RUSSIA: Yeltsin Vows To Veto Land Code

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, May 26 1996 (IPS) - President Boris Yeltsin and the Federation Council (parliamentary upper house) are both expected this week to veto a new Land Code which was adopted by the Duma (lower house) on May 22 by a vote of 288-18.

The Code, which allows Russian citizens to inherit and lease farmland but forbids the buying, selling, or mortgaging of such land, had become a major focus of political struggle between reformers and conservatives, in the run up to the presidential elections.

The land reform, launched in 1991, produced some 40 million owners. A total of 12 million rural dwellers now own land shares, and nearly 95 percent of land is now in private, share and joint ownership. The right to own land was sealed in the Constitution and the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The details were to be embodied in a Land Code.

However the Agrarian Party, which basically opposes privatisation of agricultural land, gained control of drafting the Code which has consequently been the subject of endless discussions in the Duma for over two years.

“I do not support the Land Code passed by the State Duma,” Yeltsin told veteran sailors at a meeting at Krasnaya pier in Archangel, reported the Russian ITAR/TASS news agency Friday.

“They again failed to include the selling and the buying of land. I want to use my power of veto. Let them put the law right.”

The legal land battle has heated up over the past two months since Yeltsin issued a decree on Mar. 7 “to protect Russian citizens’ constitutional rights to land until the adoption of the Russian Federation’s Land Code”.

While ensuring that agricultural land must continue to be used for agricultural purposes, the decree clarifies relations between land owners and land users and simplifies the situation with respects to selling or leasing this land.

The aim is to encourage people who have acquired agricultural land under the reforms but who are unable to work it, to sell or lease it to individuals or enterprises that will, explains Ivan Starikov, Deputy Minister of the Economy of the Russian Federation who helped to draft the decree.

“The trouble is that legal relations between the citizens who owned land and legal entities who used it were not clear. Often, land owners did not get any real payment for the use of their land. At the same time, land users feared that the land they were working could be removed from agricultural use at any moment.”

The decree says land owners must receive titles to their land. “Although the State Committee for Land Use says that some 80 percent of land plot certificates have been issued to the owners, actually most of them lie in the safes of heads of collective farms,” Starikov says.

Land users will have to sign contracts with land owners which will be held by the regional land use committees. The contracts will have a minimum duration of three years. Starikov says the decree was also intended to help the weak and the old.

“Many farm managers have no money to pay rent and tell the elderly owners that they can take their share and go but the pensioners don’t dare to do this so the managers continue to get free use.”

Under the decree, the state will either lease the plot of land that the owner is incapable of tilling and pay rent or buy it. Starikov believes this will make for more efficient agricultural production with the possibility of land being accumulated in the hands of the sole or collective owners and the founding large farms that use hired labour.

However putting agriculture on such a ‘free market’ basis did not please the Agrarian Party which dominates the Duma. They rapidly drafted a law ‘On the Specific Features of Implementing the Constitutional Right to Land’, which emasculated the provisions of the decree and incorporated the most conservative provision of the draft Land Code.

It postponed by two years the right to transfer land and says that landowners will have to repay half the price of any land they sell to the state. Both the bill and the draft Land Code limited right to own land to private subsidiary farms and plots under dachas and garages.

The right did not extend to agricultural lands. Farmers were given the life-long inheritable right to use or lease them, and those who left agricultural associations to become private farmers were given the right to own land but not sell it.

If farming stopped, the land would revert to the state.

Yeltsin predictably vetoed the bill warning that it contravened the Constitution, in particular Article 36 which codifies the right of citizens and their associations to have land in private property and also gives the owners the right to freely possess, use and manage lands unless they harm the environment or infringe on the rights and lawful interests of other persons.

There is no doubt that he will also veto the Land Code which is even more restrictive. In this case Yeltsin’s March decree allowing partial sale of land will continue to be in force and the Duma will have to return to its deliberations on the Land Code until an acceptable compromise is reached.