IndexIntroductionBefore 19171917-1921ConclusionBibliographyIntroductionThe goal of land reform, in general, is to bring harmony between the rural and urban population. Land reform is critical to the country's economic advantage, as more than half of the population is employed in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is the main source of life, especially for countries that are still developing. Tsarist Russia failed to maintain peaceful relations with its citizens due to their failed agrarian law. The Bolsheviks intended to avoid such mistakes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Making a change in 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 rely mainly on land reform, because, as mentioned before, it brings economic uprising to the country, and that is exactly what it needed. The support of the working class and peasants was necessary if the crippled Bolshevik state was to struggle, leading the new government to enact the law that control of land would be transferred to the lower class in the form of state collective farms. The previous government failed to address the agrarian question, and what the Bolsheviks offered to the lower classes was acceptable to the majority of citizens, even if the promises made were far from perfect. The lower class wanted the land divided into millions of small estates, while the Bolsheviks relied on collective farms worked by the lower class on behalf of the population. Lenin knew that if his Revolution wanted to last a long time, he needed to establish several things, such as: Win over the peasants by offering them the land that the previous government had failed to do. Although property was not exactly given to peasants, the new agrarian law meant that those who worked the land after the 1917 Revolution had much greater control over how that land was cultivated. Perhaps collective farms were not a utopia for the peasants, but they lived better than they did under the previous government. Lenin knew he had to offer the lower classes something that had never been seen in previous governments, to gain the trust of the population and keep the new communist state in power. In Georgia, however, an ambitious, and above all practical, program system was used to separate large estates and distribute land to the landless lower class. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Georgian Mensheviks did not simply promise their people ideal circumstances just to stay in power, but actually planned to keep them. This has always been the goal of Georgian Social Democrats because they learned from the experience of the western Georgian region of Guria at the time of the 1905 revolution, where the fed-up working class overthrew the tsarist government and changed the relationship between them 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 the population (the working class), unlike the Bolsheviks who had little or no support in the countryside. Georgian Social Democrats also did not support state ownership of farms. In their Marxist interpretation of Russia as an “Asian” society, they were convinced that state ownership ofagricultural land provided the material basis not for socialism, but for despotism (absolute power). These two states had, more or less, the same goal, and were under the same ideology of socialism. Both the Russian Bolsheviks and the Georgian Mensheviks wanted an economic uprising and were eager to bring it about with their agrarian (land) reforms. Because of the similarity in goals and the difference in action 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, and their plans and actions towards the improvement of their countries. To conduct this investigation, a series of primary and secondary sources will be used, such as: “A Social Democratic Peasant Republic” by Karl Kautsky (primary source); Eric Lee's blog (secondary source); “Between Red and White” by Leon Trotsky (Primary); and “Socialism in Colors” by Stephen Jones (Secondary). Before 1917 To compare and contrast the land reforms of these two states, one might say that it is necessary to take a look at the past and analyze what led to the change. In Russia there were Stolypin's agrarian changes. A series of legislative changes presented by Petr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the former Russian government, between 1906 and 1911 to rebuild the basis of peasant land ownership. They were started during the 1905 Revolution as a push to manage the ongoing agrarian question. Even before the Bolsheviks came to power, the peasant and agrarian problem was a dominant issue in Russia. In the early 1900s over half of the lower classes could not survive on agriculture alone. A significant reason for this was the huge increase in population. The Russian population grew by about 50% between 1885 and 1913. The legislative act in which the laws were changed was introduced as ukase "Concerning the fulfillment of certain existing laws on rural ownership and use of land" ( November 22, 1906) and the The law was passed by the State Duma on June 27, 1910. All workers were granted the privilege of leaving such organizations next to the lands assigned to them. Workers similarly learned that they had the option of requesting that their portions be combined into an incorporated landholding, which could be cultivated as a khutir (if the family settled on the property) or vidrub (if the family remained in a town ). The last right denoted an extreme escape from the routine of cultivating small and dissipated plots of land. The Peasants' Land Bank granted credit for the purchase of land to build vidrub or khutir properties. The last change was the Land Statute. Organization of June 11, 1911, which established a clear plan for land settlement commissions (at the governorate and volost area level) established by the ukase of 1906. In the Russian Empire in 1907-15 about 26% of the entire obshchina participants (2.5 million heads of families) took advantage of the changes to obtain approximately 16.9 million desiatins of land (15% of total collective ownership). The new framework urged workers to demonstrate activity and improve their households. Help was given by the Peasant Land Bank, agricultural associations, co-agents and Zemstvo agronomists. As a result of advances in horticultural methods (crop rotation) crop yields also improved (by 20% in 1904-12) and the value of farms increased. The aim of Stolypin's changes was to improve the situation of the wealthier workers and establish it as a basis of help for the agitated royal routine. As a result, only about 25% of families benefited from the changes. The poor and someCentral wage workers could not buy land due to high costs (400 to 700 rubles for each desiatina in Right-Bank Ukraine) and did not receive credit from the Peasant Land Bank. A considerable number of these workers eventually emigrated to the Urals, Asian Russia, and the Far East, a practice also urged by Stolypin to reduce the country's overpopulation. Ultimately the reforms gave rise to much more notable social differentiation among the peasantry, with the greater importance of working-class family units being more significant and the reduction in the amount of average measured property. Stolypin's changes were cruelly criticized in this regard by Vladimir Lenin as well as by the Russian and Ukrainian communist parties. Georgia was annexed to the Russian Empire from 1801, meaning the same rules applied. 