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Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 441e452

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhg

Land reforms and territorial integration in post-Tsarist Estonia, 1918e1940

Peeter MaandiUppsala University, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

Abstract

After the declaration of independence in 1918, the Estonian government initiated a number of land reformswithin a relatively short period of time. Althoughthe reformsvaried in aim, they led to similaroutcomes in termsof the status and structure of landedproperties. This paperexplores,first, how the land reformstransformedadiversityof tenure systems into a coherentproperty regime, and second, how the reforms related to thepolitical discussionon theproper spatialorganization of land rights in Estonia. I argue that an important aimof the reformswas to contribute to the spatial and cultural consolidationof thenewnation.The paper places the land reforms in a geopolitical context, proposing that the land reforms served to fend off a number of real and perceived threats toterritorial integration. Thepaper is basedon statements bypoliticians and intellectuals of the time, andon land reformrecords stored in EstonianStateArchive.� 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Land reform; Nation-building; Enclosure; Property rights; Petserimaa; Estonia

The institution of private property is legally well-established inEstonia today, yet it is a relatively recent phenomenon in thecountry. Historically, private land rights have, periodically, beendenied large parts of society. Peasants were emancipated withoutland in the early nineteenth century, and had to wait another half-century before the legal provisions to purchase land were in place.Peasant land purchases were only permitted in designated areaswithin the large estates predominantly owned by German-speaking nobles, but the procedures varied between differentprovinces and estate categories. Only after 1918, when Estonia wasan independent nation-state dominated by ethnic Estonians undera centralized government, were serious efforts made to extend theinstitution of private property to all parts and people of the newlyestablished national territory, and thus to bring the propertyregime into uniformity. However, due to the prolonged land reformprocess the practice of private land rights was still a novelty inmany rural communities in June 1940, when the Soviet regimeabolished private property. When Estonia re-gained independencein 1991, a new law on ownership opened up for restitution ofprivate land rights to those who were registered as owners at the

E-mail address: peeter.maandi@kultgeog.uu.se1 Legal acts are published in Riigi Teataja (State Herald), henceforth referred to as RT. Th

I. Lipping, Land Reform Legislation and the Disestablishment of the Baltic German Rural Elite,agricultural experience of independent Estonia 1919e1939, Acta Universitatis Stockholmieland reforms in Estonia, Finland and Bulgaria: a comparative study, Scandinavian Econom20, 301e337; A. Grubbström, Estonian Swedish Ethnic survival e examples from Nuckö

2 Seadus talumaade korraldamise kohta Petseri maakonas, RT, 1920, nr. 14/15. The amendViru maakonna Naroova taguses osas, RT, 1921, nr. 88/89, seadus nr. 172. Brief references toregion: A. Tammekann (Ed), Eesti. Maateaduslik, tulunduslik ja ajalooline kirjeldus III: SeTallinn, 2006.

0305-7488/$ e see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.03.005

time of the Soviet takeover (or to their heirs). Restitution generateda general interest in the property situation as it existed in 1940, yetless attention has been paid to the processes that created that veryproperty situation, not least the sequence of land reforms carriedout in the post-Tsarist years.

To be sure, scholars of Estonian history have indeed studied thecauses and consequences of land reform during the first indepen-dence period. Yet, there are two issues that deserve more attention.First, thus far research has concentrated nearly exclusively on oneof the reforms, the so-called Land Law of 1919, mainly with politicsand socio-economic changes at the national level, in focus.1 TheLand Law opened up for an expropriation of large estates, followedby the subdivision of these estates into smaller family farms. Thiswas by far the greatest reform in terms of number of farms andpeople affected, yet its magnitude tends to overshadow subsequentland reforms, which, in some regions, had a greater influence onland matters than the Land Law. One of these was region-specific,namely, the Act of Land Adjustment in Petseri District of 1920(amended in 1921 to include the Trans-Narva area).2 Two otherreforms applied to the entire Estonian territory, namely, the Land

e Land Law (Maaseadus) was published in RT, 1919, nr. 79/80, seadus nr. 156. See also1919e1939, University of Maryland, 1980; A.-M. Kõll, Peasants on the world market:nsis, Studia Baltica Stockholmiensia 14, Stockholm, 1994; H. Jörgensen, The inter-waric History Review (2006) 54, 64e97; E. Pilve, Maa vabaduse eest, Akadeemia (2008)in the interwar period, Acta Borealis (2007), 24, 162e175.ed law was published as Seadus talumaade korraldamise kohta Petseri maakonnas jathe reforms are made in various books dealing with the characteristics of the Petseritumaa, Tartu 1928; K. Lõuna, Petserimaa. Petserimaa integreerimine Eesti vabariiki,

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Adjustment Act of 1926, and a statute popularly referred to as theCrofter Act of 1926.3 The second issue that deserves more attentionis the spatial reconfiguration of land rights. Though explicitlyaddressing different problems, all four reforms offered the samespatial solutiondthe elimination of communal forms of tenure andlarge landed estates, by way of division and enclosure. A jointtreatment of all four reforms and their spatial articulation shedslight on how successive Estonian governments in the early inde-pendence period navigated between conflicting property ideals,partly in an attempt to fend off internal and external threats to thesocio-political stability in the country; the land reforms were partof a spatial strategy of national integration in a region wherelandownership was a geopolitically volatile issue. Thus, the aim ofthis paper is to identify common denominators between the fourmain land reforms of the post-Tsarist Estonian republic, focusingespecially on their spatial articulation and significance for thenation-building project.

This paper starts with a brief discussion on the significance ofland reform in nation-building projects, focusing especially on therole given to private land rights in processes of democratization andterritorial integration. This is followed by a note on method anddata. Thereafter, I describe and comment on the four major landreforms, lending special attention to their spatial articulation. In theconcluding discussion, I return to some of the issues raised in thegeneral discussion on the connection between land reform andnation-building.

Land reform in the democratic republic

History is ripe with examples of how new or fundamentallyreformed states have initiated land reforms, as a way to alter therelationship between citizens, and between the citizen and thestatedin short, to promote a new societal order.4 This change canbe both quantitative (e.g. a rise in the number of farms) and qual-itative (e.g. a statutory change in the nature of property rights). Inaddition, there is usually some kind of spatial implication. Estoniain the early twentieth century experienced a political trans-formation from monarchy (being part of the Russian Empire) toindependent republic, thus sharing at least some characteristicswith other, and earlier, examples of states in which land tenurechange can be related to the rise of republican ideals. The overviewbelow highlights some issues that serve as points of departure inthe present study.

