The term ‘land reform’ (also known as land ownership reform, agricultural reform or rural reform), which refers to changes in land ownership, is usually used in the plural. Originally, the determiner ‘reform’ was regarded as the antonym of ‘revolution’; here, following an expansion of its meaning during the 19th century, it expresses ‘renewal’ or ‘change’. In the period between the First and Second World Wars, as well as in the post-war era across Europe – particularly in Central-Eastern, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe – the term ‘land reforms’ was used by governments to describe their legislation; in academic circles, it has since been used as a technical term in this context.

English: land reform; French: réforme agraire; Czech: pozemková reforma; Polish: reforma rolna; Romanian: reforma agrară; Croatian: zemljišnu reformu; Russian: земельная реформа (zemel’naja reforma)

‘Land reform’ refers to the compulsory change in ownership of land – which, from a legal and economic perspective, constitutes a single entity – decreed and implemented by the state for ethnic, ideological, economic or socio-political reasons. The term ‘land reform’ thus refers, on the one hand, to changes in the applicable land law, particularly with regard to rights of possession and ownership, and, on the other hand, to the reorganisation of the structure of land management or cultivation. State-initiated land reforms were historical phenomena observed in East Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, particularly during the periods of political and social upheaval following the First and Second World Wars. As a result of land reforms, landless peasants were generally intended to be granted land to cultivate. Limiting the size of, or completely abolishing, large landholdings in the respective country were common objectives of these reform efforts. Furthermore, the nationalisation of land would have resulted in the abolition of individual property rights, usually through compulsory sale. However, these efforts mostly failed – particularly in the interwar period – due to resistance from large landowners. Furthermore, land reforms were used as a political tool to combat opponents in conflicts between different national or ethnic groups.

As early as the 19th century and before the First World War, this form of land reform was implemented in the Russian Empire (Stolypin’s agrarian reform, from 1906), in Romania by Prime Minister Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–1891) in 1864, and in Bulgaria in 1880, with the aim of revising land ownership structures that were often perceived as unjust. The main aim of the reforms was therefore to safeguard the basic needs of the rural population by ensuring a sufficiently large area of agricultural land.

Primarily to eliminate extreme disparities in land ownership and to abolish absenteeism, extensive land reforms were carried out following the establishment of new states in East-Central and South-Eastern Europe after 1918; these differed from one another primarily in terms of their initiation, objectives, implementation and the strategy of the respective government and the relevant institutions. The governments’ primary aim was to distribute land to legionnaires and First World War volunteers, as well as to smallholders, in order to legitimise themselves in the eyes of the members ofthenew‘nationalities’ of the state. Under socialism, land was expropriated without compensation and transferred to state ownership. Owing to the sometimes unclear legal circumstances, the refusal to pay compensation and the frequently unstable political situation, the land reforms were often carried out in an unstructured manner. Their implementation was also frequently accompanied by arbitrariness, as evidenced, for example, by various complaints lodged by German landowners with the League of Nations.

Germans living in Eastern Europe were affected by these restructuring measures to varying degrees; not least for this reason, a presentation differentiated by country and geography is required in the following.

Under Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911), an agrarian reform had already been initiated by a decree of 1906, with the aim of enabling peasants to own land independently and creating a class of middle-class farmers.

