Decree on Land

Origins

The decree's clauses rested on documents the peasants themselves had produced. In August 1917 soviets and land committees drew up 242 peasant mandates (наказы); the Socialist-Revolutionary press compiled them and published the result on 19 August, and this 'Peasant Mandate on the Land' formed the core of the decree's text. The Bolsheviks thereby took over the SR program of land socialization and absorbed the demands of the peasant majority, and Lenin did not conceal the fact. In his speech and in the stenographic record he acknowledged that the mandate had been drawn up by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, arguing that a democratic government could not ignore the decision of the masses even where it disagreed. By ratifying seizures already under way in the countryside, the decree gave them legal form.

The three decrees of the Second Congress

The decree was one of three initial decrees adopted on 8 November (O.S. 26 October) 1917 by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. It abolished landed proprietorship and crown, monastery, and church lands without compensation, placed them at the disposal of the volost land committees and uyezd soviets, and made the 'Peasant Mandate on the Land' the operative guide, with provisional legal force until the Constituent Assembly met. It was issued together with the Decree on Peace and the decree establishing the Workers' and Peasants' Government, giving legal form to the slogan 'Peace, Land and Bread' raised during the July Days. The same Congress formed the Council of People's Commissars headed by Lenin.

Later legislation and implementation

The decree was replaced by the 'Fundamental Law of Land Socialization' of 19 February 1918, and both were amended by the 1922 Land Code. Private land ownership was re-established in Russia only by the 1993 Constitution. On the scale of implementation, the Central Land Survey Administration recorded that by the end of 1920, in 36 provinces of European Russia, 21,407,152 of 22,847,916 desiatins of non-labour land had passed to the peasantry (collective farms 391,614, state farms 1,049,150), raising peasant holdings from 94,720,628 to 116,127,780 desiatins, or from 80 per cent to 99.8 per cent of all usable land. The gap between the decree's clauses and the distribution actually carried out remains an open question.

Assessment and debate

Historians broadly agree that the decree helped the Bolsheviks secure popular support, but its motives are disputed. Liberal historians such as Acton and Pipes read it as opportunistic or as an instrument of legitimacy for a totalitarian state, while revisionists treat it as a response to circumstances and a measure aimed at improving people's lives. The decree's stance on private property and hired labour long remained the basis of Soviet and socialist-country land policy.

Comparison with other land reforms

The decree is treated alongside other land reforms built on large-scale expropriation and redistribution, such as Bolivia's 1952 revolution and Cuba's 1959 agrarian reform, which set ceilings on landholding and transferred land to small producers or the state. It differs, however, in resting on the 242 peasant mandates and in assigning disposal to volost and uyezd land committees, a delegated, local-committee mechanism distinct from later state-farm models.