The Stolypin Land Reform passed in 1906 provided for the
enclosure of the land of individual peasant households in European
Russia. The political, social and legal aspects of the Reform have
been studied in detail in the past but little attention has been
focused on the actual results the Reform achieved on the ground. It
is the author's contention that examination of the results of the
Reform is essential if conclusions are to be reached about the
significance of the enclosure movement to the changes taking place
during the inter-revolutionary period in Russia and to the 1917
Revolution itself. The study of the enclosure movement in Russia is
also relevant to the more general discussion among geographers of
agrarian change and revolutions.
In the thesis, with reference to three provinces selected
from different functional regions of pre-Revolutionary Russia, the
pattern of adoption of enclosure is described and an attempt made to
explain the patterns. In the first part the number of peasant
households that enclosed their land, the method by which enclosure
was effected and the resultant type of farming units formed in the
sample provinces is investigated and hypotheses explaining the patterns
observed tested. It was found that the peasants' response to the
Reform varied considerably and that this was due to differences in the
socio-economic composition of the peasant class, the level of
agricultural technique, the existing spatial organisation of the land
and ecological conditions. In the second part the post-enclosure
situation is examined, attention being focused in particular on the
type of farming system that evolved on the newly formed enclosed farms.
It was found that, contrary to the expectations of the authors of the
enclosure legislation, the improvements of farming in the way of
intensification was not widespread on farms after enclosure. The
improvement of farming was found to be dependent more upon the resources
possessed by individual peasant farmers than upon the system of tenure
and spatial organisation of the land