Philosophical foundations

Ideally, a democratic republic is a state where supreme power isheld by the people and their elected representatives. This hasimplications for property rights; democratization is usuallyaccompanied by an egalitarian concern, which in turn may beregarded as a legitimate reason for a transfer of land rights betweengroups of people. As pointed out by Metzer and Engerman,

3 The Land Adjustment Act (Maakorralduse seadus) was published in RT, 1926, nr. 23,seadus) was published in RT, 1926, nr. 16, seadus nr. 16. For examples of the implementatsee P. Maandi, Change and Persistence in a Reformed Landscape. A geographical analysis1840e2003, in: Geografiska regionstudier 64, Uppsala, 2005. The Crofter law is also com

4 R. King, Land Reform. A World Survey, London, 1977.5 J. Metzer and S. L. Engerman, Some considerations of ethno-nationality (and other di

J. Metzer (Eds), Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality and Sovereignty in History, New York, 2006 If not otherwise stated, this paragraph is based on E.D. West, Property rights in th

McChesney (Eds), Property Rights. Cooperation, Conflict, and Law, Princeton, 2003, and R7 R.J.P. Kain and E. Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State. A History of Prop

and religion in Newtonian America, in: D.W. Meinig (Ed), The Interpretation of Ordinary

a common notion in the early phases of modern political regimeswas that full participation in the body politic required ownership ofland, and accordingly, land ownership became an identifier of therelevant ‘people’ for whom the state functions as agent.5

Just how this transfer ought to be carried out depends in part onhow the nature of property rights is defined.6 Even before theadvent, in modern history, of republican states, people like JohnLocke in the seventeenth century, argued that property rightsbelong to the natural rights of man, predating the formation ofsociety and government. Yet his main interest was to make surethat the sovereign protected, rather than redistributed, propertyrights. A century later, and in some contrast to Locke, Adam Smithargued that property is foremost an acquired right; property in landwas earned through labour and the simultaneous guarantees givenby government, of protection of property and the wealth it gener-ated. Thus, Smith’s idea exemplifies the conviction that all menshould have equal rights to acquire property and wealth, forexample through labour. However, Smith’s argument did notautomatically imply that property and wealth must, in the end, beequally distributed. The issue of equal distribution of propertyrights became pronounced only later, not least among utilitarianthinkers, and later, Marxists. The principle of ‘the greatest happi-ness of the greatest number’ emanated in a conviction thatgovernment predated property; the nature and distribution ofproperty were never given, but could be changed by the will ofa majority of citizens. Property, here, was subordinated to ‘socialjustice’ and not a primordial or acquired individual right. Thesethree ways of approaching the nature of property rights are, ofcourse, theoretical, and none is automatically favoured bya republican system. Later in this paper I return to these argumentsand explore how they relate to the land reforms in question.

The spatial articulation of the democratization of land rights

If a shift to a democratic system alters the way in which propertyrights are acknowledged, this shift is, generally, spatially articulated.As studies of land reforms in other democratizing countries havedemonstrated, this spatiality is not a sideshowdit is integral to thenewwayof definingproperty rights. For example, inpost-revolutionAmerica, Jeffersonandother statesmenpromotedanewlandsystembased on private ownership of rectilinear and ‘independent’ landunits, in the Public Domain to thewest of the original states. Largelyignoring the interests of Native Americans, this had the practicaladvantage of speedingup the sale of federal land and imposing somedegree of control over the westward settlement expansion.However, the new gridiron property structure also represented the‘democratic rationality’ of the new regime, whether or not it mate-rialized as such.7 Allegedly based on science rather than custom, thenew land system symbolized a clear step away from, or a leap aheadof, a supposedly backward-oriented tenure system based onhereditary privilege and manifesting social segregation. Thesimplicity of the system also meant that it was easy to apprehend,

seadus nr. 21. The ‘Crofter Act’ (Kogukonna-, asutuste ja erarendimaade korraldamiseion of these reforms at the village level, some of which are referred to in this paper,of land reforms and landscape change in Rapla and Muhu municipalities, Estonia, c.mented on in Jörgensen, The inter-war land reforms (note 1), 82e83.

stinctions), property rights in land, and territorial sovereignty, in: S.L. Engerman and6, 9e10.e history of economic thought: from Locke to J.S. Mill, in: T.L. Anderson and F.S.. Pipes, Property and Freedom, New York, 1999, 30e63.erty Mapping, Chicago, 1992, 294e297; J.B. Jackson, The order of a landscape: reasonLandscapes. Geographical Essays, New York, 1979.

P. Maandi / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 441e452 443

making land transactions more transparent and accessible to themany.8 In addition, as the US territory expanded across the conti-nent, the land system gave the impression of unity in an otherwisenaturally and culturally varied nation.9 Revolutionary Francerepresents another case of the democratization, as it were, ofproperty-space. The revolutionwas followedby the confiscationandsubsequent distribution of many noble and church estates (i.e.spaces of privilege), but also thedivision (partage) of rural commons.The stated aim of this spatial reconfiguration was to promote anegalitarian society and to encourage entrepreneurial individualism,aswell as tobond the citizen to the state and its cherished republicanideal, rather than to customary communal institutions.10 Thus, thespatial reconfiguration of land rights was an important way ofcommunicating egalitarian ideals and integrating the nationalterritory. The way in which such considerations were articulated inpost-Tsarist Estonia, is discussed later in the paper.

National land reform politics and local practice

So far, I have approached the significance of land reform to thedemocratizingnation,mainly fromthepolitician’s perspective. Evenif the instigators of land reform are elected representatives of thepeople, a statutory reform can be regarded, to some extent, as a top-town project to which people at the local level have to adapt. Somehave stretched this argument to mean that ever since the develop-ment of centralized nation-states (especially from the eighteenthcentury onward) they have rearranged propertied space in linewithsupposedly rational principles, as a way to control the territory andthe people therein. Scott, for example, argues that by imposinga standardized property structure a state could impose authority inits territory by making the latter ‘legible’, by which he meansmeasurable and manipulable, the cadastral map being the verysymbol of this manipulation.11 The map’s layout is deliberately keptsimple (thus disregarding local realities) so that when allied withstate power, the map enables much of the reality it depicts to beremade. Seeminglywell-intended, even a land reform in thenameofegalitarianism may thus mask an agenda of state domination.

Scott’s argument must be juxtaposed to empirical studies thatshow how outcomes of statutory reforms may well reflect local,rather than state, authority. An interesting example is Norberg’sstudy of the law that called for the partition of commons in ruralFrance, following the revolution. Her findings show that manycommons actually remained, not so much because of the peasant’sdislike of state policies, but because of a variety of pragmaticconsiderations; similarly Norberg finds that many communitiesopted for partition not because the state imposed it, but because itwas called for by local interests.12 Thus, what we see here is thatnational politics of land reform may indeed be imposed on localtraditions in a more or less authoritarian way, but they can also

8 A. Linklater, Measuring America. How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest La9 D. Whittlesey, The impress of effective authority upon the landscape. Annals of the

Shaping of America. A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 2. Contine10 J. Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution, Cambridge, MA, 2001, especia11 J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition H12 Many peasant communities simply lacked the incentive to invest time and money incommons survived not because they were liked by local peasants or rural poor, butstructures. When partition was indeed carried out, it could be because commons werepartition as a way to cast a vote against irresponsible community representatives. In addofficial approval. K. Norberg, Dividing up the commons: institutional change in rural Fr13 E.g. J. Hiden and P. Salmon, The Baltic Nations and Europe. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania14 Riigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste tegevus 1918e1934, Tallinn, 1934.15 Archive material for the following communities have been studied in greater detai(Skamja) in the Trans-Narva area in Virumaa District, eleven villages (Mok�sina, KilinVäike-Kalki) in Petseri District, and the noble estate Sikeldi in Harju (now Rapla) Distriexists and most of it belongs to Russia today.

coincide with the interests of local inhabitants, even if for otherreasons than those anticipated by the reformers at the state level.Hence, the way in which estates and commons were partitioned inpost-Tsarist Estonia, may reflect a complicated play betweennational and local realities.

Data and method

As stated earlier, the aim of this paper is to find common denom-inators between the four main land reforms of the post-TsaristEstonian republic, focusing especially on their spatial articulationand the significance of the same to the nation-building project. Inthe previous section, I highlighted some general issues that need tobe considered in addressing the aim, and the way I have done so isdescribed below.

