Concept of «Land Management» in the evaluation of contemporaries (1906–1917)

Abstract

In the Soviet historiography of the Stolypin reform, its key concept of “land management”, introduced by Kofod, was not used. Land management is such a territorial organization of agricultural production that ensures maximum economic efficiency of production and social and cultural well-being of workers. Methodological content of land management should be considered in four areas: technical and economic, agroeconomic, economic and socio-economic ones. The analysis of the works of contemporaries and supporters of the reform shows the difference in the approaches of researchers to land management. In Sinelnikov's work on land management in the US and Canada, it was shown that the government refused to solve agroeconomic problems. In Savich's work on land management in the Urals, technical and socioeconomic problems, i.e. shortcomings in the activities of local government agencies, leading to a mixed interspace and numerous appeals of the local population to the courts, were identified. Bruckus's work reflects only the agroeconomic approach to land management, excluding technical and economic (road construction and land reclamation), economic (allocation of loans and irrevocable benefits) and socio-economic (development of agricultural knowledge, recovery of well-being) ones. Mozzhukhin analyzes all directions, but restricts the concept of land management only to technical ones, and the remaining directions serve as a general improvement in land use conditions. Most reform supporters did not realize the integrity of the land management system and the need for its development in all directions. Among contemporaries, the land surveying engineers Denzin and Herman were those who wrote about land management most accurately and adequately. Denzin, developing technical and agroeconomic directions of land management, emphasized the importance of new sources for land management: field logs, land management projects, and land plans reflecting the efficiency of agricultural land allocation. Herman expanded the range of tasks of land management and proved that, in Russia, land management went in all four directions, especially in the economic one connected with the investments in the development of individual peasant farming. The complexity and diversity of land management activities, the ambiguity of the very notion of “land management” consisted of engineering and technical specifics, as well as of legal, agronomic, economic and socio-cultural specifics, led to its disappearance from Russian historiography.doi 10.17072/2219-3111-2018-2-109-118