Yeltsin Signs Guarantees of Private Land Ownership : Russia: His landmark decree tackles a key barrier to free market. It could spell the end of collective farms.

Seventy-six years after Vladimir I. Lenin confiscated all private property, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin signed a decree Wednesday guaranteeing Russians the right to buy and sell private land.

The landmark order also allows Russian corporations and individuals to partition, inherit, mortgage or rent land. And it specifies that the government may not confiscate land without fair market compensation.

Parliament had proclaimed private property two years ago, but the law was purely theoretical, as “owners” had no right to control or dispose of their land.

In another sweeping step, beginning in 1994 Russian collective farms will no longer be required to hand over a third of their production to the state, according to the presidential press service. The full text of the decree is to be published today.

‘Without this decree, there could be no real ownership of land,” said Yuri D. Chernichenko, leader of the Farmers Party.

“There are 12 million peasants in Russia, and all of them have become wealthy in just one day,” he said. “But they will need time to realize the full significance of it.”

Land reform remains one of the last formal obstacles to a free market in Russia. About a third of all Russian enterprises have been privatized, although the massive defense sector remains in state hands.

Subsidies still keep energy prices below world levels, but the Yeltsin government has vowed to decontrol them soon. Even bread prices have now been freed. Low-income families are to receive bread coupons, and pensions will be increased to cushion the sticker shock.

But private ownership of land remains one of the most emotionally and politically volatile issues in Russia.

Even under the czars, Russian land was deeded not to individuals but to peasant communes known as mirs , and was sometimes redistributed to the poor in a rough egalitarianism.

Both Marx and Engels thought the institution of the mir contained “the germ of socialism,” and Josef Stalin starved millions of peasants to implement that collectivist vision in the 1930s.

One of the Bolsheviks’ first acts on seizing power was to abolish private property. On Oct. 26, 1917, Lenin confiscated all private estates, with no compensation to landowners, and decreed that land was to belong to the people--as represented by the socialist state.

Exactly 76 years and one day later, Yeltsin’s decree aims to reverse all that. If it can be implemented--and the details of implementation have bedeviled and undermined all of Yeltsin’s previous reforms--the decree will create a vast class of private landowners, liberate them from state supervision and thrust them out into the brave new world of free-market agriculture.

But skeptics abound.

Reformers say Yeltsin’s proposal does not go far enough toward disbanding Russia’s 26,700 collective farms, while some collective farmers say they do not want to disband.

Political pundits argue that grass-roots agrarian reform cannot be accomplished by decree and say that Yeltsin should have put his plan before the new Parliament that is to be elected Dec. 12. Urbanites worry that they seem to be excluded from the land giveaway.

And private property foes warn that speculators, corrupt bureaucrats and Russian mobsters will buy up farmland to resell at indecent profits or rent out at usurious rates, creating a new class of serfs.

“In Russia, land, air and water must belong to all the people and not to concrete individuals,” said Gennady A. Zyuganov, a leader of the Russian Communist Party, which is allying itself with the powerful, conservative Agrarian Party for the upcoming election. “This is against Russian historic traditions. The very nature of a Russian peasant is against it.”

If the collective farm structure is broken into individual farms, “we are in for years of starvation,” Zyuganov declared.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to land reform is the risk-averse peasants who were born and raised on collective farms and have no desire to go it alone. Less than 4% of Russian farmland is now private, and all 184,000 of those family farms were created in the last three years. The vast majority of farmers live on collectives, where the security of state ownership has compensated for a low standard of living.

Public opinion polls have found that half to three-quarters of all farmers oppose decollectivization.

“We do not need any new system; we work fine together!” a collective farmer named Nikolai told the Moscow News.

Nikolai is one of 136 workers and 181 pensioners on the Niva farm, one of six collectives in the Nizhny-Novgorod region slated for privatization under a pilot program sponsored by the International Finance Corp. Like many other farmers, Nikolai fears that powerful agriculture bosses will wind up with the most fertile pickings.

“Everyone knows our management will receive the best plots of land,” he said.

But Farmers Party leader Chernichenko says farmers can band together for efficiency; mortgage part of their property to raise money to buy modern farm equipment, and declare independence from domineering bosses.

“Imagine a poor old woman who has toiled all her life in a collective farm for barely water and bread,” Chernichenko said. “Today she got the right to own a land plot she can sell and become richer than the entire collective farm was yesterday. She can give it to her grandchildren or a friend or anybody. She doesn’t need the collective farm anymore.”

Land reform was stymied by the old Parliament that Yeltsin disbanded last month--in part, analysts say, because of the large number of lawmakers who came from collective farms or other sectors of the giant Soviet agricultural bureaucracy.

Izvestia columnist Mikhail Berger supports private land ownership but worries that the new Parliament may also balk and attempt to overturn Yeltsin’s decree.

“It may well end up in a real war, because land is a commodity really worth fighting for,” Berger said. “People who manage under Yeltsin’s decree to get land could lose everything if Parliament changes the law, and the new rules would benefit the groups that didn’t get land. At worst, this could be a blood bath.”

But others argue that peasants will suddenly have the promise of owning something of enduring value--land--and will shun any parliamentary candidate who would take it away.

“Of course, the state collective farms will not die overnight,” said economist Pavel G. Bunich, who noted that the conservative agricultural lobby remains influential. “But not for very long,” he said. “Freedom is very catching.”

Sergei L. Loiko of the Times Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.