Features of the legal status of agricultural workers during the agrarian reform of the 1990s (based on the data of the Central Chernozem region)

Abstract

Background. The key process of agrarian reform in the 1990s was the reorganization of collective and state farms, which led to the granting of agricultural workers the rights of owners of land shares. The relevance of the study of changes in their legal status is due to the need to study the social aspects of the formation of land ownership in Russia in the 1990s – 2000s. The purpose of the study is to study the features of the legal status of agricultural workers of the Central Chernozem economic district by analyzing the demand for different rights of owners of land shares. Materials and methods. Reports of the committees of land resources of the Central Chernozem regions from the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation are used as sources of research. A special place among the sources is occupied by normative legal acts, as well as materials of interviews and sociological surveys of rural residents. The methodological basis of the study was historicalgenetic and systemic methods, which allowed to consider the process of changing the legal status of agricultural workers during the agrarian reform of the 1990s. Results. The reasons why in the first half of the 1990s the development of property relations in rural areas was held with great difficulties are formulated. On the basis of normative-legal acts the order of formation of the rights of owners of land shares is considered. The process of registration and issuance of documents on the right of ownership to employees of agricultural enterprises was studied. The level of demand for different rights of owners of land shares is analyzed, which allowed to identify the features of the legal status of employees of agricultural enterprises of the Central Chernozem economic region. It was found that from the broad list of rights of owners of land shares granted by the state, the most common among employees of agricultural enterprises was the leasing of land shares and its use for the formation of a farm. Other rights were practically not claimed. Conclusions. The legal status of qualified and unskilled employees of agricultural enterprises in the years of agrarian reform can be designated as the status of pseudo-owners. Formally possessing the right of ownership of land, in fact, they did not have the possibility of its full implementation (some soon lost it altogether).

Keywords

• agrarian reform
• central chernozem region
• agricultural workers
• ownership
• land share
• property share