Economy of The Soviet Union - Forms of Property

Forms of Property

There were two basic forms of property in the Soviet Union: individual property and collective property. These differed greatly in their content and legal status. According to communist theory, capital (means of production) should not be individually owned, with certain negligible exceptions. In particular, after the end of a short period of the New Economic Policy and with collectivization completed, all industrial property and virtually all land were collective.

Land in rural areas was allotted for housing and some sustenance farming, and persons had certain rights to it, but it was not their property in full. In particular, in kolkhozes and sovkhozes there was a practice to rotate individual farming lots with collective lots. This resulted in situations where people would ameliorate, till and cultivate their lots carefully, adapting them to small-scale farming, and in 5–7 years those lots would be swapped for kolkhoz ones, typically with exhausted soil due to intensive, large-scale agriculture. There was an extremely small number of remaining individual farmsteads (khutors хутор), located in isolated rural areas in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Siberia and cossack lands.