LAND LEASE DEVELOPMENT IN THE AGRICULTURAL SECTOR OF THE EUROPEAN NORTH OF RUSSIA IN THE 1920s

Abstract

Background. The relevance of the study of various aspects of the development of land lease in the Russian village in the 1920s is determined by the need to obtain new knowledge about the nature of the new economic policy, as well as to study, in a wider context, the potential possibilities of parcel peasant farming in rental and economic spheres after an equal distribution of the main means of production – the land. The purpose of the study is to analyze the main factors in the development of rental relations in the village of the non-chernozem zone of Russia and to elucidate the potential for commercializing the agricultural sector under Soviet conditions during the period of the new economic policy. Materials and methods. The validity of the research results is provided by introducing new historical sources into scientific circulation, presented by reporting and analytical documentation on the provinces of the European North of Russia in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the State Archive of Arkhangelsk region and the National Archive of the Republic of Karelia. The analysis is based on the materials of the budget statistics of the peasant economy. This type of source contains the most complete information about peasants’ farms and their families and gives an opportunity to study the content of the social, demographic and production aspects of their life. Budgetary information can reveal the evolution of the yield of the peasant household on the basis of the detailed information containing in them about all branches of the economic activity of peasants and interrelations of the basic elements of the economy. When necessary, the author supplemented his analysis with mass statistical material. The methodological dominant of the study was the epistemological provisions of the Russian agrarian science of the late 19th–20th centuries, in particular, the theories of the family organization of peasant farming, which were formulated within the organizational and production vector of research. The author adheres to the foundations of the system approach and the principles of historicism, which presuppose a systematic structural analysis of the life of the peasant household as an integral formation with inherent internal connections and their interaction in the context of the general historical changes of 1917 and the first half of the 1920s. The research is based on the problem-chronological method of studying historical reality, which allows us to compare the state of constant quantities and modification changes in the organization and functioning of the family-labor co-operative of the peasant household, the processes and phenomena occurring in it at the beginning and end of the period under study. Results. The main directions of legislation in the field of agricultural production and land lease transactions are studied, general trends in the development of land lease and the features of its manifestation in non-agricultural provinces of Russia in the 1920s are revealed. An attempt was made to typologize rental relations regarding the socio-economic and territorial clusters of agricultural production of the northern village. The main factors of lease relations (rent and lease of land) are justified, “social portraits” of a landlord and a tenant of the land are revealed. Conclusions. Based on the analysis of documentary and historiographic sources, it was concluded that throughout the 1920s there had been no conditions for largescale commercialization of peasant farming in the European North. The relations of land lease and rent retained their foundation of a pre-capitalist, consumer nature. The underdevelopment of leasing was explained by the leveling redistribution of land, which provided an opportunity for most peasants to cultivate their own small land plots themselves, and at the same time a relatively slow restoration of industry and conditions for peasant withdrawal, which forced peasants to engage exclusively in agriculture.

Keywords

• types of peasant production
• lease relations
• economic zones
• nature of land lease
• forms of lease