landed property

After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.

The article considers the agrarian transformations (primarily privatization and structural adaptation to the domestic and international markets) in the former GDR that are often presented as a success story due to the growth in agricultural productivity and competitiveness of new types of agricultural en-terprises. First, the author identifies the main tasks of these transformations: (1) privatization of the “socialist property” and its distribution between (a) those who contributed capital and land to the agricultural enter-prise when it was established, and (b) its employees at the moment of restructuring; (2) adaptation to new market conditions. Both tasks were extremely difficult and challenging for they required large investments in better breeds and machinery, and a significant reduction of agricultural workforce. Second, the author considers the legislative basis for privatization and the real practices of the reorganization of the former agricultural enterprises (proposals for the distribution of the assets, land restitution as prior to compen-sation, the successor large-scale enterprises forced land leasing contracts, manipulations with the balance sheets to obtain hidden reserves necessary for survival by underestimation of the existing assets, etc.). The author believes that the Kohl government did not foresee that privatization would be so complicated, and made many mistakes while striving to keep agricultural production in the new countries, especially to restrain the growth of unemployment. Therefore, the contemporary research of the agricultural economy is very critical of the regulations and frameworks set by the German government that is blamed for being responsible for many serious development constraints (short-term leasing contracts, paying off old debts, the lack of state subsidies for large enterprises, etc.). The final section of the article reveals the meaning of the land property in the agrarian transformations in the GDR. The author relies on the statistical data for more than two decades, monitoring data on the still ongoing transition and his own studies of agri-cultural enterprises in different regions (1992, 1997, 2002 and 2016).