Of course now that the good guys are in power in Russia the western press duly ignores any criticism that Solzhenitsyn might make.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
September 10, 2001
09:32 [Friday 23rd February, 2001]
Solzhenitsyn slams land reform
MOSCOW - Nobel-prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn slammed a proposal to sell Russian farmland by auction Wednesday, but President Vladimir Putin pledged farmers would not be driven off the land.
The author of "The Gulag Archipelago" warned that allowing the unfettered sale and purchase of farmland could deprive Russians of the right to move around as they please and create an army of landless farmhands.
"We would lose our Russia," Solzhenitsyn told the Interfax news agency as Russia's newly created advisory State Council held a day-long debate on land reform, a subject that has long divided Russia's political leaders.
"Land should be owned by the farmer, not a plunderer or a landlord," he said.
Closing the State Council session Putin acknowledged fears that farmworkers could be driven off the land as a result of privatisation but promised: "This will never happen."
One way of preventing such an outcome would be "to recognise the right of the present land-users to own the land," ITAR-TASS quoted Putin as saying.
He said an updated draft land code would be presented to the State Duma (lower house of parliament) by May 1, with a framework law on agricultural land ready for parliamentary debate a month later.
Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev told the meeting that the land code would include restrictions or bans on several categories of land.
The government draft listed valuable land, forests and sites of cultural heritage that would come under state protection, Gordeyev said, as quoted by ITAR-TASS.
Leonid Roketsky, the Tyumen regional governor and a leading State Council member, predicted that a land code would be passed "this year."
The Russian authorities have been inching their way towards a reform of land ownership rights, although since the principle of land privatisation was approved in the 1994 civil code they have handled the issue of the sale of farmland with extreme caution.
Their concern with increasing efficiency in the agricultural sector, much of it still collectively operated, has been offset by awareness of public sensitivity to the symbolic aspects of land ownership.
"The land problem ... has always gone beyond the economic sphere and had tremendous public and political importance," Putin noted Wednesday.
Last month Putin called for comprehensive land rights that would permit the private ownership and sale of land, while the main independent farmworkers union said it wanted "limited" land sale rights that would provide protection against speculators.
The Duma last month approved private land ownership for the first time, but excluded agricultural land, the sale of which is strongly opposed by the Communist Party and its allies.
Solzhenitsyn meanwhile called for the creation of regional land banks that would hold the available farmland and offer farmers low-interest loans to enable them to buy it.
The banks would be independent of the government, and would give the land free to descendants of "kulaks" (supposedly wealthy farmworkers during the Communist era) who could provide witnesses to prove they had been stripped of their land in Soviet times, he said.
He warned that a system of land auctions, as currently envisaged, would result in land going "to the greedy hands of robbers who have stolen billions from Russia, not to the farmers."
The so-called "new Russians" regard land as "a profitable investment, enabling them to keep their billion," and most rural residents would have no choice but to become farmhands, he said.
If the auction system is introduced, he warned, the land would "be covered by bald patches" with warning signs signalling private property "where you and I will not be able to walk around." Detailed coverage
/AK&M/