Agrarian Reforms

Measures taken by a state to change agrarian relations and the forms of landownership. The nature of the social system and state power determines in whose interests and on what basis these reforms are carried out. During the bourgeois revolutions in some capitalist countries, agrarian reforms were anti-feudal and speeded up the development of capitalist relations. In the peoples’ democracies of Central and Southeast Europe and Asia, Agrarian Reforms aimed to abolish landlord property by confiscating the landed estates and handing them over to the peasants free of charge or at a small price.