Firstly, in order to address the status of private land rights at theoutset of independence, I outline the development of private landrights in Estonia during the nineteenth century, focusing also onregional variations. The outline has the character of a researchoverview, pulling together bits of information froma range ofworkswritten primarily by scholars of Estonian and Russian history, thusarriving at an integrated history of land rights in Estonia.

Secondly, to address the practical and ideological significance ofthe reformsdof their spatial articulation especiallydI rely on theland reform statutes and comments by politicians and intellectualsof the time. These may not be representative of all prevailingopinions, but they are at least indicative of the views held byleading persons at the time, a conclusion that finds some support inrecent research in Estonian history.13 The progress of the landreforms, i.e. their respective pace and magnitude, is described andcommented on in a detailed government-published report on thegovernment’s activities in 1918e1934.14 While this report may bepartial, I have found it a useful complement to statistics based onagricultural censuses, as the former includes data specific to thedifferent reforms.

Finally, in addressing the materialization of the land reforms atthe local level, I have selected a number of villages and estates fromdifferent parts of the country.15 This is not a representative sample,but the communities represent a variety of land tenure traditionswhich the Estonian state had to tackle. The most important sourceof information has been found in ‘village files’, i.e. documents forthe selected communities that relate to the entire land reformprocess (often covering the two decades of independence). Theseare stored in the Estonian State Archive (Riigiarhiiv, ERA) in Tallinn,Estonia, and include minutes from village councils, land surveyors’notes, maps, and letters of complaint addressed to the regional landcommissions. From the village files we can at least get a glimpse oflocal attitudes to the reforms. Some of the villages were also visitedin 2003e2005, to interview elderly people (six in all) who still

nd Sale in History, London, 2002, 185.Association of American Geographers 25 (1935), 85e97. See also D.W. Meinig, The

ntal America, 1800e1867. New Haven, 1993, 194e195.lly chapters 3 and 4.ave Failed, New Haven, 1998.the partitioning of commons that were of little or no value to them. In other cases,because partition, even when wanted, was impeded by complicated institutionalmanaged in a corrupt way by community governments, and many peasants sawition, some communities divided the commons prior to the state’s law and withoutance, 1789e1799, Politics & Society (1988) 16, 265e286.in the Twentieth Century, London, 1991; Kõll, Peasants on the World Market (note 1).

l: four villages (Võiküla, Aljava, Paenase, Mõega) in Saaremaa District, one villageetsi, Verbustje, Dubrovka, Miku, Verhulitsa, Pedajaaluste, Ersava, Kõõru, Plesok,ct, and the noble estate of Kuivastu, in Saaremaa District. Petseri District no longer

P. Maandi / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 441e452444

remembered the late interwar period; of especial interest was tolearn more about the extent to which the reformed propertystructures depicted in cadastral maps were acknowledged inpractice. Their memories may have faded or become distorted withtime, but I have nonetheless referred to the interviews where theyprovide us with information not found in other sources.

Land rights in pre-independent Estonia16

The Estonian Maapäev (Landtag), in its 1918 ‘Manifesto to allpeoples of Estonia’, claimed sovereignty over the Estonian-speaking territory, which was declared a democratic republic.17 Themanifesto called for the establishment of a provisional government,which was to protect the life and interests of the citizenry, nowdefined as all men and women living within its boundaries. Amongthe issues that required explicit attention was a ‘democratic solu-tion’ to the ‘land question’, the latter referring to the unequal accessto, and distribution of, agricultural land. The Land Law of 1919 wasto be the solution. The Land Law called for the nationalization of allestates owned by noblemen, nobility corporations, and churches,and the division of those lands into farms, which were to bedistributed and eventually sold. Several years later, in an articlepublished in 1935, Kaarel Liidak, a leading Estonian agronomist andlater minister of agriculture, stated that he could understand thoseGerman-speaking nobles who argued they had a formal right totheir expropriated land, but he added that that right emanatedfrom violent conquest by German crusaders in the late medievalperiod. Thus, it could never be accepted by the Estonians as a ‘trueright’; ‘Our right’, he claimed, ‘is an older, primordial, naturalright’.18 Liidak was alluding to the centuries-old intellectual debatein Europe, referred to earlier in this paper, about the relationshipbetween government and the nature of land rights. Likemany otherstates in Eastern Europe, Estonia was located in the nexus ofwestern and eastern land tenure traditions, which had contributedto the simultaneous existence of different land tenure systems.With national independence, Estonia was trying to clarify itsbelonging to a western European property tradition, in whichprivate property rights had become the dominant form of tenure. Inthe east, as argued by Powelson, even if feudalism as ‘delegatedgovernment based on land’ had faded, it had survived to someextent as a ‘monopoly of land and capital by an elitist class, who usethose assets and their police strength to secure power not freelyentrusted to them by their subjects’.19 Let us take a brief look at thisheritage, because it is relevant to the study Estonian land reforms.

Russia’s Baltic provinces

Prior to the First World War and the disintegration of Tsarist Russia,Russia’s Baltic rim consisted of three provinces (Fig. 1). They were,

16 Most places in Estonia have established names in Germanic languages, Estonian, andthe Germanic toponyms. For the independence period, toponyms in Estonian are used.17 Manifest kõigile Estimaa rahwastele, see Office of the President of the Republic of Es18 K. Liidak, Maasaeaduse aastapäeval, Akadeemia, 1987 (1935), 1374e1381. Emphasis i19 J.P. Powelson, The Story of Land. A World History of Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform,20 The Estonian names are Eestimaa, Liivimaa, Kuramaa, and Saaremaa, respectively.21 By the end of the 18th century, less than 2% of the people living in the three provinceprovinces dropped to an average of 1%. H.W. Whelan, Adapting to Modernity. Family, Ca22 Whelan, Adapting to Modernity (note 22), 70e71.23 Whelan, Adapting to Modernity (note 22), 71; O. Crisp, Peasant land tenure and civilImperial Russia, Oxford, 1989.24 In 1869, similar regulations were extended to peasants on crown land throughoumandatory for crown peasants to purchase the land for which they paid rent. See K. Lkroonukülas 1819e1915, Tartu, 2005.; Crisp, Peasant land tenure (note 23).25 J. Eellend, Cultivating the rural citizen: modernity, agrarianism and citizenship in la26 E.g. Jakob Pärn’s novel’s ‘Own house, own master’ and ‘Black robe’, published in J. P

from north to south: Estland, Livland and Kurland, with the island-region of Ösel enjoying a special status within Livland.20 EthnicEstonians constituted themajority of the rural population in Estlandand the northern half of Livland, including Ösel. Yet, it was thenumerically small BalticGermannobility (the coreofwhich traced itsancestry to theTeutonic crusaderswhoconquered the territory in thelate Middle Ages), which ran the internal affairs of the provinces.21

The knights formed themselves into nobility corporations, whichcorresponded to the four territories mentioned earlier. Eventuallyeach province had a diet (Landtag), which was nearly exclusivelydominatedby the respectivenobilitycorporation.Membership in thelatter was granted only to those in possession of knightly manors(Rittergüter); all land in the rural areas belonged to estates, of whichmost ranked as knightly manors. The nobility thus had great influ-ence on judicial, police, administrative and parish institutions, andforeign sovereigns who ruled the territory from the sixteenthcentury onwards (Swedish until 1721, Russian until 1917) generallyconfirmed these privileges, albeit with periodical encroachments.

