Patterns of land ownership in Ukraine and eastern-Europe

It turns out that my readers have a dizzying array of skills, experiences and knowledge. I reached out to one of my readers who I suspected had first-hand knowledge of eastern Europe and asked him if he could explain how all of these Ukrainian vloggers have enough property to "homestead".

His response: 

"I was over there in the 1980's, well before the socialist states collapsed.  From the Khrushchev era on, laws allowed most citizens throughout the East Bloc to have (control, not ownership) small 1 acre to 3 acre individual parcels outside of cities to grow food on.  This was allowed to alleviate food shortages, which were terrible.  Mostly due to sorry logistics throughout the Bloc, which allowed most food to rot before it made it to market.  They grew enough food, but they could not deliver it to consumers (prior to reforms).  Their grocery stores were obscene.  Cigarettes were their only quality product! 

The laws eventually allowed building garden sheds on these smallholdings, which quickly transformed into marvelous vacation cottages.  Like everything East Bloc, they looked ramshackle on the outside, but were splendid on the inside.  Smallholders were generally allowed to pass these holdings on to their heirs, but not divide them or sell them to unrelated parties.  After 1990, the individuals who occupied these smallholdings were allowed to take legal title under a variety of laws which differed by country and republic."

 

The 500 Day Programs

The privatization of the Soviet Union actually began under Gorbachev, before the 1991 coup which destroyed the Communist Party.  The '500 Days Program' was laid out in April 1990 and set the ground rules for privatization of all assets in the Soviet Union.  It was the last gasp of the Soviet Communist Party to avoid the collapse of communist control which had occurred in the other Bloc countries.   All the former USSR republics' privatization efforts were based on the '500 Days Program'. (Note: Ukraine and most of the 'stans were republics in the former USSR) Other Warsaw Pact countries had different programs, because they had had well established private property laws and land titles prior to 1945.  The Russians did not even have intelligible private property law or titles prior to the Revolution.  Most land holdings were by order of the Czar, or simple adverse possession.  

Even today, roads in rural Ukraine are "rough".  Source

Outside of the cities, land has little value in Russia because there is so much of it.  Water, on the other hand, is quite valuable.

 

That explains the presence of all of the tiny, dug ponds scattered across the rural landscape. A pond is lower tech than a drilled well and a submersible pump. Source of image

Very large regions of Ukraine have annual precipitation of 20" or less

The '500 Days Program' was an excellent plan, but plagued by corruption.  The USSR and several Bloc countries had powerful criminal mafias which took control of their economies from the 1960's on.  This corruption was the only way Bloc citizens could get the necessities of life.  From this corruption rose oligarchs as communism collapse; oligarchs who hogged land and assets.   One reason Putin is very popular over there is his successful war on these mafias and oligarchs.  They are much more powerful today in Ukraine and the West than within Russia.

 

In many ways, the citizens of the former USSR were better prepared to endure the total collapse of their economy than we are...God forbid that it should happen. Even so:

 

The yellow highlighted region are the babies who would have been born during WWII.

The straight red lines are the babies who would have been born during the collapse of the USSR and in the chaotic decade afterward.

The region circled in blue are the "excess females". Men took the collapse with less grace than the women and there were many more deaths-of-despair (alcohol abuse, accidents, suicides...not going to the doctor).

 

My reader added in one of his emails that the Orthodox church was one of the few stable institutions and was a rock for many during those tumultuous years. It is pretty much a world-wide phenomena that women attend church at about 4X the rate of men.

 

Many thanks to my reader who wishes to remain anonymous.