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Léon Duguit and the Social Obligation Norm of Property pp 143–167Cite as

The Social Function of Property: Russia

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Abstract

Property ownership in Russia always has been looked upon as the key to power. This political implication of property ownership , with its specific fusion of public power and property ownership remains until today a basic feature of Russia’s patrimonial regime. This paper focuses on two moments in Russian history illustrating that Russia hesitated/refused to deviate from a unitary, absolute concept of property ownership, and to qualify property ownership as a social function, beneficial for society. The first moment concerns the question why the Russian Bolsheviks after the October revolution of 1917 did not rely on the communal property of the mir or obshchina (the common property of the peasant community) to build their Soviet Marxist-Leninist social and property structures. The second moment comes with post-communist privatization in the nineties of the previous century. The new class of private owners, the oligarchs, became leading figures in the boards of huge holdings and corporate identities as Gazprom and Lukoil, as a consequence of different forms of insider trading. From the Putin period on (2000), the oligarchs became totally dependent from the president in a political move towards re-assertion of state authority and re-constitution of the patrimonial state with a blurred distinction between the public and the private.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Property ownership” refers to a bundle of property rights that a legal subject (individual or juridical person) is entitled to exercise over a tangible or intangible asset. The notion of “property rights” refers to the rights to use, alter and sell property and to the right to an income generated by that property. Specific property rights determine the structure of relationships among organizations and individuals in a system.

  2. 2.

    “In fact, the doctrine of socialist law also did not recognize a division of law into public and private, because the socialist doctrine did not allow for anything private in private law, especially when it came to property” (Pakalniskis 2004, 57).

  3. 3.

    Evgeny Pashukanis for example discusses the works of Duguit in: Pashukanis 1925–1926, 1064–1068. See also: Beirne and Sharlet 1980, 166–168.

  4. 4.

    Decree “On Land” of November 8 1917, definitely declared on February 19, 1918, RSFSR Laws od 1917–1918, texts 3 and 346.

  5. 5.

    Decree “On the Abolishment of Inheritance” of April 27, 1918, Ibid. text 456.

  6. 6.

    Decree of February 19, 1918, RSFSR Laws 1917–18, tekst 346, sections 12, 13.

  7. 7.

    Obshchina and mir were traditionally translated by historians as “redistributing agrarian community”. This changed after the publication of a provocative essay by S. A. Grant (1976, 636–651), who, as before him the Russian historian Kliuchevski, argued that obshchina was a neologism, introduced by A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevski. Contrary to the threefold connotation of “mir” (rural community, peace, world), obshchina was more unambiguous: it meant “rural community”. The peasants, on the contrary, used the old and for them more significant term of mir, when they referred to the peasant community and the sharing of the land use (Atkinson 1983, 5).

  8. 8.

    Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the 15 Union Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

  9. 9.

    The original edition—La cite antique—is written in French and dates from 1864.

  10. 10.

    “Osnovy zakonodatel’stva SSSR I soiuznykh respublik ob arende” (“Principles of legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics on Lease”, Vedomosti SSSR 1989, No. 25, 481; Decree of the Council of Ministers and Model Statute: Sobranie Postanovlenii SSSR 1989, No. 19–20, p. 63.

  11. 11.

    New legislation, in most cases copied from western examples, has been enacted in this field. But they do not rely on a coherent sustainability policy. Specific interpretation problems will arise when these laws are implemented in a post-communist society; Law of the RSFSR “On Competition and Restriction of Monopolitistic Activity on Commodity Markets”, Ekonomika I zhizn’ 1991, No. 19, 24; Law of the RSFSR “On Environmental Protection”, 19 December 1991, Vedomosti RSFSR 1992, No. 10, item 457.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, Leuven Institute for International and European Studies (LINES), KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000, Louvain, Belgium

    Katlijn Malfliet

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  1. Katlijn Malfliet
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Correspondence to Katlijn Malfliet .

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  1. Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Paul Babie

  2. Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Jessica Viven-Wilksch

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Malfliet, K. (2019). The Social Function of Property: Russia. In: Babie, P., Viven-Wilksch, J. (eds) Léon Duguit and the Social Obligation Norm of Property. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7189-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7189-9_7

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