In revolutionary Russia, this agrarian reform did not initially progress beyond the establishment of land committees in April 1917, as the conservative liberals did not agree to expropriation. The driving force behind the reform, Minister of Agriculture Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873–1952), consequently abandoned his plans at the end of August 1917. Following the October Revolution, on the basis of the ‘Decree on Land of 26 October 1917’, land redistribution took place in the autumn and winter of 1918, covering an area of 17–24 million hectares (depending on the criteria used). However, this failed to satisfy the peasants’ ‘hunger for land’, as the land distributed was mostly difficult to access or of poor quality, and thus it was not possible to ensure food supplies for either the rural or the urban population. The state requisitioning of grain and other foodstuffs – the so-called ‘dictatorship of supply’ – tended to exacerbate the situation in the interwar period and provoked various peasant uprisings, without resolving the underlying problems. Above all, the old elites, including German landowners, lost their lives or were forced to emigrate during the war and the interwar period. The fundamental agrarian reform of the NEP period (the ‘New Economic Policy’ [Novaja ėkonomičeskaja politika, NĖP], the economic policy concept devised by Lenin [1870–1924] and Trotsky [1879–1940] of 1921) is the Agrarian Code of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) of 30 October 1922, which primarily regulated property relations and land use in accordance with the principles of the communist state. Under Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), from 1924 onwards, alongside industrialisation, the forced collectivisation of agriculture was carried out, which effectively abolished private ownership of land. In 1932, the proportion of collectivised farming households stood at 61.6 per cent; German landowners were affected only in isolated cases, as their numbers were very small.

After the Second World War, a ‘Council for Collective Farm Affairs within the Government of the USSR’was established to continue the forced collectivisation and to monitor compliance with the various agricultural regulations.

In the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, land reforms were initiated and implemented following the proclamation of the republics and in the wake of the War of Independence (1918–1920). In the process, predominantly German-owned land – and thus also the property of the German-Baltic ruling class – was expropriated and, for the most part, distributed to smallholders.

Despite internal controversies, an Agricultural Act was passed in Estonia on 10 October 1919, which stipulated the expropriation of all large estates, including their contents. By 1921, 2.3 million hectares of land had been expropriated, of which around 1.2 million hectares were distributed; the remainder became state property. The Baltic Germans lodged a complaint with the League of Nations alleging a violation of minority rights, but this was dismissed.

In Latvia, the Agrarian Act of 19 September 1920 provided for the expropriation without compensation of large estates, including their buildings, covering a total area of 3.5 million hectares. During the distribution, a classification system was applied which heavily favoured, above all, those who had taken part in the War of Independence.

The agrarian reform in Lithuania, enacted on 29 March 1922, was the least radical and mainly affected Polish and Russian landowners. The upper limit on private land ownership was set at 80 hectares, and later even raised to 150 hectares.

Following the completion of the nation-building process in Poland in 1921, the land reform – which had been initiated as early as 1919 and enshrined in the Agrarian Reform Act of July 1920 – was implemented. Initially, its implementation was in danger of failing due to domestic political instability, but in 1925 a comprehensive body of legislation was passed which, for the time being, provided for voluntary parcelling – that is, the transfer, without any fixed limit on the amount, of large estates comprising between 180 and 700 ha. However, provision was made for compulsory sale at market prices should the annual quota for voluntary parcelling, set at 200,000 ha, not be met. The reform reached its peak in 1927, when 245,000 ha were parcelled out. In total, 154,000 new smallholdings were created in this way during the interwar period; around 500,000 farms were able to expand. During this period, the proportion of Germans amongst the large landowners fell only from ten per cent in 1921 to nine per cent in 1931.^[1] This was due to support from the German government and the negotiations at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

In the wake of the Great Depression, sales ground to a halt due to falling land prices, and there were isolated cases of compulsory expropriation, particularly in the more agriculturally developed western regions.

The relatively slow pace of the reform in Poland failed to resolve the social and economic problems that prevailed, primarily due to overpopulation in rural areas; as a result, the surplus labour force in agriculture and the low incomes of farmers continued to threaten the livelihoods of the majority of the population.

In the post-war period, a further land reform took place in Poland. In the areas that had already belonged to Poland before 1939, the area under cultivation had been limited to 50 ha, whereas in the new western territories of Poland, a more generous arrangement was the norm. In the territories that had belonged to Poland prior to 1939, a total of around two million hectares were confiscated, of which around 780,000 hectares had been German-owned. In the spring of 1945, Poland then expropriated all land holdings belonging to Germans in the former eastern territories of the German Reich; in total, around four million hectares of agricultural and forest land were made available for distribution. The justification for this reform lay primarily in the recovery of land that had been owned by ‘traitors and enemies’.

