Russians Steal Ukrainian Farms

The June 18, 2022 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal has an article behind its paywall titled Ukraine's Embattled Farmers Say Russians Steal Their Land.  

According to this article, Russian troops, Chechen units of the Russian army and Russians units from the Donetsk People's Republic have illegally confiscated the crops and farms of Ukrainian farmers.

The provenance of the lands in question is an interesting aspect of the situation. 

During the Tsarist era these lands were the property of the nobility, local communes and individuals. While serfdom had been abolished in 1861, the peasants were still in a position where the obligations of land use often were greater than the possible income. The Duma, or Russian parliament, was absorbed with the petitions and problems of the peasantry and the nobles. 

The Bolshevik revolution changed all that. Agricultural land became property of the state and was organized as state farms, collective farms and, as had been in the past, small plots for the personal use of the peasants. The Ukraine was part of the USSR until August 24, 1991 when a plebiscite voted overwhelmingly for independence from the CIS, the political structure that superseded the USSR.

No longer a "communist" country, Ukraine needed to disburse it's agricultural land to private interests. Information on how this was accomplished isn't easy to find. Of course, it was no longer possible to restore the property to its pre-revolutionary owners. A great deal of the Ukrainian agricultural land is owned by absentee landlords, the privatization process is not very transparent. The current owners might be agricultural "oligarchs" as the new proprietors of the Russian state industries are called  by the US media. Redistribution of state lands has been one of the biggest problems for countries that have rejected the communist system.

Americans should be fairly familiar with this sort of issue, having confiscated millions of acres of land belonging to the native Americans, purchasing land from France and Russia that already belonged to natives, acquiring properties that once were colonies of Spain after 1898 and taking over the Republic of Hawaii, among others. The idea that the borders of Ukraine are somehow sacrosanct flies in the face of world history.