg and East Germany, as well as in Moscow, where he led the post-Soviet KGB successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1998-99. As the 2003-04 federal election cycle approached, Putin could ill-afford to leave St. Petersburg independent of the Kremlin and the stealth-authoritarian system he wanted to build. In the run-up to the 1999-2000 federal election cycle, Moscow's mayor, Yurii Luzhkov, was brought to heel by Putin for organizing regionally based opposition to the dominant bureaucratic-oligarchic clan of the Yeltsin era. Putin had come to play a supporting, but vital, role in this so-called Family, first as the Yeltsin-appointed FSB chief, then as premier, and finally as the crowned presidential successor. The victory over Luzhkov and others in that federal election cycle and over regional leaders through federative reforms established Putin's hegemony on Russia's political stage and enforced a system of limited illiberal managed democracy. …

The Russian presidency is of recent origin, although there was always a prime minister, or (in the Soviet period) a chairman of the Council of Ministers. The prime minister and his colleagues were elected by the Soviet parliament, the USSR Supreme Soviet, and in addition, there was a collective presidency or Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, with the chairman of that body carrying out the functions of head of state—although there was still no presidency as such. Neither the chairman of the Presidium nor the prime minister was accountable in any meaningful way to the parliament, or (still more so) a mass electorate; rather, decisions on matters of this kind were taken by the party leadership and routinely ratified. All this began to change in the late Soviet period: a presidency was approved with some haste in March 1990, and Gorbachev was elected as its first incumbent with the support of 71% of the Congress of People's Deputies who voted (there was no popular vote). The next president was Yeltsin, who had been elected chairman of the Russian parliament in May 1990, and in June 1991 was elected Russia's first‐ever president in a direct popular election against five other candidates. The presidency, as it was established by this time, was normally an elective office, and it was a position of executive authority, but its powers extended under Yeltsin. The four sections of this chapter look at the experience of the Russian presidency under the following headings: The Context of Semi‐Presidentialism in Russia; Constitutional Powers; Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Parliaments; and Yeltsin and the Russian Semi‐Presidency.

The purpose of the article – to reveal that P. Wrangel's agrarian reform was widely understood as a system of measures that influenced the socio-economic situation in the countryside, the socio-political activity of the peasantry. The research methodology is based on such principles of historical knowledge as scientificity, historicism, objectivity, system analysis, etc., as well as on the application of general scientific, special historical study methods. The scientific novelty consists in the following: it has been justified that P. Wrangel did not limit his agrarian reform by the redistribution of land among peasants. He considered as its cornerstone the intensification of agriculture as an industry, improving the material wealth of peasants, transforming the peasantry into a leading social class. Being aware of the need for quality changes aimed at intensifying agriculture as a sector of the economy, P. Wrangel worked in this direction. In our estimation of efficiency of this work, in our opinion it is necessary to consider the conditions under which it was carried out. Despite the adverse circumstances, P. Wrangel's agrarian reform in southern Ukraine was fruitful. Its conduct, firstly, testifies that the Commander-in-Chief took care of improvement of land management, improvement of agro-technical cultivation of land, provision of peasant farms with agricultural machinery, seed fund, working cattle, etc. Secondly, the measures taken by the government officials did not seek to exacerbate the authorities' relations with the peasantry. On the contrary, every effort was made to minimize confrontation in the countryside. Thirdly, the agrarian reform was based on the principles of state protectionism of the peasantry. The Conclusions. Among the clear achievements of P. Wrangel's agrarian reform there were the following results: 1) the pro-peasant character of agrarian legislation and agrarian reform in general, aimed at preserving livestock, including breeding stock, providing peasant farms with agricultural machinery and equipment, seeds etc.; 2) the complimentary attitude of the peasantry of the South of Ukraine to the activities of the White civil authorities during the sowing, harvesting, normalization of lease relations, intensification of the agrarian sector as an economic sector; 3) during the time of implementation of agrarian reform in the South of Ukraine, 3145 peasants became the real owners of the land, which was confirmed by the relevant legal documents, according to which 66 725 des. of land were secured into a private ownership. None of the governments that took part in the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917 – 1921 achieved this.

A major part of the political tumult that shook the Soviet Union in its final years can be attributed to events that occurred at the level of the republics or at even lower levels of the system. In the past, politics at the republic level or lower were always subordinate to political developments at the centre – in particular, changes in the Soviet Communist Party and its leadership, and policies set by the Politburo and within the government bureaucracy. The major political development of 1990 occurred at the republic level when elections to republic parliaments took place. These elections followed the example of the 1989 national elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, the first in which there was widespread competition for seats. They resulted in what charitably might be called a new dynamism in Soviet politics; to put it another way, they resulted in a rapid escalation of conflict and unpredictability. Much of the instability was the result of protracted jurisdictional struggles between levels of government and between new political institutions at any given level. New parliaments and leaders in the republics In all republics except the Russian Federation, there were direct elections in 1990 for deputies to a republican Supreme Soviet (see pp. 31–4). In Russia, the USSR example of a Congress of People's Deputies was replicated, with the Congress in turn electing a Supreme Soviet from among its members.