In the 1780s, Catherine the Great converted the fiefs of thenobility to allodia, making the enserfed Estonian-speaking peas-antry’s situation more precarious. However, the serfs of Estland,Livland and Kurland were emancipated in 1816e1819, halfa century before those of Russia proper. Many members of thenobility were influenced by Western European humanitarian andphilanthropic ideas, as well as the economic theory of physioc-racy.22 Emancipationwas also supported from the east by Catherinethe Great and later Alexander I, who wanted the Baltic reforms toserve as possible models for the rest of the empire.23 The terms ofemancipation were, however, dictated by the nobility corporationswith the result that serfs were emancipated without land. From thepeasants’ perspective, emancipation had given them personalfreedom, but they lost their customary right (under feudalism) todwell on, and use, land on condition of service or rent to thelandlord. However, new ‘peasant laws’ in 1856e1865 facilitated thepurchase of land by individual peasants in the Baltic provinces,within those parts of the Rittergüter that were defined as peasantland (as opposed to the manor demesne).24

The agrarian reforms as well as changes in the form of localgovernment in the second half of the nineteenth century coincidedwith themovement for national awareness amongethnic Estonians.The reformshadgiven the once-subduedpeasants anopportunity toclimb up the social hierarchy, and to many Estonians, the indepen-dent farmer embodied the idea of progress and pride. Inspiredprimarily by German, Dutch and Scandinavian agrarian reforms,Estonian intellectuals and agricultural societies sought to encourageEstonians to purchase their rented land; only then could they ach-ieve economic and moral progress.25 Literary works such as novelsserved to enlighten the peasantry about the advantages of fullproprietorship.26 Newspapers in the Estonian language began to

sometimes Russian. When referring to the pre-independence period I primarily useSee Fig. 1.tonia at http://www.president.ee (accessed 1 November, 2009).n the original, my translation from Estonian.Cambridge MA, 1988, 99. Emphasis in original.

s were registered nobles. By 1897, the nobility’s share of the total population in theste and Capitalism among the Baltic German Nobility, Köln, 1999, 23 and 213.

rights implications before 1906, in: O. Crisp and L. Edmondson (Eds), Civil Rights in

t the empire, which were found amidst the private estates. In 1886, it was madeust, Pärisorjast päriskohaomanikuks. Talurahva emantsipatsioon eestikeelses Liivimaa

te tsarist Estonia, Studia Baltica, serie II, nr 1, Stockholm, 2007.ärn, Oma tuba, oma luba, Tallinn, 2009 (1879).

Fig. 1. Estonia prior and after independence. The territory of the Estonian Republic is indicated in grey. The country was created from the former province of Estland, the northernhalf of Livland, and the so-called Trans-Narva area of St. Petersburg province, and the area around the town of Pechory (Petseri), of the Pskov province.

P. Maandi / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 441e452 445

appear in the latterhalf of thenineteenth century, and theysought tomobilize Estonians as well as the central government in St Peters-burg against the conservative elements of the Baltic Germangentry.27Despitedifferencesbetweenconservative andmore radicalfractions of the national movement, few questioned the symbolicsignificance of the independent family farmer.

By 1914, there were more than 50,000 freehold farms in Estlandand the northern half of Livland (controlling around 42% of the landin the area), but some 23,000were still tenants on estate land.28 Thesecond half of the nineteenth century had thus been a period ofagrarian change, with the peasant class becoming an active partici-pant in land and agricultural markets. However, because there weredifferent categories of estate land (e.g. noble, crown, church and cityestates), and because the provinces constituted separate jurisdic-tions, the reforms of the late nineteenth century did not decrease thevariety of property-related structures and practices. Troska, in herstudy of nineteenth-century peasant village structures, notes that, inthe estates of Ösel, farmland often remained unconsolidated whensold to the peasants.29 This meant, for example, that the village-based three-field system prevailed. According to the same study,enclosures before purchase were more common on the mainland,especially in the more fertile regions of Livland and Estland. In Liv-land, the establishment of new crofts or small tenant farms wasprohibited and existing ones could persist only if considered viable,but a rapid population increase during thenineteenth century forcedmany rural dwellers to take up crofts on freehold or communal lands,accentuating the social stratification within the rural population.

Russia proper

Let us briefly turn our attention to Russia proper (i.e. to the east ofthe Baltic provinces), because when Estonia was created in1918e1920, the new state was formed by merging Estland with thenorthern half of Livland, as well as parts of two provinces formerlybelonging to Russia proper (Fig. 1). Two things appear especiallyrelevant in relation to experiences in the Baltic provinces: first, thelater date of emancipation of serfs, and second, the slow

27 T. Karjahärm, The political organization of Estonian society and the political parties inActa Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studia Baltica Stockholmiensia 5:1, Stockholm, 1990.28 T. Pool, Maareform, in: Eesti. Maa, rahvas, kultuur, Eesti kirjanduse seltsi toimetused29 G. Troska, Eesti külad XIX sajandil. Ajaloolis-etnograafiline uurimus, Tallinn, 1987.30 R. Wortman, Property, populism, and Russian political culture (note 23), 15e17; Pip31 Crisp, Peasant land tenure (note 23), 36e37.32 D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune 1905e1930, Stanford, 1983; Crisp33 Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune (note 32), 8e13.34 G. Yanev, The Urge to Mobilize. Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861e1930, Chicago, 1982.

development of individual property rights in land among peasants.As in the Baltic provinces, the Russian nobility was freed from itsobligations to the Tsar during the course of the eighteenth century,and the Charter of the Nobility (1785) granted them property rights.This meant, in practice, that serfs in noble estates were consideredthe property of the noble lord, which in turn limited the power ofthe Tsar to enforce emancipation within noble estates.30 Peasantson crown or state land were not formally serfs, yet they had to fulfilsimilar duties. Even on crown lands emancipation, especially withland, was initially not considered a realistic option, largely forpolitical reasons. Instead, successive emperors set out to extendcivil and economic rights to crown peasant, hoping that thesemeasures would influence also the nobility to improve the condi-tion of their serfs. Legal provisions to manumit peasants with landexisted from 1803, yet few landlords bothered. Thus, most peasantswere bonded to the noble lord, Tsar or state, until the generalemancipation edict of 1861; that is, about half a century afteremancipation (without land) in the Baltic provinces. Yet, by thattime the principle that peasants must be emancipated with theland that they tilled, was well-recognized.31

Instead of acquiring land on an individual basis the land wasregularly transferred as a single cadastral unit to the members ofthe land commune (usually comprising one or more villages). Thecommune was responsible for collecting the redemption tax fromthe members. Thus, even if individualization of farming wasencouraged (and indeed the statute opened up for a breaking up ofcommunal property) Russian villages tended to persist ascommunal institutions, with common fields subdivided intonumerous strips tilled by the member households.32 A peculiarfeature, unknown in the Baltic provinces was the time-to-timeredistribution of land between the member families, as a response,mainly, to changing family size.33 Under these circumstances, thenotion of private property as a specific piece of land that can beinherited or sold at will, could not take root. Attempts atmodernizing peasant agriculture along Western European linesregularly failed, because of peasant resistance or complicated andcorrupt bureaucracy.34 However, especially after the revolution of

Estonia in the years 1900e1914, in: A. Loit (Ed), The Baltic Countries 1900e1914, in:

19, Tartu, 1926, 449e451.

es, Property and Freedom (note 6), 195e197, 202e203.

, Peasant Land Tenure; Pipes, Property and freedom (note 6), 203e204.

