Land Socialization

The Program's Content

The program rested on the principle that land should pass from private ownership into an all-people's fund without being converted into state property. Land came under the guidance of organs of people's self-government, from rural and urban communes up to provincial and central bodies, and land use became egalitarian-labor use based on one's own labor. Whether individually or in association, those who tilled the land with their own labor were to secure a consumption norm. The SRs regarded this as the preliminary stage of socialism in Russia, holding that socialism would begin in the countryside. The demand was one of the party's minimum-program items alongside political democracy.

Origins of the Program

Drafted by the party's chief theorist Viktor Chernov, the program was published as a draft in Revolutionary Russia in May 1904 and adopted at the First Party Congress in early January 1906. Based on the idea of egalitarian land use, the agrarian program expressed the peasants' aspiration to divide the landed estates and objectively corresponded to peasant moods during the 1905–07 bourgeois-democratic revolution, which won it peasant support.

Bolshevik Succession

The peasant mandate of the Decree on Land, passed by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October (8 November) 1917, abolished private ownership of land forever, barred land from being sold, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated, and made all land the property of the whole people, passing into the use of all who cultivated it. Lenin conceded that the decree and the mandate were drawn up by SRs. In January 1918 the Constituent Assembly passed a land socialization law, but the Assembly was forcibly dissolved after a single day. The Fundamental Law of Land Socialization, signed on 19 February 1918 by Lenin and Sverdlov, replaced it, and the 1922 Land Code amended both decrees.

Divisions and Alternatives

Positions diverged within the SR party itself. The Left SRs declared themselves the only true representatives of the program and demanded the immediate socialization of land. The Popular Socialists opposed socialization, which turned land over to collective peasant ownership, and instead wanted nationalization by the state together with compensation for landowners, while the SRs rejected indemnities. The Bolshevik program of land nationalization and the program of land socialization stood opposed to each other. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia assesses that the program did not go beyond the bourgeois revolution because it failed to link the agrarian question to destroying private property as the basis of capitalism, and states that socialization as carried out was in fact land nationalization.

Implementation and End

From spring 1917 peasants resumed mass land seizures in expectation of a black repartition. The Ministry of Agriculture recorded 205 agrarian disturbances in April 1917 across 42 of 49 European-Russian provinces, 558 in May, and 1,122 in June, and by 25 October the agrarian movement covered 91.2% of districts. By the end of 1920 in 36 provinces of European Russia, of 22,847,916 desiatins of non-labouring land, 21,407,152 desiatins passed to the peasantry, raising peasant holdings from 80% to 99.8% of all usable land.