Turning the pages back...

December 7, 1997

More than five years after private land ownership was legalized by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's state-owned collective farms have finally been disassembled, our Kyiv correspondent reported on December 7, 1997. "We can say today that the land reform that began with the giving of certificates to individuals and legal entities is practically complete," said Volodymyr Kulinych of the Ukrainian State Committee on Land Resources.

Ukraine legalized the private ownership of land in 1992, but only in August 1995, when President Leonid Kuchma signed an edict on the procedure for delving out shares of state collective farms to individuals and organizations, did the transfer of state-owned land into private hands begin, our correspondent Roman Woronowycz explained. That act and one from November 1994, which initiated the privatization of agricultural lands, began putting land in the hands of the farmers who had worked it for years for the Soviet state.

Since then through 1997, 8 million hectares of land were privatized through the issuance of certificates to farmers in state collective farms. The average size of a plot of land redeemed for a certificate was 5 hectares. In the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine some of the plots doled out were as large as 20 hectares, while in the west certificates were redeemed for as little as eight-tenths of a hectare.

Source: "With state-owned collective farms now gone, Ukraine seeks to complete privatization of land," by Roman Woronowycz, Kyiv Press Bureau, The Ukrainian Weekly, December 7, 1997, Vol. LXV, No. 49.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 7, 2003, No. 49, Vol. LXXI

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