Land and the Peasant

Abstract

The lull which followed the violent controversies of 1925 about agrarian policy encouraged an attempt to clear up the long standing ambiguities of agrarian legislation. The RSFSR had enacted an agrarian code in the autumn of 1922, and this had been taken over with minor amendments by the other principal republics.1 But the constitution of the USSR adopted at the end of 1923 included among the functions of the central government “the establishment of general principles of the consolidation and utilization of land”; and nothing had hitherto been done to carry out this provision. In the summer of 1926 the standing commission of the Sovnarkom of the USSR on legislative proposals2 drew up a set of draft “General Principles of the Utilization and Consolidation of Land” to be promulgated by the TsIK of the USSR. Faced with this formidable document, Sovnarkom decided at its session of June 29, 1926, to place the question on the agenda of the session of TsIK in the following year, and in the meanwhile to request the Communist Academy to examine the draft in consultation with the best available economic and legal experts.3 A counter-draft, only one-third as long and less far-reaching, was submitted by the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR; and another arrived later from the White Russian SSR, which complained that the draft of the Sovnarkom commission was an unconstitutional attempt to impose an “all-Union agrarian code”.4