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The Latvian Land Reform of 1920 (Latvian: 1920. gada agrārā reforma Latvijā ) was a land reform act expropriating land under the first Republic of Latvia in 1920 (during the Latvian War of Independence shortly before independence). The act favoured ethnic Latvians and targeted the nobility by dividing estates into smaller land plots for transfer to landless Latvians, generally for farming. The act also formed a reserve land fund for the state in order to create new settlements as a result of the rapid increase in the rural Latvian population during the period. Similar land reforms were passed in Estonia, Lithuania ( March 29, 1922) and Poland ( December 28, 1925). The expropriation decree was signed on 16 September 1920 by the Constituent Assembly of Latvia.

Background
In 1816 and 1819 tsarist laws freed the peasants of the Estonian and Livonian provinces from serfdom, but without land. [1] In an attempt to smooth out the contradictions between the prosperous German minority and local landless laborers from among the autochthonous Estonians and Latvians, the government of tsarist Russia made a number of changes. The agrarian reform in Livonia (1849) and the agrarian reform in Estonia (1856) abolished corvée and personally allocated up to 80% of the region's arable land to free peasants, but without forests. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Germansstill owned almost all the forests of the Baltic and a significant share of arable land. For example, in 1913, German nobles still owned 48.1% of the arable land within present-day Latvia. [2] Therefore, the agrarian question remained one of the most urgent tasks of the young Estonian and Latvian states in 1918-1920.

Legislation
On September 16, 1920, the Constituent Assembly adopted the first part of the law "On Land Reform". It provided for the creation of the State Land Fund and the nationalization of large estates in order to change the economic and social structure of the newly created state. 1,479 estates, 171 priestly estates, 294 small estates (pusmuiža), 202 farms, 546 individual land plots, 5,865 private estates with a total area of ​​3,396,815 hectares were nationalized without compensation. The former owners were left with 50 hectares of inalienable land, which was forbidden to be sold, donated, united, pledged, burdened without the permission of the government [3].

The remaining three parts of the law were adopted later [4] :


 * Part 2 "On the use of the State Land Fund" - December 21, 1920;
 * Part 3 "On the strengthening of the Land Reform" - May 3, 1922;
 * Part 4 "On land management committees" - September 17, 1920.

Land applicants were divided into 5 categories [4] :


 * 1) landless peasants of the local parish - holders of the Order of Lachplesis, family members of the fallen soldiers of the Latvian army and war invalids;
 * 2) peasants of other parishes - soldiers of the Latvian army with at least six months of service, participants in the Fights for Liberation, participants or invalids of the Latvian rifle battalions ;
 * 3) all other landless peasants of the local volost;
 * 4) peasants of other volosts who have their own equipment for economic activity;
 * 5) others who wish without inventory.

Outside the categories, land was allocated to government, municipal, public institutions, for social improvement and cultural needs. Land was also automatically allocated for cutting plots of local small-land peasants, setting up a new economy on the site of an existing one, for tenants who had been using some kind of allotment for a long time [4].

War invalids received land free of charge, others had to pay from 10 to 29 lats per hectare [4].

Progress of the reform
Prior to the Land Reform, landowners owned 55% of private land. The number of Baltic Germans according to the first census in 1920 was 58,097 people (3.5% of the country's population). Their nationalized 3.4 million hectares of land accounted for almost half of the total area of ​​agricultural land under the control of Latvia at that time. The Germans in Latvia were thus left without means for their traditional existence, which was the leasing of land to landless Latvians, Latgalians, Sets, and also (less often) Russian Old Believers and Orthodox.

The reform began in 1920 and was completed in 1937, as a result of which 55,964 new owners received land, creating 54,128 new farms. Only 928 thousand 757 hectares of more than 3 million nationalized ha were at their disposal. Half of the farms did not exceed 22 ha, and large farms with an area of ​​over 500 ha were destroyed. 31.6% of all farms were medium and above average, they cultivated 64.5% of the total land. There were few farms with an area of ​​more than 50 hectares: 23.2% of the land was at their disposal [4]. The plots of land separated from the estates were not subject to nationalization if they were acquired by the citizens of Latvia before April 23, 1915 [4].

Already by the adoption of the 1st part of the law, all the estates with buildings, land and inventory that were within the borders of the Republic of Latvia were enrolled and nationalized in the State Land Fund. The former owners were left as administrators of other people's property without authority until the Ministry of Agriculture takes over. All contracts for the purchase or alienation of land, pledges and encumbrances, debt obligations were declared null and void pending approval by the Latvian government. The financial part of the reform was provided by the State Land Bank, established in 1922 [4].

In 1924, the Latvian Seimas, in contrast to the Estonian Riigikogu , decided that the former owners would not receive any compensation from the state (in Estonia, in 1926, a new version of the law of the Estonian authorities established compensation for former owners in the amount of 3% of the market value of the land and no compensation for forest land). The German nobles were thus definitively bankrupt, although the family was allowed to keep 50 hectares of land for personal use [5], but this was not enough to live in grand style in the huge mansions of the palace type, to which the German nobles were accustomed. By the way, similar reorganizations took place after the First World War in several European countries, but the reforms in Estonia and Latvia were the most radical, since German minorities there owned half of all cultivable land, which went against the ethnocratic policy of the newly independent states of the region.

In 1929, the Seimas additionally ruled that the local Germans, members of the Baltic Landeswehr, numbering 3.1 thousand people, who tried to maintain the pro-German regime on the territory of Latvia, also did not have the right to receive compensation for the lands transferred to the Latvians.

Features of the reform in Latgale
Unlike Estonia, where the reform was carried out first in 1919, and then again in 1920, after Soviet Russia transferred the Pechora uyezd to Estonia, the Russian-speaking volosts of Latvia ( Abrene ) were immediately covered by the reform. In Ludza Uyezd, the ethno-land layout differed from the Central Latvian one: there were no German latifundia and manors here, and the predominant population, consisting of a mixture of Belarusians, Russians, Poles, Latgalians and Setos, ran a more or less communal type of economy. This also irritated the Latvian authorities, who were striving for the unification of economic methods throughout the country. In Ludza County, a land-administrative reform was also carried out, which set itself the goal of destroying communal land tenurein the Russian-speaking environment, as well as to bring the Latgalians closer to the Latvians in terms of introducing farm farming methods. Thus, collectivization, which unfolded here after the transfer of Pytalovo to the RSFSR in 1945, actually returned local Russians to their traditional pre-revolutionary communal land use, which the Latvian authorities tried to destroy[ source not specified 852 days ].

The Russian peasants of Latgale were ahead of the Latvians in terms of the proportion of the able-bodied population, but they got less land: 80% of all land owners-Latvians owned 88% of the land, and 11% of the Russian owners received 6% of the land [6].