<P> The Emancipation reform of 1861, effected during the reign of Alexander II of Russia, abolished serfdom throughout Russia . More than 23 million people received their liberty . Serfs were granted the full rights of free citizens, gaining the rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business . The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords . </P> <P> Until the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within peasant communities called mirs, which acted as village governments and cooperatives . Arable land was divided in sections based on soil quality and distance from the village . Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household . This communal system was abolished in 1906 by the capitalist - oriented Stolypin reforms . The reforms introduced the unconditional right of individual landownership . They encouraged peasants to buy their share of the community lands, leave the communities and settle in privately owned settlements called Khutors . By 1910 the share of private settlements among all rural households in the European part of Russia was estimated at 10.5% . </P> <P> The Stolypin reforms and the majority of their benefits were reversed after the communist revolution of 1917 . The Decree on Land, issued by Lenin at 1917, and the "Fundamental Law of Land Socialization" of 1918, decreed that private ownership of land is totally abolished - land may not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated . All land, whether state, crown, monastery, church, factory, entailed, private, public, peasant, etc., shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people, and pass into the use of all those who cultivate it . These decrees were superseded by the 1922 Land Code . After the universal agricultural collectivization, land codes of the Soviet republics lost their significance . See Agriculture in the Soviet Union . </P> <P> After the collapse of the USSR, a new land code was enacted, allowing private land ownership . See Agriculture in Russia . </P>

Who did the government sell much of the best most farmable land to