Constitutional Implications of Changes in Property Rights in the USSR
![handle is hein.journals/cintl23 and id is 377 raw text is: Peter B. Maggs*
Constitutional Implications of Changes
in Property Rights in the USSR
Introduction
The major Soviet property rights issue at the start of the 1990s was the
fate of centralized ownership of state property. Since the 1930s, the
Constitutions and laws have established and recognized the central gov-
ernment as the oN~ner of all land, almost all productive resources, and a
large portion of urban housing. Republic and local governments owned
no property; state enterprises owned no property; collective farms
owned no land; private businesses owned only a tiny fraction of produc-
tive assets; and most apartment dwellers did not own their apartments.
Within and outside the Soviet Union, critics blamed this overcentraliza-
tion of property ownership for the political and economic shortcomings
of the Soviet system. There was a consensus that much state property
should devolve to the non-state sector and that much of what remained
should devolve to the republic and local levels. The possibility that
some republics will secede from the Soviet Union has fueled the discus-
sion of change and raised important legal questions about the fate of
USSR property located in these republics.
The 1977 Soviet Constitution,' like the 1936 Constitution, envi-
sions a highly centralized system of state property ownership. This own-
ership is centralized in two respects. First, the state owns all the land
and the most important means of production. Second, state ownership
is ownership by the USSR as a whole, not by republic or local bodies.
Article 11 of the 1977 Constitution provides:
State ownership is the common wealth of the whole Soviet people,
the basic form of socialist ownership.
The following are owned exclusively by the state: land, its minerals,
bodies of water, forests. The basic means of production in industry, con-
struction, and agriculture, means of transportation and communications,
banks, property of trade, municipal, and other enterprises organized by
* Corman Professor of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A.B.,
J.D., Harvard.
1. See KONST. SSSR [Constitution of the USSR] art. 6, reprinted in BUTLER, COL-
LECTED LEGISLATION OF THE USSR AND CONSTITUENT UNION REPUBLICS I-1 7 (Vol. I,
1983).
23 CORNELL INT'L L.J. 363 (1990)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/cintl23&div=24&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Constitutional Implications of Changes in Property Rights in the USSR
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