The right to land ownership in the Black Sea and Kuban troops in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of the approach to land tenure in the tradition of the Black Sea and Kuban Cossack troops. These troops were a genetic continuation of the Zaporozhian Army and tried to preserve both their autonomy and a special economic status, which relied on the special principles of land use, which was commonly used both as stationary communities and the entire Army. The issues that are considered in the article are considered to be particularly relevant in the context of modern legislative searches for the most effective means of using Ukrainian land resources.

The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the maintenance of land resources owned by the stationary communities and all of the Black Sea troops, and subsequently Kuban, was an extremely important factor in its economic development and the preservation of its own status and ethnic identification of the Cossacks, and the struggle to preserve public ownership of the land fund was one of the priorities of the Black Sea / Kuban Cossacks, which did not stop until the beginning of the 20th century. In all provisions on the basic principles of the structure and economy of the Black Sea and Kuban Cossack troops, the land law was carefully fixed and emphasized, based on the joint ownership of the military land fund. At the same time, it caused a lot of conflicts, both with the imperial administration, and among the Ukrainians themselves of the Kuban, both Cossacks and "nonresident". At the beginning of the 20th century, most such conflicts were overcome due to the intensive development of the cooperative movement. In fact, the attitude of the imperial government to the Kuban as a colony, which was manifestly manifested in the forms of the economic outlook for the region, provoked a strong resistance, first of all, by the local Ukrainians, who, acting as a leading organized and cohesive force, found activity in the form of economic self-organization. First of all, this was manifested in the creation of credit unions.

All this allowed maintaining and modernizing the basic principles of the Cossack land tenure and resolving most of the conflicts that they caused. Unfortunately, further development was interrupted by the Bolshevik revolution and by the forced establishment of Soviet power in the Kuban.