During the past two decades agrarian (‘land and farm’) reforms have been widespread in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), following earlier ones in Asia (China and Vietnam). However, independent family farms did not become the predominant sector in most of Eastern Europe. A new dual (or bi-modal) agrarian structure emerged, consisting of large farm enterprises (with much less social functions than they had before), and very small peasant farms or subsidiary plots. The paper compares five case studies, looking at agrarian actors, property rights, state influence, and rural poverty. These are Russia, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in the EECCA region, and China's Xinjiang province in Asia. The paper concludes that state influence is still substantial, property rights regimes are quite diverse and rural poverty remains medium to high. State-led agrarian reform, in particular where a redistributive (or restitution-based) land reform was implemented led in some cases to land-based wealth redistribution, but policies and institutions were lacking to support the individual farm sector. More often the outcome was a rapid transfer of land in the hands of corporate farm enterprises, reversing the initial process of ‘re-peasantization’. It seems that the old ‘Soviet dream’ of mega-farm enterprises in the ‘transition to capitalism’ has regained prominence, with huge agro-holdings ‘calling the shots’, providing an insecure future for agricultural workers, peasants and farmers.

During the first independence of the Latvian Republic, the radical agrarian reform between 1920 and 1937 was the most important attempt to solve the agrarian problem. At the core of the reform was the nationalization of the estates, the buildings, the interior inventory and the cattle, and the distribution of the land which had become property of the National Land Fund (NLF) among landless peasants and small farmers. The objective of the paper is to identify the different factors that cumbered the beginning of the agrarian reform in Latgale and made it more complicated. In Latgale there was a big problem to abandon the system of land management under collective responsibility, which slowed down the personal initiative of the farmers and therefore constrained the introduction of more progressive methods of land cultivation and management. In Latgale, as a long-term adminstrative part of the guberniya of Vitebsk, archaic methods of managementi similar to those in Russia prevailed. After the formation of the Latvian state, when the region of Latgale joined the better developed regions of Vidzeme, Kurzeme and Zemgale, the agrarian underdevelopment of Latgale became particularly obvious. Therefore, eliminating this gap in the agrarian development became one of the most important tasks on the way to an economically and politically stable state. Although the Latvian law on the Agrarian reform was meant to apply to the whole territory of Latvia, the agrarian reform in Latgale needed to react to peculiarities that demanded additional measures. While preparing and implementing the agrarian reform in Latgale, it was necessary to consider the historical „heritage” from the times when Latgale was part of the Polish- Lithuanian state and the Russian Empire: - A non-efficient system of management which was based on rural management expertise; - An artificially created shortage of land among the Latgalian, i.e. Catholic farmers, since there were restrictions for them in land purchasing; - Poorly educated and conservative farmers. Since 1917, the situation of the Latgalian farmers became worse because of unlawful activities by different armies such as the requisition of cattle and looting. Because of the continuing existence of the Soviet regime until January, 1920, the registration of landless peasants and the land assignment started later in Latgale than in other regions. When the land assignment in Latgale started, at first the data that the land surveyors and regional managers of the National Land Fund had gathered on site had to be processed. The precise area under the administration of the National Land Fund was not known, nor was the area of the land which was used for agricultural purposes. There were no maps of the major part of the estate and village lands in Latgale. As long as Latgale used to be the part of the Guberniya of Vitebsk, there was no data about Latgale. Many archives of the agrarian commission were destroyed by the communists in 1919, and during World War I parts of them had already been taken to Russia. There was no organized land register in Latgale. From a legal point of view, the land was registered under the name of one owner, but in reality many heirs often cultivated the land together. In addition, there were some legally registered shared land properties in Latgale. There were not many landless peasants in Latgale, but there were indeed many small farmers who had obtained the right to acquire additional land. The quantity of the land of the National Fund in Latgale did not correspond to the large number of land claims. In Latgale, about 60% of the small farmers had a right to claim land. Since the procedure of land assignment was therefore much more difficult in Latgale than in other Latvian regions, the special instruction № 25 was drafted for Latgale in addition to the law on the agrarian reform. This instruction regulated the principles of land assignment from the National Fund in the region. The instruction provided for greater privileges for land claims put forward by locals. Although there were a lot of difficulties and problems during the preparation of the agrarian reform and the land assignment in Latgale, it finally proved to be a great achievement for the solution of the agrarian problems in Latvia in general.

The agrarian reforms that began more than 20 years ago have still not solved the problems of rational land use and protection. The situation is now so acute that these problems have gained particular importance – not only the agricultural economy hangs in the balance, but the whole national economy. Studying agrarian reforms from the historical perspective leads to conclusion that the results thereof in different historical periods greatly depended on timeliness, scrupulous elaboration of the provisions thereof, and social support by all the population groups. Many approaches and solutions could have helped avoiding unnecessary expenses related to the reforming and obvious devastating consequences of these modernisations, if taken into account. However, unfortunately, this was not the case in the conduction of market transformations which began in 1991.