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1905, Russian peasants were encouraged by the state to purchase,from the commune, the land that they tilled, and have theirfarmlands consolidated and enclosed, for which the governmentoffered financial assistance. This was made within the frameworkof the Stolypin reforms. Yet, even if the number of separated farmsincreased during the reform years, the number of farms remainingin the communes constituted a clear majority still at the eve of theFirst WorldWar.35 Thus, Estonia’s acquisition of ‘Russian’ territoriesduring the War of independence (1918e1918), meant that it had toaddress the fact that the people in these territories, even those thatwere defined as ethnic Estonians, were not accustomed to privateproprietorship, neither in theory nor in practice.

Land reforms within the new national context

While enclosure and individualization of land rights were far fromnovel processes in the regiondresulting, as elsewhere, from theintroduction of capitalistic ideas and Enlightenment philoso-phiesdEstonian independence meant that these processes werenow enforced within a new agenda, based onwar-time experiencesand the formation of a new nation-state. This agenda called for thestandardization of the varied property regime, and there were, Iargue, two interrelated reasons for this. Firstly, given the heritage ofa decentralized territorial power structure (which had generatedthe heterogeneous tenure system) a standardization of the prop-erty regime would greatly facilitate the central government in itsadministrative tasks. As elsewhere, this included, for example, thecollection of taxes, supervision of agricultural production and landtransfers, and the (cadastral) mapping of the new territory.36 Asecond reason was connected to the fragile geopolitical situationand the influence of the same on internal socio-economic tensionsin the early years of independence. Here, the purpose of reformwasto weaken any loyalties towards Baltic German or Bolshevik (i.e.Russian) causes, primarily by levelling out socio-economic differ-ences in a polarized rural society.

This second reason, i.e. the relationship between possession ofland and political loyalty, had become a politically sensitive issueduring the turbulent years of war, for three main reasons. Firstly,during the latter part of the First World War, the Baltic provinceswere occupied by the imperial German army, and many BalticGermans sided with the occupying forces, and were prepared toopen up demesne land to immigrant German farmers.37 Secondly,after the German military’s withdrawal in 1918 and the Estoniandeclaration of independence, Estoniawas attacked by Soviet Russia,thereby igniting the War of independence. In an attempt to uniteEstonians against the Red Army, the leaders of Estonia promisedfarmland, once the war was won, to those who joined the Estoniannational forces. In eastern Estonia, which was controlled by Sovietforces for several months, private property was abolished anda communist regime was introduced. The ‘Russian’ areas whichwere transferred to the Estonian national territory after thewar hadnever been governed by Baltic provincial law and they had beensubjected to an even longer period of Bolshevik rule. Thirdly, when

35 Atkinson, The End of the Russian Commune (note 32), 79e82; see also J. Pallot, Khutora242e256.36 Kain and Baigent, The Cadastral Map (note 7), 332e344.37 See e.g. the memoirs of the last chairman of the Estland nobility corporation, origina(1930), 193.38 Pool, Maareform (note 28).39 Lipping, Land Reform Legislation (note 1), 1980; Kõll, Peasants on the World Market40 Riigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste tegevus (note 14), 148.41 Liidak, Maasaeaduse aastapäeval (note 18), 1377, my translation from Estonian.42 Pool, Maareform (note 28), 452, my translation from Estonian.

the Estonian nationalist forces were fighting the Soviet forces in theeast, a Baltic German irregular army, Landeswehr, attacked Estoniafrom the south; even if the attack was unsuccessful it furthercemented Estonians’ distrust of Baltic Germans. Let us look at themajor land reforms and examine how they relate to these admin-istrative and geopolitical concerns.

Eliminating the privileged space of the Baltic German nobility

On October 10, 1919, before the War of independence had come toan end, and after much debate, the Land Law (Maaseadus) waspassed, which stipulated the expropriation of noble, crown andchurch estates, creation of the State Land Fund, and finally, thesubsequent allotment of most of the expropriated agricultural landinto family farms. Expropriated forests were generally transferredto the State Forest Fund. Although the former estate owners werecompensated to some extent, and were, if they wished, permittedto keep 50 ha in one of their former manors, this was the coup degrace that put an end to the hegemony of the Baltic Germannobility. No less than 1039 estates, of which the majority belongedto members of the nobility, were thus nationalized.38 The newfarms were not, initially, freehold farms, but hereditary leaseswhich could be held as long as the leaseholder, or ‘settler’, actuallycultivated the land. In 1926, under strong pressure from the polit-ical party of the ‘settlers’ (Asunikude erakond), rents were loweredand eventually convertible to full ownership.39 The reform led tothe creation of 55,104 new allotments by 1933, of which some 5000were intended as plots for expanding rural towns and railwaycommunities rather than farms; in addition, 23,023 tenant farmsand crofts on former estates were transformed to owner-occupiedfarms (on conditional terms), the latter often receiving additionalland from the State Land Fund.40 Many manor houses were turnedinto schools, hospitals, or local government offices, a furthersymbol of the democratization, as it were, of the spaces formerlyreserved for the privileged aristocracy.

In the political rhetoric, the radical character of the Land Lawwas partly blamed on the actions of the Baltic Germans themselves.Commenting on the Land Law in the 1930s, Kaarel Liidak (who hasbeen referred to earlier) explained that the Baltic Germans them-selves had come up with the idea of expropriation of estate land,when they, during the German occupation, agreed to a ‘colonisationof the land by ethnic Germans’.41 After a couple of generations,Liidak argued, the Estonians would have been replaced by a foreignpeople. Similarly, Theodor Pool, a farmer and leading politician,claimed that the Land Law prevented the estate lands from beingturned into ‘a bulwark of German conservatism’.42 Expropriationand allotment of estate land were also intended to fend offa conceived Bolshevik threat. There were fears that if the estateswere not immediately divided into family farms, the landless ruralpoor would sympathize with the communists of neighbouringRussia. Thus, in his 1926 assessment of the Land Law, Pool arguedthat the reform had helped to level out class differences and

and Otruba in Stolypin’s program of farm individualization, Slavic Review (1984) 43,

lly published in German; E. von Dellingshausen, Kodumaa teenistuses, Tallinn, 1994

(note 1), 44e45.

Fig. 2. The demesne of Sikeldi (Siklecht) estate, in Rapla parish, the province of Estland, before and after the implementation of the 1919 Land Law. Source: EHA: f. 2486, n. 1, s. 3016,and ‘Skeemiline kaart’ XIV-30, XIV-31, XV-30, XV-31.

P. Maandi / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 441e452 447

improved the social situation in the rural areas, hence working asa counterweight against Bolshevism, which ‘lurks in the East’.43

Thus, the estate demesnes underwent a metamorphosis duringthe early 1920s, as numerous ‘settlers’ trickled, as it were, acrossthe estate boundary and immediately began the construction offarmhouses, fences, wells, etc. Sikeldi (Siklecht in German) manorin northern Estonia may serve as an example (Fig. 2). Most of thefarms in the estate’s ‘peasant land’ had been sold to the peasantry

43 Pool, Maareform (note 28), 453, my translation from Estonian.

in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the manor demesneremained largely unaffected by peasant activities. However, twelvecrofts had been established on the demesne to be used by thelabourers on the manor. With the passing of the Land Law of 1919,the owner, Rudolf von Lilienfelt, decided not to keep any land inSikeldi manor and applied for compensation instead. The lawsettled which categories of people were entitled to former manorland, and in what order of priority. Veterans of the War of

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independence and widows of liberation fighters were first in line,followed by crofters and labourers of the manors. In Sikeldi, it wasdecided that the crofters and the miller, who had enjoyed the rightof usage to 3e4 ha of arable land each on the manor, were to beallotted viable farms.44 They became propertied farmers once theyhad paid a purchase price to the state and on the precondition thatthey actually tilled the land during the first six years. Thus, a hier-archical tenure system was replaced by a ‘flat’ structure in whichnobody was another person’s tenant. In addition, sixteen newallotments were created.45 Ten war veterans were promisedfarmland in the manor. Three of the veterans had distinguishedthemselves in battle, and were given land free of char-gedsomewhat symbolically, in the manor centre. Persons from theneighbourhood bought the remaining six allotments, while most ofthe forested areas were, as elsewhere, kept in the State Forest Fund.The average size of the new farms was 28 ha.

