Собственность на землю в России: История и современность ред. по Д. Ф. Аяцкова (review)

407 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 науки начала XIX в., как Нико- лай Тургенев, считал разумным и оправданным вставку текстов западных экономистов в свой “Опыт теории налогов” без каких бы то ни было оговорок (S. 128). Обратный пример (включение Екатериной II в свой наказ 1767 г. отрывков из работы Семена Десницкого, представлявшей со- бой переработку лекций Адама Смита) указывает, напротив, на релевантность традиционной бюрократической модели отказа от авторства в пользу вышесто- ящего, “интегрального” автора для экономического дискурса в России XVIII-XIX вв. (S. 53). Новаторство и тщательность предпринятой Йоахимом Цвай- нертом работы открывает путь к следующей странице истории экономического дискурса в Рос- сии – изучению его влияния на экономическую и социальную практику общества в целом. Склонность русского читателя (зрителя, слушателя) к некрити- ческому (в частности – импера- тивному) восприятию текстов, исходящих от носителей харизма- тического авторитета, объясняет и живучесть курьезной ошибки в переводе “Капитала” (используе- мый К. Марксом термин Mehrwert был переведен на русский как “прибавочная стоимость”) (S. 343), и, с другой стороны, мно- жественность экспериментов по конкретно-экономической реа- лизации литературных утопий (вроде фурьеристских коммун Николая Спешнева). Любая ис- следовательская деятельность в этом направлении потребует обращения к книге Йоахима Цвайнерта, изданной в Марбурге издательством “Метрополис”. Elizabeth WHITE Собственность на землю в России: История и современность / Под общ. ред. Д. Ф. Аяцкова. Москва: РОССПЭН, 2002. 592 с. ISBN: 5-8243-0363-0. This collection of articles on land ownership begins appropriately with Piotr Stolypin’s statement that “land is the guarantee of our strength in the future; the land is Russia.” Appropriately, not just because the contributors would concur in his assessment of the cardinal importance of land in Russia, nor because his name is associated with the agrarian reform begun in 1906, but also be- 408 Рецензии/Reviews cause Stolypin had been Governor of Saratov, where the idea for this book was generated. Indeed, the collection has a contemporary political colouring , introduced as it is by Saratov’s current governor, Dmitrii Ayatskov. Ayatskov was the executor of the “Saratov Experiment” in the mid 1990s, which legalized for the first time in Russian history a free market in agricultural land. About a third of the book is devoted to post-Soviet agrarian reform. However, this coloring adds to rather than detracts from the whole, showing how the conflict over models of land ownership continues to this day. As one of the contributors points out, interest in the history of land ownership was actually rekindled by proposals for land reform under Yeltsin. A systematization and elucidation of the deep historical reasons for the existence of a specifically Russian concept of property ownership, especially in the agrarian sphere, became of great significance as battles over proposed legislation raged fiercely in the 1990s. Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii traces the development of various conceptualizations of land ownership and models for resolution of the “land problem” developed by Russian elites, nobles, bureaucrats, politicians and political thinkers, revolutionaries, agrarian experts, and the educated public. It is conceptualizations and projects that they are most concerned with, although some do draw on archival material to illustrate the situation from below, or give good statistical overviews of the state of agriculture at various times. In her article “Property in Feudal Russia,” N. A. Gorskaia outlines the specificities of land ownership in Russia, which then reverberate throughout the book. She concludes that there was no concept of land ownership in medieval Russia, in the modern sense of the word. Ownership of land by the state, the votchinniki , and the nobility was connected to control over the peasants, “power over the direct producer, ownership of a human being.” Another feature was the wide scale of state ownership , which reached its apogee in the twentieth-century nationalization, and which was aided by the monarchy ’s early evolution into autocracy and absolutism. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the state’s priority was to guarantee its own prerogatives to land. Another basic feature was the peasant commune. The idea that the “land belongs to God,” that is, to society as a whole, was fundamental to the psychology of the Russian peasant. Communal land use prevented the development of a concept of private property not just among peasants but also the nobility. Even in the nineteenth century, noble status was judged not by the amount of land held but the number 409 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 of serfs owned. M. D. Dolbilov’s contribution “Land Ownership and the Emancipation of the Peasants” picks up on the lack of clarity of landownership among the nobility. He claims the nobility saw “ownership ” of land as conditional and involving a duty of care to the peasants . This awareness that they were organizers of peasant labor deprived them of a fixed concept of private property. During land registration many nobles were found to have a very unclear idea of what exactly their properties consisted of, and Dolbilov conjectures that if one were to conceptualize a topographical map of Russia with the noble estates projected on it, the result would be not so much a network of clear boundary lines as areas of cloudy patches and overlapping contours. This “openness ” of the concept of property allowed for rich and complex discussions in government and society. He challenges the notion that the nobles’ response to the proposed emancipation was the defense of their rights to property ownership. Only a small circle of aristocrats held to the...