INTRODUCTION

There were two major property rights reforms in late imperial Russia, the emancipation of the serfs from personal bondage (1861–1863), and the Stolypin reforms, introduced by edict on November 9, 1906, and completed by legislative acts (1906–1910). Critically important for the evolution of secure property rights in Russia, the first reform replaced usufruct with peasant ownership of allotment land, thus severing landlords' sovereignty over the village and strengthening its governance unit, the Land Commune. Showing its conservative design, it made the nobles' implementation of land redemption voluntary. It also placed restrictions on peasant movement by empowering the Land Commune to approve resettlement, frustrating observers who had hoped for more rapid change. Forty-five years later, the Stolypin reforms finally allowed individual households to claim ownership and titles to allocated strips of land (nadel), to gather these strips into independent farms, and to dispense with the authority of the commune. These measures proved an effective model of land reform, taking agricultural development much further by the outbreak of World War I.

The social upheaval that resulted from Russia's entry into World War I increased social control over agricultural change. The spontaneous seizure of nobles' lands by the peasants in the summer of 1917 showed how fragile were the market institutions emerging from the grant of property rights in land. Agricultural development achieved before World War I, however, proved sustainable, giving both reforms profound economic significance.