With the National Committee’s assumption of power on 28 October 1918 and the formation of a new government under the leadership of Tomáš G. Masaryk (1850–1937), the process of establishing the state of Czechoslovakia was complete. Whilst the Czechoslovak land reform, which began with the ‘Law on the Restriction of Large Landholdings’ enacted by the National Committee on 9 November 1918, what, from the outset, used by some members of parliament primarily as a political instrument against the nobility who did not hold Czechoslovak citizenship – including German large landowners – the Masaryk government, however, viewed the land reform as a stabilising factor for the young republic. In the course of the land reform, just under 4,000,000 ha were set aside for redistribution – this affected estates comprising more than 150 ha of agricultural land or 250 ha of general land. By 31 December 1921, for example, a total of 733,489.81 ha had been expropriated in the Bohemian lands. Within a few years, ‘the fundamental decisions on land reform were translated into specific laws on expropriation, parcelling and compensation payments’^[2], so that the stabilising effect of the redistribution of land ownership in Czechoslovakia soon became apparent: As there were no delays to the process in parliament, as had been the case in Poland, for example, the land reform was completed by the end of the 1920s and, above all, satisfied the claims of many Czech and Slovak smallholders.

The second land reform in Czechoslovakia, in which more than a quarter of the total area of arable land and woodland was redistributed, began in February 1945 and continued until 1951. As the so-called ‘conclusion’ of the reform following the First World War, it was officially initiated by the decree ‘on the expropriation, redistribution and settlement of land belonging to enemies and traitors’ of 21 June 1945. At the end of this reform, the upper limit on private ownership was set at 50 ha; the class of medium-sized farmers was now the strongest due to the new ownership structures. In the final stage of the second reform, which was implemented primarily after the Communist takeover in March 1948, the government released a further 700,000 ha for distribution, thereby also abolishing ownership of medium-sized plots of land.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Mihály Károlyi (1875–1955) had proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Hungary on 16 November 1918, and in January 1919 he announced a land reform as a measure to address social grievances, which was also given a legal basis by the Land Reform Acts of February 1919. However, internal and external pressures led to Károlyi’s resignation; on 21 March 1919, the Communists, led by Béla Kun (1886–1938), seized power and established a Communist Soviet Republic. The redistribution of the large estates, which had been radically expropriated, failed to materialise, with the result that resistance from the rural population also contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Republic. Although the government under Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), as Regent, was forced to accept the territorial cessions resulting from the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the landowning elites were nevertheless able to achieve political consolidation, bolstered by the concession of a moderate land reform. The Small Farmers’ Party, led by the Minister of Agriculture, István Nagyatádi Szabó (1863–1924), was the driving force behind the land reform, with the result that a Land Reform Act, also known as the ‘Nagyatádi Land Reform Act’, was passed by the National Assembly in November 1920. The Act did not significantly alter the structure of land ownership, as, on the basis of the Act, only 450.00 ha of the 8.5 million ha available were redistributed – land which the large landowners had voluntarily ceded.

After the Second World War, Imre Nagy (1896–1958), as Minister of Agriculture for the Communist Party MDP (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja [Party of Hungarian Workers]), a land reform based on communist-socialist objectives was initiated in March 1945 through the Land Reform Ordinance. Under a decree of July 1945, all members of the German People’s Association – and thus, de facto, the entire German minority – were expropriated without compensation. On 29 December 1945, in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, the Hungarian government decreed that all Hungarian citizens who had declared German nationality or German as their mother tongue in the 1941 census were to be expelled to Germany. In total, between 1946 and 1948, around 185,000 members of the German minority were forcibly dispossessed, interned in camps and expelled.^[3]

As early as 1864, Prince Alexandru Ion Cuza (1820–1873), together with the Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–1891), had attempted an agrarian reform which turned some peasants into landowners, but which failed due to resistance from the boyars.