1917-1921 Soon 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 passed in the first six months of the Bolshevik government's existence. The rushed laws also show how one-dimensional and chaotic the new government already was. This new land law stated that: there would be no private ownership of land; furthermore the land could not be sold or mortgaged; All private property was to be held by the government with no price to pay. These lands also included lands held by the former upper classes such as the Romanovs (tsarist leaders), properties owned by nobles, as well as church lands and private estates. All this land was to “be made available to the workers who work it.” Government-controlled territory was handed over to the land cabinet and district soviets. They stated that the land can only be worked by the people who physically work on that land. They could not hire other workers to work for them. To put it in a general context, these policies led to many cases of hunger in the country and were a failure. In Georgia, on the other hand, the most notable achievement was land reform (1918-1919). Instead of following in the footsteps of the new Bolshevik government, which, as mentioned before, led to large-scale starvation, they offered the land to the workers, expecting to create a prosperous working class. Apparently, the change was a tremendous success, and Georgia never had any problems with its own citizens, unlike the situation in Russia (and later, under captive collectivization). Furthermore, unlike the Bolsheviks, the Georgians believed in the value of independent workers' guilds. Corporations wanted and received the right to strike in the nation's new constitution. They also persuaded the government to involve parliament to create a tripartite "Wage Council", which was revolutionary at the time. They were displaying a social welfare state that would not appear anywhere else in Europe for a long time. Of course there were problems. Then, as now, Russia exploited ethnic minorities and their protests. The Georgians managed to maintain their authority over areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but not without paying a price. Even though they were determined to ensure full national security, they often took care of national minorities, playing into the hands of the Russians. At that time, Russia was going through a civil war. However, the only thing the Reds (Bolsheviks) and Whites (Mensheviks) could agree on was that small nations like Georgia had no right to a free state. Georgia adopted a strategy of neutrality during the war without prejudice, ruling not only against the Bolsheviks, but also against the Mensheviks, this meant that Georgia wasurgently looking for allies in the world. Their diplomats could be found in the main countries of Europe, in particular at the Paris Harmony meeting. They achieved some real victories, eventually gaining recognition from Britain and other countries. They also sought recognition and support for what they saw as another major force: the international socialist movement. A group of socialist leaders, led by Karl Kautsky (who was often called "the pope of Marxism") visited the country in 1920 and were amazed by what the Georgians had accomplished. A leader of the British Labor Party present at the meeting said that the Georgians had created one of the perfect socialist states. Despite the apparent differences between the agrarian law of these two states, it can be said that to some extent they also have similarities. . The main similarity is that both governments planned to make changes to their agriculture due to the failures of previous leaderships. The ideas were similar, but the implementation of their promises is what distinguishes the two socialist states. Russian industry was largely destroyed by the wars of intervention, and most urban workers died in the Red Army. Given military needs, long-term communist development policy was not so much in the plans at this stage. But the Soviet regime embarked on some land redistribution, attempting to dismantle Stolypin's reforms beyond what many would consider possible. Coming out of the shadow of Stolypin's failed 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 reports from the autumn of 1917, this concern strikes a universal chord: in a resolution of a workers' assembly in Petrograd, the collective body also encouraged the Soviets to “immediately declare all public lands and hand them over for disposal by part of volost land committees”. The idea that land should be shared was deeply rooted in collective custom, so it is not surprising that workers now reacted against hereditary occupation of land through landlords and called for an arrival at the framework of public land: "Land is property common and equal inheritance of all people and therefore cannot be the subject of private ownership by individuals... ownership of land, as property, is one of the most unnatural crimes "These sources may be questionable because the. Soviet Union was very strict about what had to be published 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 fear of having opposition. “The law approved on March 7, 1918 prescribed that poor farmers who needed land could only rent portions of land reserves to the State. But a new law, passed on January 28, 1919, specified that they could purchase state land at a moderate price. This step could be seen as another difference in the views of Bolshevik Russia and Menshevik Georgia regarding the land question. With this new law, Georgia finally broke out of the socialist borders and did what was necessary for the country, unlike Russia, which strictly stuck to the ideas of socialism, no matter how necessary a change was and how urgent it was . The Georgian Social Democrats and the Russian Bolsheviks had different strategies regarding the agrarian question. When there was war communism in Russia, the Bolsheviks treated workers both as suppliers of essential products, but also as enemies.