The property structure of the new Sikeldi settlement wasrepresentative of the Estonian agrarian ideal of the time, based onthe notion of independent and spatially dispersed family farmswith consolidated fields. However, the spatial articulation of thereform, i.e. its focus on the Baltic German space and the creation offamily farms, was an expression of a mixture of the philosophies ofproperty rights discussed earlier: the idea of the ethnic Estonian’snatural right to land, but also on the idea of a right acquiredthrough labour (e.g. the ‘land to the tiller’ policy, or the allocation offarms on conditional terms), and to some extent, on the idea ofproperty as a common rather than private good. The egalitariannature of the reform appears clearly on the national level, as shownby Taagepera: 61% of all farms (excluding farms smaller than 1 ha)were found within a range of 10e50 ha, with an average farms sizein Estonia just above 20 ha.46 Figures are similar for Latvia andLithuania, where similar reforms were passed; however, in manyEastern and Central European countries, post-reform situationswere characterized by a polarization between very small farms andvery large estates (e.g. Czechoslovakia and Hungary), or, if largeestates were indeed eliminated (as in Bulgaria), this did notdecrease the number of unviable farms.47 Having said this, theapplication of the viability principle meant that there was notenough estate land to distribute among Estonia’s landless,a problem that had to be addressed later, as we will see.48

Disintegrating the ‘Russian’ village communes

The eastern borderlands, i.e. the Trans-Narva area and the Petseri(Pechory) District, were the next targets of reform. These areaswere ethnically mixed, and communal landownership was thenorm. These were also the areas where Bolshevik rule during therecent wars lasted the longest, and where some of the mostdestructive battles had taken place, leaving the inhabitants ina state of war fatigue and poverty.

44 Sikeldi mõisa likvideerimine, ERA f. 58, n. 4, s. 353; Andmed Sikeldi asundustalude koh45 Toimikud Sikeldi asunduse kohta, ERA f. 62, n. 2. s. 945, 946, 947, 948.46 R. Taagepera, Inequality indices for Baltic farm size distribution, 1929e1940, Journal oaccount for the numbers, as they are based on agricultural statistics of 1929, when othe47 Kõll, Peasants on the world market (note 1), 1994; Jörgensen, The inter-war land re48 It has been estimated that 17.6% of the agricultural population was still landless in49 Seadus talumaade korraldamise kohta Petseri maakonas, 1920. Prior to the EstonianRiigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste tegevus (note 14), 152.50 Seadus talumaade korraldamise kohta Petseri maakonnas ja Viru maakonna Naroova tstrips of land consolidated prior to the Estonian takeover; Riigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste51 Riigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste tegevus (note 14), 152.52 See Lõuna, Petserimaa (note 2), 153.53 Petserimmaa olukorra kirjeldus, ERA f. 14, n. 1, s. 1395, my translation from Estonian.54 Tammekann (Ed), Eesti (note 2), 63.55 Tammekann (Ed), Eesti (note 2), 151, my translation from Estonian.

Petseri District in the southeast is especially interesting. Here, inits western part, the Setu people were the largest ethnic group. TheSetu spoke an Estonian dialect, but shared many cultural traits withthe Russians, e.g. religion, personal names, the alphabet, and thetradition of village communes. In 1920, the Law on Land Adjust-ment in Petseri District provided for the resumption of the pre-revolution Stolypin reforms (in Russia proper) in Petseri District,though adjusted somewhat to the new situation.49 In 1921, thereform was extended also to the north-eastern borderland, east ofthe river Narva, through the ratification of the Law on Farmland inPetseri District and the Trans-Narva area of Viru District.50 Villagescould not be forced to reform their tenure system, but if at least oneshareholder requested reform, and if one third of the shareholderswere in favour of reform, the process could begin. By 1934, 9844farms in eastern Estonia were affected by these two reforms.51

The objective of the reformswas notmerely socio-economic. TheEstoniangovernmentdidnot fully trust the loyaltyof the inhabitantsof this ethnically and culturally mixed region, and the land reformswere partly seen as a means to integrate the borderlands with therest of Estonia. In 1921, commenting on the political and socialinstability in Petseri District, minister of internal affairs KaarelEenpalu called for a speedy abolition of village communes, anda rapid consolidation of farmland and enclosure of commons; heeven suggested that reluctant communes should be forced tocomplywithenclosure.52 Ina secret report presented to theEstoniangovernment in 1927, the Political Police describes the anti-Estoniansentiments among parts of the Petseri District population, whichemanated, the report said, in the persistence of Russian customs andthe inhabitants’ loss of the Russian market. Thus, even the PoliticalPolice identified, among othermeasures, the abolition of communalland tenure and the traditional redistribution of land, as an urgentstrategy of integration; if the population’s socio-economic situationwas not improved, ethnic Russians, but also many Estonian-speaking Setu, ‘would willingly see Petseri District as part of SovietRussia, being instantaneously ready to unite with Soviet Russia’.53

However, in a regionalegeographical survey published in 1928,a number of distinguished scholars claimed that the Setu hadgenerally come to realize the shortcomings of communal land-ownership, and that the reforms served to get rid of ‘obsoletecustoms’ and ‘Russian influence’dthe two terms seem to have beenused more or less synonymously.54 The authors also argued thathistorically the Setu region had been unnaturally tied to a ‘whollyalien people’ (i.e. Russians) for centuries, and that the latter wereincapable of bringing anything of positive value to the Setu people.Culturally, the compilers of the survey argued, the Setu regionmustbe pulled closer to the rest of Estonia, and the Setu must make aneffort ‘to blend with the other parts of Estonia’.55 Thus, from theperspective of many a statesman and scholar, the land reform wasregarded as an important tool by which the life and attitude of theSetu and other people living in the borderlands could be

ta, ERA f. 58, n. 3, s. 264.

f Baltic Studies (1972) 3, 26e28. Note, however, that the Land Law reform cannot fullyr land reforms, too, had been in progress since some years back.forms (note 1).1934; T.U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, Stanford, 2002, 132.takeover, in Petseri District, 1606 farms had had their strips of land consolidated;

aguses osas, 1921. In the Trans-Narva area of Virumaa District, no farm had had itstegevus (note 14), 152.

Fig. 3. Mok�sina village in the Petseri (Pechory) District, after Estonian independence and the resumption of the Stolypin reforms. The surveyor’s rough field map reveals that allhouseholds have been assigned consolidated fields, held as private property. The village as an institution has become obsolete. Source: ERA f. 3540, n. 2, s. 135.

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‘modernized’ and brought into alignmentwith core Estonian values.And, just as with the 1919 Land Law, the owner-occupied, consoli-dated family farmwas both a means and an end.