Following the territorial gains set out in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, King Ferdinand I (1865–1927) was able to embark on the agrarian reform he had already promised in 1917. Following the initial passing of various individual laws, the government under Alexandru Averescu (1859–1938) implemented a land reform in 1920–1921, which primarily resulted in the complete expropriation of the lands belonging to the Hungarian Crown and to former Hungarian citizens who had become foreign nationals. As a result of the reform, it must be noted that only a small proportion of farmers received sufficient land. The main problems, such as low profitability, persisted, with the result that by the time of the Second World War, around 75 per cent of farmers still owned less than 5 hectares of land.

The expropriation in Romania following the Land Reform Act of 23 March 1945 was a measure aimed at acquiring land at the expense of the German and, to some extent, the Hungarian minorities, as well as Romanian war criminals. The Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians effectively lost their landholdings, which consisted mainly of agricultural land. The abolition of large-scale land ownership, coupled with the simultaneous cap on land ownership at 50 ha, resulted in around 1.8 million ha being expropriated and, for the most part, redistributed. In addition, around 80,000 Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour.^[4]

Under the motto ‘Only you and God’s land’, Aleksandar (1888–1934), Regent of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – later Yugoslavia – on 6 January 1919 announced the implementation of a land reform aimed both at resolving the general agrarian question and at abolishing the kmet system^[5] and large-scale landownership. As part of the land reform initiated in early 1919, by 1929 a total of 437,862 ha of land—which had been taken from large landowners holding more than 500 ha—had been distributed among 262.666 families in need, at an average of three cadastral yoks per family. Nevertheless, the land distribution – which was provisionally concluded with the ‘Law on the Liquidation of Agrarian Reform on Large Estates in Yugoslavia’ of 19 June 1931, and in which many farmers, such as the Danube Swabians, were not taken into account – failed to improve social and economic conditions in the country: the now prevailing structure of small landownership, the farmers’ renewed dependence on landlords, and the continued lack of market viability hindered the social advancement sought by small and micro-landowners.

The Communist reform efforts, which reached their peak between 1945 and 1948, were aimed at eliminating the feudal conditions that still persisted in some areas as a result of the interwar land reform, which was regarded as a failure. The ‘Law on Land Reform and Colonisation’ of 23 August 1945 marked the start of this second land reform in Yugoslavia, which resulted in the redistribution of approximately 1.6 million hectares of agricultural and forest land, much of which had previously been German-owned. The confiscated land was distributed amongst newly formed, state-run co-operations. From 1951 onwards, the collectivisation of agriculture was halted and, in response to demand, private ownership of agricultural land was limited to ten hectares.

Assessments of the land reforms, which represented a decisive turning point particularly for German landowners in the interwar period, are mixed, as the social and economic structures, as well as land ownership patterns in the various countries, were only partially improved in favour of smallholders and the less well-off sections of society. In academic research, the land reforms are primarily examined in conjunction with the establishment of nation states, because the ‘discursive anchoring of the nation state in interwar Central and Eastern Europe was subject to severe internal tensions’.^[6] The new nation-states had to cope with the social upheavals caused by the far-reaching land reforms during the interwar period without losing their internal stability. The national political aspects of the Czechoslovak, Polish and Hungarian land reforms, as their central motive, have been discussed and assessed in varying ways.^[7] Whilst a national political impetus cannot be identified as a fundamental feature of the reforms, it did play an important role, particularly in public discourse and in contemporary perceptions. The land reforms were also examined and assessed in terms of their stabilising effect on the new nation-states.^[8] The economic benefits are often the central aspect when considering the individual reforms and have consequently frequently been the subject of research.^[9] A nuanced academic examination of the reforms, particularly with regard to German landowners, is still lacking.

