The Social Function of Property: Russia

Abstract

Property ownership in Russia always has been looked upon as the key to power. This political implication of property ownership, with its specific fusion of public power and property ownership remains until today a basic feature of Russia’s patrimonial regime. This paper focuses on two moments in Russian history illustrating that Russia hesitated/refused to deviate from a unitary, absolute concept of property ownership, and to qualify property ownership as a social function, beneficial for society. The first moment concerns the question why the Russian Bolsheviks after the October revolution of 1917 did not rely on the communal property of the mir or obshchina (the common property of the peasant community) to build their Soviet Marxist-Leninist social and property structures. The second moment comes with post-communist privatization in the nineties of the previous century. The new class of private owners, the oligarchs, became leading figures in the boards of huge holdings and corporate identities as Gazprom and Lukoil, as a consequence of different forms of insider trading. From the Putin period on (2000), the oligarchs became totally dependent from the president in a political move towards re-assertion of state authority and re-constitution of the patrimonial state with a blurred distinction between the public and the private.