Table of contentsIntroductionBefore 19171917-1921ConclusionBibliographyIntroductionThe goal of land reform, in general, is to bring harmony between rural and urban populations. Agrarian reform is fundamental because of its economic gain for the country since more than half of the population is employed in agriculture. Agriculture is the main source of livelihood, especially for countries that are still developing. Tsarist Russia failed to maintain peaceful relations with its citizens due to the failure of its agrarian law. The Bolsheviks intended to avoid such mistakes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayChanging the agrarian law was very important not only for the Bolsheviks but also for the Georgian Mensheviks. For Russia, World War I and the revolution crippled the Russian economy and brought instability and chaos to the country. The new Russian state should mainly rely on land reform, because, as mentioned earlier, it leads to an economic uprising in the country, and this is precisely what it needed. Support from the working class and peasants was necessary for the crippled Bolshevik state to fight, leading the new government to pass a law stipulating that control of land would be passed to the lower class in the form of farms state collectives. The previous government failed to resolve the agrarian question and what the Bolsheviks offered to the lower class was acceptable to the majority of citizens, although the promises made were far from perfect. The lower class wanted the land divided into millions of small holdings while the Bolsheviks trusted collective farms operated by the lower class on behalf of the population. Lenin knew that if his revolutions were to last long, he had to do several things, such as: Win over the peasants by offering them land, which the previous government had failed to do. Although property was not exactly offered to peasants, the new agrarian law meant that those who worked the land after the 1917 Revolution had much more control over how the land was cultivated. Collective farms may not have been a utopia for peasants, but they lived better than they had under the previous government. Lenin knew that he had to offer the lower class something that would be unheard of in previous governments in order to gain the trust of the population and keep the new communist state in power. In Georgia, on the other hand, there was an ambitious, and above all practical, effort to separate the large estates and distribute land to the landless lower class. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Georgian Mensheviks did not simply promise their people ideal conditions for remaining in power, they actually planned to realize them. This was the goal of the Georgian social democrats from the beginning, as they learned from the experience of the western Georgian region of Guria, at the time of the 1905 revolution, where the tired working class, overthrew the tsarist government and changed the relationship between it and the government. Social Democratic Party. The Georgian Social Democrats were the voice of the working class. They saw it as their responsibility to improve the lives of the majority of their population (the working class), unlike the Bolsheviks who had little or no support in the countryside. The social democratsGeorgians also did not favor state ownership of farms. In their Marxist interpretation of Russia as an "Asian" society, they were convinced that state ownership of agricultural land provided the material basis not for socialism, but for despotism (absolute power). These two states had somewhat the same goal, and they were under the same ideology of socialism. The Russian Bolsheviks and Georgian Mensheviks wanted an economic uprising and were eager to do so with their agrarian (land) reforms. Due to the similarity of goals and difference in actions, it can be said that this topic is fascinating mainly because it shows the difference between socialist states, in this case Bolshevik Russia and Menshevik Georgia, as well as their plans and actions to improve their situation. country. To conduct such an investigation, a number of primary and secondary sources will be used, such as: “A Social Democratic Peasant Republic” by Karl Kautsky (primary source); Eric Lee's blogs (secondary source); “Between Red and White” by Leon Trotsky (Primary); and "Socialism in Colors" by Stephen Jones (secondary).Before 1917In order to compare and contrast the land reforms of these two states, one could say that it is necessary to take a look at the past and analyze what led to change. In Russia, there were the Stolypin agrarian changes. A series of legislative changes introduced by Petr Stolypin, the head of the Council of Ministers of the former Russian government, between 1906 and 1911, in order to rebuild the peasant land base. They were launched during the Revolution of 1905 in an attempt to manage the continuing agrarian question. Even before the Bolsheviks came to power, the peasant and agrarian problem was a dominant issue in Russia. In the early 1900s, more than half of the lower class could not survive on agriculture alone. An important reason for this was the extreme increase in population. The Russian population increased by about 50 percent between 1885 and 1913. The text in which the laws were amended was introduced as ukase "Concerning the application of certain existing laws on rural land ownership and l 'use of land' (November 22, 1906) and the law was passed by the State Duma on June 27, 1910. All workers had the privilege of leaving these organizations along the land distributed to them. The workers also learned that they had the option to request that their shares be consolidated into an incorporated landholding, which could be farmed as a khutir (if the family was settled on the property) or a vidrub (if the family remained in town). The final stretch denoted an extreme departure from routine in terms of cultivating small, dispersed segments of land. The Peasant Land Bank provided credit for the purchase of land in order to build a vidrub or khutir property. The last change was the land status. Organization of June 11, 1911, which established a clear plan for land settlement commissions (at the level of provinces and volost regions) developed by the ukase of 1906. In the Russian Empire, in 1907-1915, approximately 26 percent of the total obshchina shareholding (2.5 million households) exploited the changes to gain approximately 16.9 million desiatins of land (15 percent of total collective ownership). The new framework urged workers to be active and improve their family units. Assistance was provided by the Peasant Land Bank, agricultural associations, co-agents and zemstvo