STATE REGULATION OF RELATIONS IN THE NORTHERN RE-GION OF “WHITE” RUSSIA DURING THE CIVIL WAR

Abstract

The article examines the problem of state regulation of land management and land use issues by the white government of the European North during the Civil War. The author analyzes the state of land relations in this region and states that due to geographical, climatic, social and military-political conditions, similar relations in the provinces of central and southern Russia differed significantly. The article reveals the position that the main contradictions in the use of land were not in the legal regulation of landowner–peasant relations, but in the legal unsettlement of the boundaries of forest clearing and land plots of peasant community members, farmers, tenants, territories of neighboring peasant societies, monasteries and churches. In conditions when the idea of inviolability of communal land use prevailed in the legal consciousness of peasants, the normative legal acts of the Provisional Government of the Northern Territory, which largely reflected the main provisions of the land program of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries on the legislative abolition of private ownership of land and free use of it, were generally positively received by peasants. At the same time, their temporary nature and the requirement of the Omsk Council of Ministers to unify land laws in matters of restoring ownership of land on a national scale aroused wariness and distrust in their own power among residents of northern villages. Because of this, peasants were leaning towards the Soviet government and its Decree on land.