Mok�sina, a Russian-speaking village of only 61 ha in total, expe-rienced a transformation of landownership typical of the region.56

The village constituted a single cadastral unit ever since the reformsof the latter half of the nineteenth century and the households wereshareholders in the communally owned land. The land surveyor, in1922, found that the last meeting, which resulted in land redistribu-tion among the twelve households, had taken place in 1910. As thatmeeting’s decision was the only documentation of the internal landrelations within the village, the regional land commission declaredthat it was legally valid and that the share held by each farm repre-sented its legal claim. The farms cultivated between three and tenelongated strips each, practicing three-field crop rotation. Accordingto the new property structure they were allotted one compact fieldeach, with the exception of three farms that were allotted two, andone that was assigned three, separate parcels. The farms were verysmall by Estonian standards (between2 and6.7 ha) andhardly viable.Nonetheless, communal tenure was abolished and the propertystructure was indeed brought into alignment with the new, stan-dardized property regime of the nation; itwas, at least officially, non-hierarchical and undifferentiated, but also corresponding to thestate’s need to survey the land (Fig. 3).

If the landowners in Mok�sina appear to have accepted the ideaof individualized property rights, Dubrovka is an example ofa village were the local interests converged with those of the state,

56 Mok�sina küla hingemaade kruntimine, ERA f. 3540, n. 2, s. 135.57 Dubrovka küla hingemaade korraldus, ERA f. 62, n. 2, s. 288358 T. Shanin, The Awkward Class. Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing SocietyCommune (note 32), 169e174.

but for somewhat different reasons.57 Some time early in thetwentieth century, a number of Dubrovka residents had moved outfrom the old village core and settled in the neighbouring state land(whether the land was state owned prior to the territory’sincorporation into Estonia is not clear), where they rented smallallotments. They had done so probably in accordance with pre-Bolshevik Russian reform policies, which among other thingsencouraged peasants to leave the commune, and which assistedthese peasants by e.g. selling crown lands. It seems however, thatthese peasants acted as if they retained rights in the village’scommunal land, which was still divided into narrow strips. Ina letter from 1933 to the regional land office, some Dubrovkavillagers complained that those who had left the commune, regu-larly let their cattle onto the harvested strips in the old village,showing no respect of the traditions of the commune. The villagersalso explained that the village commune itself was divided,between those who adhered to the old ways, and those who hadaccepted the traditions as ‘dissolved’. The confusing institutionalsituation in Dubrovka was probably enhanced by recent reforms inRussia. The Stolypin reforms (1906e1916) had initiated the decay ofcommunes, leading to tension and distrust between peasants wholeft the commune and those who did not, while the Bolshevikabolition of private property (1917) had, once again, reaffirmed thecommunal rights in the eyes of many peasants.58 Thus, by the timethe Estonian state resumed the Stolypin reforms, the confusion hadreached a point when even the adherers of the old customs inDubrovka approved of the state-supported privatization reform as

: Russia 1910e1925, Oxford, 1972, 150e152; Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land

Fig. 4. Peanase village, Ösel (Saaremaa) District, prior to the land consolidation and tenancy reforms of 1926. The village consisted of nine freehold farms, their farmsteads seenclustered in the centre. Each farm cultivated a number of fields. The pastures were held in common. In addition, there were 20 tenant farms or crofts within the village bounds.Source: ERA f. 3, n. 24, s. 851.

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a form of salvation, exclaiming that ‘cultivating land in strips willpush the households down the abyss’.

Politics of enclosure in old Estonian villages

By the mid-1920s, the state paid increasing attention to the farmsituation in former Livland (and to a lesser extent Estland), wherefarms that were purchased already during the Tsarist-period wereseldom adequately consolidated. As described earlier, this wasespecially the case in the Ösel (Saaremaa) region in West Estonia,where estate lords, in the nineteenth century, often sold land topeasants without prior consolidation. Hence, even if the farms wereprivately owned, the village-based open field system prevailed, andpastures were often managed communally. Compared to the newsettlements created on former estate land or the recently consoli-dated farms close to the border with Russia, many villages in oldLivland appeared all the more archaic. In terms of agricultural prog-ress, the Ösel (Saaremaa) region was considered marginal, withrelatively poor conditions for agriculture, and lagging behind the

59 A. Luha, E. Blumfeldt and A. Tammekann (Eds), Saaremaa. Maateaduslik, majanduslik jaSaaremmainH. Sooväli, SaaremaaWaltz. Landscape Imageryof Saaremaa Island in the20th60 Maakorralduse seadus, 1926.61 Kogukonna-, asutuste ja erarendimaade korraldamise seadus, 1926.

national average.59 This provided an economic incentive for a newwave of reforms in Estonia. A second reasonwas more overtly polit-ical. A great number of crofts, with little land to till, were scatteredacross private and communally owned land, and the poverty of thecrofters, and their exposure to the sometimes limited goodwill of thelandlord, was a potential threat to social and political stability. TheLand Law of 1919, after all, had not provided land to all who needed.

These issues were addressed by two land reforms enacted in1926, which, despite their different origins, contributed to thestandardization of the property regime across Estonia. The LandAdjustment Act facilitated the consolidation of parcels and enclo-sure of commons, within entire village tracts.60 A landowner couldrequest consolidation, but one third of the landowners, whotogether owned at least one third of the land in the village, had togive their consent. Almost simultaneously, another law was passed,initiated by the Labour Party (centre) when it entered a coalitiongovernment in 1923dthe Separation of Communal, Institutionaland Private Land Act, popularly known as the Crofter Law(Popsiseadus).61 Its objective was to improve the socio-economic

ajalooline kirjeldus, Tartu,1934. See also a brief overview of pre-Soviet descriptions ofCentury,DissertationesGeographicaeUniversitatis tartuensisNo.21, Tartu, 2004, 74e77.

Fig. 5. Peanasevillage,Öseldistrict (Saaremaa), after the landconsolidationand tenancy reformsof1926. Thevillage consistedof37 freehold farms, of various sizes. Source:ERA f. 3, n. 24, s. 851.Ă

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situation and legal status of crofters, by providing them with thepossibility of obtaining full proprietorship. If the commons were tobe enclosed the crofters feared that the freeholders could pushthem aside, ignoringwhat the crofters themselves regarded as theirearned right to the marginal lands that they had improved; in theend the statute enabled a forced separation and sale of land to thecrofter, if the parties could not reach an agreement on a voluntarybasis.62 The law was sternly resisted by the right-wing parties, whoargued, in a Lockean manner, that the state was to protect, notviolate, private property rights. The Labour Party replied by arguingthat the right-wing parties themselves had supported the state’slegal interference in land matters many times before, but that theynow employed the same argument about the sacredness of privateproperty put forth by the nobility when the latter had opposedpeasant land ownership and emancipation.63 Much effort had beendevoted to the abolition of the hierarchical structures of land tenureassociated with the old regime, and there was thus an egalitarianincentive to reform archaic tenant relations among Estonian

62 Such fears are expressed in the numerous letters (often following a standardizedwordiin 1924e1925, when the Land Adjustment Act and Crofter Law were still being prepared;63 Tööerakonna Keskkomitee, Wõitlus elamise õiguse eest. Popsiseadus, Tallinn, 1926.64 Tööerakonna Keskkomitee, Wõitlus elamise õiguse eest (note 63), 23. My translation65 For a summary of the Finnish inter-war experience, see Jörgensen (note 1), 81e84.66 See for example Luha, Blumfeldt and Tammekann, Saaremaa (note 59), 348e49.