agronomists. Thanks to advances in horticultural methods (crop renewal),Crop yields also improved (by 20 percent in 1904–1912) and the value of farms increased. The aim of the changes made by Stolypin was to improve the situation of the richest workers and establish it. as an aid base to the hectic royal routine. As a result, the changes only benefited about 25 percent of families. The working poor and some wage earners in the centers could not buy land due to high costs (400-700 rubles for each desiatin in Right-Bank Ukraine) and did not receive credit from the Peasant Land Bank . Considerable numbers of these workers eventually emigrated to the Urals, Asian Russia, and the Far East, a practice also advocated by Stolypin to reduce the country's overpopulation. Eventually, the reforms resulted in much more noticeable social differentiation among the peasants, with the largest working family units becoming larger and the working families becoming the largest. The measured average amount of property ownership declined. The changes made by Stolypin were cruelly criticized in this sense by Vladimir Lenin as well as by the Russian and Ukrainian communist parties. Georgia was annexed by the Russian Empire since 1801, meaning the same rules were applied. 1917-1921 Shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power, in November 1917, the new government issued a new land law, which was one of more than 190 laws adopted during the Russian Empire. first six months of the existence of the Bolshevik government. The rushed laws also show how one-dimensional and chaotic the new government already was. This new land law stipulated that: there would be no private land ownership; nor could land be sold or mortgaged; All private property was to be held by the government without any price to be paid. These lands also included lands owned by the former upper class like the Romanovs (tsarist rulers), properties owned by nobles, as well as ecclesiastical lands and private estates. All of this land was to “be made available to the workers who worked there”. Government-controlled territory was ceded to the land cabinet and district soviets. They declared that the land could only be exploited by the people who physically worked on it. They were not allowed to hire other workers to work for them. To put things in general context, these policies led to many cases of famine in the country and were a failure. In Georgia, on the other hand, the most remarkable achievement was the land reform (1918-1919). Rather than follow in the footsteps of the new Bolshevik government which, as previously mentioned, caused a large-scale famine, they offered land to workers, hoping to build a prosperous working class. Apparently, the change was incredibly successful and Georgia never had any problems with its citizens, unlike the situation in Russia (and later, under forced collectivization). Moreover, unlike the Bolsheviks, Georgians believed in the value of independent workers' corporations. The guilds wanted and obtained the right to strike in the new national constitution. They also convinced the government to enter Parliament to create a tripartite "Wages Council", which was revolutionary at the time. They presented a welfare state that would not exist anywhere else in Europe for a long time. There were problems, of course. Then as now, Russia exploited ethnic minorities andtheir protests. The Georgians managed to maintain their authority over their regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, although not without paying the price. Although they were committed to full national assertiveness, they often catered to national minorities, thereby playing into the hands of the Russians. At that time, Russia was facing a civil war. However, the only thing the Reds (Bolsheviks) and Whites (Mensheviks) could agree on was that small nations like Georgia were not entitled to a free state. Georgia adopted a strategy of neutrality in the war and lack of bias in this war, setting out not only against the Bolsheviks, but also against the Mensheviks, this implied that Georgia was urgently looking for allies on the planet . Their diplomats were in important European countries, notably during the Paris harmony meeting. They achieved real victories, eventually winning recognition from Britain and others. They also sought recognition and support from what they saw as another major force: the international socialist movement. A group of socialist leaders, led by Karl Kautsky (often called "the Pope of Marxism") visited there in 1920 and were amazed by what the Georgians had accomplished. A British Labor Party leader present at the meeting said Georgians had become one of the perfect socialist states. Despite the apparent differences between the agrarian laws of these two states, it can be said that to some extent they also have similarities. . The main similarity is that both governments were planning to make changes to their agriculture due to the failures of previous leaders. The ideas were similar, but the implementation of their promises is what distinguished the two socialist states. Russian industry was largely destroyed by the wars of intervention, and large numbers of ordinary urban workers died in the Red Army. Given military needs, long-term communist development policy was not really considered at this stage. But the Soviet regime embarked on some land redistribution, attempting to dismantle Stolypin's reforms beyond what many would consider possible. Emerging from the shadow of the failure of the Stolypin land reforms, it is not surprising that the lower class continued to express hostility and suspicion. to the notion of private land ownership. In peasant accounts from the fall of 1917, this concern strikes a universal chord: in a resolution of a gathering of workers in Petrograd, the collective body also encouraged the Soviets to "immediately declare all lands public and hand them over in power to dispose of it.” Volost land committees. The idea that land should be shared was deeply rooted in collective custom, so it is not surprising that workers are now reacting against the hereditary occupation of land through owners and demanding entry into the public land framework – “Land is the common good and equal heritage of all people and therefore cannot be the subject of private ownership by individuals…ownership of land, as property, is the one of the most unnatural crimes. » These sources might be questionable because the Soviet Union was very strict about what had to be published in order to keep their ideology sacred and not give citizens alternative ideas. This would apply more to the first decade of the Soviet Union due to its new government and the fear of encountering a,