• Jaromír Balcar: ‘An Instrument in the People’s Struggle?’ The Beginnings of Land Reform in Czechoslovakia, 1919–20. In: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998), pp. 391–428.
• Mark Cornwall: ‘National Reparation’? The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans, 1918–1938. In: Slavonic and East European Review 75 (1997), pp. 259–280.
• Michael Garleff: The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Regensburg 2001 (Eastern and South-Eastern Europe), pp. 111–113.
• Heinz-Dietrich Löwe: Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform. In: Hans-Joachim Torke (ed.): Encyclopaedia of Russian History. From the Beginnings to the October Revolution. Munich 1985, pp. 367–368.
• Jovica Lukovic: ‘The land should belong to those who cultivate it themselves.’ The Yugoslav Agrarian Reform in the Interwar Period – From Land Allocation to a Solution to the Peasant Question? In: Journal of Social Sciences 1 (2006), No. 2, pp. 36–54.
• Josef Matl: Agricultural Reform in Yugoslavia. Berlin 1927 (Sources and Studies/Institute for Eastern European Studies, Breslau 8).
• Norbert Penkaitis: Agricultural Development in Lithuania 1918–1992. Berlin 1994.
• Joachim von Puttkamer: The Czechoslovak Land Reform of 1919. Social Transformation as the Foundation of the Republic. In: Bohemia. Journal of the History and Culture of the Bohemian Lands 46 (2005), pp. 315–342.
• Wojciech Roszkowski: Land Reforms in East Central Europe after the First World War. Warsaw 1995.
• Holm Sundhaussen: Land Reforms. In: Edgar Hösch, Karl Nehring, Holm Sundhaussen (eds.): Encyclopaedia of the History of South-Eastern Europe. Vienna et al. 2004, pp. 118–120.
• Holm Sundhaussen: The Missed Agricultural Revolution. Aspects of the Developmental Stagnation in the Balkan Countries before 1945. In: Roland Schönfeld (ed.): Industrialisation and Social Change in South-Eastern Europe. Munich 1989 (South-Eastern Europe Studies 42), pp. 45–60.
• Alice Teichova: Small States Caught Between the Great Powers. Economy and Politics in Central and South-Eastern Europe in the Interwar Period. Vienna 1988, pp. 39–56.

[1] Wojciech Roszkowski: Landowners in Poland 1918–1939. New York 1991 (East European Monographs 299), pp. 27–32; and Uwe Müller: Land Reforms and Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe. In: Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Torsten Lorenz, Uwe Müller, Katarzyna Stokłosa (eds.): Social Conflicts and National Borders in East-Central Europe. Festschrift for Helga Schultz on her 65th birthday. Berlin 2006, pp. 171–187, here p. 185.

[2] Joachim von Puttkamer: East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Munich 2010 (Oldenbourg Outline of History 38), p. 76.

[3] Janos Hauszmann: Hungary. From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Regensburg 2004 (South-East and Eastern Europe: History of Countries and Peoples), p. 258.

[4] Von Puttkamer: Eastern Central Europe (note 2), p. 109.

[5] Kmeten were independent peasants who were, however, obliged to pay compulsory levies – usually a third of their harvest – to the state.

[6] von Puttkamer: East-Central Europe (note 2), p. 222.

[7] See Balcar: ‘A Tool in the Struggle for National Identity?’; Cornwall: ‘National Reparation?’; Teichova: ‘Small States Caught in the Crossfire’.

[8] Cf. von Puttkamer: East-Central Europe (note 2), p. 163ff.

[9] See Srećko M. Džaja: The Political Reality of Yugoslavism (1918–1991). With particular reference to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Munich 2002 (Studies in Contemporary South-Eastern European History 37); Hauszmann: Hungary (note 4); von Puttkamer: East-Central Europe (note 2).

Raffael Parzefall: Land reforms. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32847 (as at 13 July 2021).