farmers. Indeed, much in line with utilitarian philosophy, theLabour Party claimed that ‘social justice’ was always paramount toprivate property rights. They also warned that unless the crofters’situation is solved, Russia’s Bolsheviks would exploit the situation:‘Never forget’, the party exclaimed rhetorically in a pamphlet, ‘thata people, who can work and feed itself, will never take the baitoffered by Russia’.64 The similar ‘torparit reform’ or Lex Kallio inFinland, which some argued reduced the number of communistsupporters, was referred to as a precedent.65 Indeed, socialistsympathies among crofters and smallholders in Saaremaa weresometimes treated as superficial and passing, and prone to changeonce the land reforms were implemented.66

In West Estonia, these two land reform laws were often imple-mented simultaneously, simply because many crofts were locatedin the communal pastures, which were to be enclosed and priva-tized in accordance with the Land Adjustment Act. In addition,because the nineteenth century Peasant Laws in tsarist-period Öseland Livland had prohibited the formal creation of small farms,

ng) from crofters in Saaremaa (representing 60 villages) to theMinistry of AgricultureMärgukirjad Saaremma lapimaade kruntimise kohta, ERA f. 80, n. 2, s. 2076.

from Estonian.

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many farms were co-owned by family members rather than sub-divided between them. The laws enabled co-owners to claim theirshares as separate, freehold plots. The reforms implied that allhouseholds in a village would own land on equal terms. Progresswas slow, however. In 1934, nearly a decade later, the Crofter Lawhad given 2758 crofters and tenant farmers across Estonia fullproprietorship, but another 7723 were still in the reform process;8364 farms had been consolidated in accordance with the LandAdjustment Act, or had started the process.67 In fact, several villageshad not completed the reform process when land was nationalizedupon the Soviet takeover in 1940 (Figures 4 and 5).

Paenase, in Muhu parish, Saaremaa District, is an example ofa village significantly affected by these two reforms. The villageconsisted of nine freehold farms (purchased from a crown estate inthe 1870s). All had numerous strips of arable and hay, and a share inthe commons. The owners wanted to consolidate their respectivestrips, divide the commons, and at the same time subdivide some ofthe farms between co-owners.68 Subdivisions increased the numberof farms to eighteen, which inevitably led to a general decrease infarm size. However, because there were twenty crofts in the village,land consolidation was carried out simultaneously with the CrofterLaw. The crofters resided, predominantly, along the edges of theformer open fields and used between 0.2 and 2.8 ha of land. Theywere given the opportunity to purchase their land, aswell as receiveadditional land at the expense of the old freehold farms anda neighbouring, nationalized manor. As remembered today bya descendant of one of the original freeholders in Paenase, thereform was unpopular among established freeholders, but few ofthem complaineddthe crofters were often relatives of the free-holders, and were often assigned land in the village’s formerpastures where soils were, anyway, poor.69 The same man remem-bers that much of the former commons was used as communalpasture even after the reform and still when the Soviet occupationbegan.70 By the end of the 1930s, therewere thirty-seven registeredfreehold farms, to be compared to the nine freehold farms at theonset of the reform. By implementing the Land Adjustment Act andthe Crofter Law, the economic potential of the former reform wasreduced by the political considerations of the latter; indeed, thereforms reinforced the existence of very small and unviable farms(even if some of them were, in practice, craft-workers’ homes).71

These weaknesses aside, from the state’s point of view, with the1926 reforms, the overall aim of creating an undifferentiated, non-hierarchical property structure, in alignment with the democraticideal of the new state, had been addressed, if not yet completed.

Mending the nation: concluding remarks

Individualization of land rights and land enclosure hadbeen ongoingin the region since themiddle of thenineteenth century, butEstonianindependence gave such processes a new role and meaning. Whilesome of the original economic and philanthropic motives remained,new considerations were added. By placing the four major landreforms of the post-Tsarist period in their historical and geopoliticalcontext, I have shed light on their role in the national integrationproject. This role of the reforms may not be immediately evident,

67 Riigikantselei, Valitsusasutiste tegevus (note 14), 153e155.68 Paenase küla korralduspiirkond, ERA f. 3538, n. 1, s. 287, 288, 289.69 Interview conducted in Paenase, 2003.70 The continuation of communal practices in privatized commons is recalled also by elthe same parish, it is remembered that privatized commons were indeed fenced. The in71 In 1938 a new law, motivated by agro-economic research, specified that if a farmwasmust remain with the original farm, while the part cut off must not be less than 10 ha; F.72 Riigi statistika keskbüroo, III. Põllumajandusloendus 1939. a., Tallinn, 1940.

given that each reform addressed a specific and different problem,such as: the concentration of land to a privileged ‘foreign’minority;the persistence of Russian-style village land communes in easternEstonia; remaining open field systems and communal pasturesprimarily in the former province of Livland; and, finally, povertyamong, and vulnerability of, crofters and agricultural workers in anotherwise democratized society. Yet, the solution provided by eachreformwas based on the same principle, i.e. to create conditions forindependent family farming, and this in turn led to the imple-mentation of a similar type of property structure across the nationalterritory. The political and scholarly rhetoric of the time suggest,quite clearly, that a coherent property regime was regarded as animportant means by which the country could be culturally andspatially integrated or, to put it figuratively, mended. In other words,all of the land reformsdnot only the much studied Land Law of1919dcontributed to the fulfilment of a new societal order, inwhichthe equitable distribution and individual control of property occu-pied a pivotal role. Based on thefigures presented in this paper, thesefour reform impacted on 106,816 farms, by changing their propertystatus, by adjusting their property boundaries, or by having createdthem in the first place (the total number of farms in Estonia in 1939,with 1 ha of land or more, was 139,984).72

The series of land reforms enacted in Estonia between 1919 and1926 can thus be described as a form of calculated and piecemealspatial surgery conducted by the state, with the aim of removing orcuring dysfunctional or obsolete structures that were believed tohinder, or even threaten, the realization of the new nation and itsdominating citizen ideal. As far as the state was concerned, by the1930s, estates and villages had become obsolete as cadastral ororganizational entities; in terms of land relations, it was as if therewere no intermediate levels separating the citizen-landowner fromthe state. In 1931, the first sheets in a new cadastral map series wereprinted, called skeemiline kaart (‘schematic map’ or ‘general map’).The sheets corresponded to the squares in a geometric grid thatcovered the entire country, and the standardization of the propertyregime meant that the map maker could, for the first time, beindifferent to the varied land tenure history of each and everysettlement. However, as this paper demonstrates, the standardizedappearance of the new property structure and its seeming time-lessness (in the sense that all properties were synchronized, as itwere, according to the same ideal),were, at the same time, the spatialarticulation of changing property rights ideals. While the generaldevelopment displays similarities with countries where democraticand market-oriented institutions developed earlier, the Estoniancasemust be viewed against the country’s position betweenwesternand eastern property traditions and their ideological foundations.

Acknowledgements

The research described here was partly funded through a SwedishResearch Council grant (#2008-1486) and a grant by The SwedishResearch Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences andSpatial Planning (Formas, #2002-972). The author would like tothank the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to theimprovement of this manuscript.

derly people in the villages of Võiküla and Mõega in Muhu parish, while in Aljava interviews were conducted in 2003.to be divided (e.g. between co-owners, or between owner and crofter), at least 20 haVirma, Maareformi käigus ümberkruntimiskava uus kord, Geodeet (1999) 20, 33e35.