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19 Rev. Cent. & E. Eur. L. 1 (1993)
The Contrast between Modernization and Tradition: Land Ownership during the Last Decades of the Tsarist Empire

handle is hein.journals/rsl19 and id is 15 raw text is: 19 Review of Central and East European Law 1993 No. 1, 1-29 Q 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in The Netherlands 1 THE CONTRAST BETWEENMODERNIZATION AND TRADI- TION: LAND OWNERSHIP DURING THE LAST DECADES OF THE TSARIST EMPIRE ADRIANO SILVESTRI J.D. University of Trento, Faculty of Law 1. Introduction: The Relevance of Russian Pre-revolutionary Law for Contemporary Reforms Starting from the middle of the past century, the relationship between man and land has been one of the most controversial fields of both Russian and Soviet law. In retrospect, it can be noted that the models of reforms concerning land ownership constantly vacillated between the two extreme concepts of communal property and private ownership, according to the political intentions of those who wielded power. It seems as though Russia has regularly tried to rid itself of its traditional legal concepts based on a sense of community but has never fully succeeded. The reforms carried out by Mikhail Gorbachev mirrored the situation of the last decades of the Russian Empire, when Stolypin and his colleagues tried to replace traditional communal models of landholding and attempted to spread the idea of the individual ownership of arable land. The requests for freedom and for the reallocation of land expressed throughout the former Soviet Union over the last few years have many things in common with the narodniki movement of the end of the nineteenth century and particularly with the programs of the revolution- ary party Zemlia i Volia. The slogan the land to the peasants (zemlia krest'ianam) is as popular today as it was during the second half of the last century. Today, as well as ninety years ago, the abstract and political impor- tance of the reforms outweighs their relevance for concrete needs. The all-union legislation on land adopted on 28 February 1990, and that on ownership, passed one week later on 6 March 1990, appealed more to legal scholars and sovietologists than to Russian peasants. The reason for

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