Conflicts over Land Use in the Moscow Region
Conflicts over Land Use in the Moscow Region

Summary/Abstract: The lands of the Moscow region are currently undergoing a transformation that may be as profound in its own way as the collectivization of farmland in the 1930s. In that earlier time the shift was from family-based private or communal farming to collective and state farms in a process that included uncompensated appropriation of land, livestock, and farm machinery, plus the arrest and deportation of anyone who resisted. Although the current transformation involves re-privatization of land, it is not a reversal of the process of collectivization but an entirely new stage of land exploitation. Developers and prosperous individuals, not the former farm families, are rapidly acquiring these lands by fair means and foul in order to construct high-priced housing in gated compounds, and these new owners show little regard for the ecology, the people long resident in the region, or even established zones of protection of cultural heritage sites. An unequal struggle is underway on the part of local citizens to save access to meadows, rivers, ponds, and woods that had belonged to their collective farms and have long be regarded as shared community assets. They are being joined by scientists, artists and lawyers who seek to halt the destruction of cultural heritage sites. These opponents have formed small islands of civil society action and succeeded in some places to limit or delay new construction.

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