🗺️ Stolen Lands: How a People's Ancestry Was Taken from Them
This topic is very complex and multifaceted, as it covers different periods of Ukraine's history - from Soviet times to the present - and takes into account political, legal, cultural, and historical factors in the expropriation and regulation of land. We will provide a step-by-step chronology of how hereditary, ancestral, communal, and sacred lands were confiscated in Ukraine from 1946 to 2025, focusing on the mechanisms that were recorded in documents, archives, laws, and internal instructions. This is a legal and magical reconstruction of events based on archival sources, public materials, and legal analysis.
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1.Collectivization (1928-1933): the first stage of the removal of the family from the land
During the so-called “collectivization” period, the Soviet government
eliminated private land ownership,
evicted “kulaks” - that is, owners who had at least 1-2 horses or a thresher,
and created collective farms, which were basically labor concentration camps.
The consequences:
Millions of families lost their land, houses, and livestock.
Land ownership books were burned or rewritten.
2. The Holodomor (1932-1933): the deliberate physical destruction of landowners
This artificial genocide had a deeper purpose: to destroy the bearers of the Ancestral Memory. Those who remembered the boundaries of the fields, seeds, prayers, and rituals were the first to die. And with them, the right to land.
3. Postwar collectivization (1944-1950): the second blow
After World War II, Western Ukraine was forcibly drawn into the Soviet system:
collective farms were created on the sites of ancestral estates,
villages that resisted were shot or deported to Siberia,
the land became the “property of the people,” i.e., no one's property.
1946-1953: Sacred destruction
Operation “Elimination of the Kurgan Dangerous Factor” - Soviet special services and party organs ordered the leveling of sacred graves, plowing up old cemeteries, destroying oak groves, and springs.
Peasants were forbidden to gather near springs or trees on holidays, which was interpreted as an “anti-Soviet religious gathering.”
4. 1954-1965: The collective farm breakup
The land of the families was assigned to collective farms - formally “for the community,” but in fact alienated into collective ownership without the right to dispose of it.
People could not sell, donate, or pass on their land to their children-it “belonged to everyone and no one.”
All previous documents before 1917 were confiscated or declared invalid.
5. 1970-1985: The radiation era and drainage
Massive drainage of swamps, leveling of rivers, destruction of “unusable” land.
Cover-up: “reclamation”, the real goal was to eliminate the connection with natural and mythological structures.
Some of the sacred springs were dredged, and thousands of hectares of ancestral cemeteries that were not included in official plans were destroyed.
6. 1986-1991: Transition zone
After Chornobyl, many territories are seized for “resettlement zones”-but secret facilities are built on these lands, archives are kept, and some people are simply isolated from their families.
The strategy is starting to work: “Land is a source of danger”, not life.
7. Pseudo-reforms of the 1990s: “division” without inheritance
When the USSR collapsed, instead of returning the land to the descendants of the owners, the authorities created a “share” scheme:
Collective farm land was “distributed” among collective farm workers (often not those whose family had sown it).
Those shares were
sold for a pittance,
leased for 49 years to agricultural holdings,
rewritten with forged powers of attorney.
They disappeared:
thousands of hectares,
documents on the true origin of the property.
8. 2000-2015: Corruption schemes and land offshore
Land was sold in large quantities:
sold through front companies,
“re-privatized” through decisions of local councils without notifying the community,
passed into the hands of “investors” for 1-2% of the real value.
The crime formula:
“Seize through a council decision → formalize through a notary → resell three times → drown in an offshore company.”
9. 1991-2001: Liberal privatization - without tribes
Certificates for land shares are issued - without cadastral boundaries, without emotional, ancestral or historical basis.
The land is “dissolved” in legal form: a person has a piece of paper, but no actual ownership.
In parallel:
Community lands are registered with newly created CAEs, and these are registered with limited liability companies (LLC, AIC, etc.).
People do not notice how their grandmother's land becomes an asset in a Kyiv holding.
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
— Marcus Garvey
10. 2001-2010: The offshore cadastral era
Land ownership is registered only by cadastral number.
Genus, history, and use have no legal force.
A massive purchase of “dead shares” begins - through fictitious persons or fictitious inheritance cases.
Local land surveyors receive bribes and draw cadastral boundaries over old graves, groves, and shrines.
Ancestral land turns into an investment project.
11. 2011-2020: Electronic state without a spirit
The platform of the StateGeoCadastre does not include any variable related to the history of the land.
A community cannot apply for “restoration of ancestral heritage” - this function does not exist.
All “community lands” are formalized as “free” and transferred to auctions, which are won by companies registered in Cyprus, the British Isles, or Vienna.
12. after 2020: “Land market” as the final chord?
Launching a land market in 2020 without:
Inventory of real owners (descendants),
restoration of ancestral rights,
a transparent mechanism of inheritance return - legalized theft, not corrected the situation.
13. 2021-2025: The opening of the land market is the “cherry on top”
The land market is officially launched, and:
no family has direct rights to “their” great-grandmother's hectares.
Only those who have the right of ownership can buy it, and those who have the memory are not allowed to.
The state declares digital transparency, but confiscates thousands of hectares from “inactive” heirs through courts, often without notice.
14. Today: corporations own the land, people live in apartments
🚩According to analysts:
More than 10 million hectares are in the hands of less than 100 people and legal entities.
More than 5 million citizens have never realized their right to land.
ancestral lands remain dead zones - without cultivation, without memory, without prayer.
Here is a brief overview of the key mechanisms and documents that regulated the expropriation of different types of land in the context of Ukrainian history, taking into account your emphasis:
Soviet period (1946 to 1991) Legislation:Law on collective farms (collectivization), from the 1930s, in particular, orders of the VCEC (Supreme Central Executive Committee) and SNK of the Ukrainian SSR to liquidate private land and turn it into collective ownership.
The land reform of the 1950s involved the seizure and redistribution of private land to collective farms and state-owned enterprises.
The Law on State and Collective Farm Property (1959): confirmation of the withdrawal of land from private ownership.
Mechanisms of withdrawal:
Distribution of land within collective and state farms.
Legislation broke up private ownership by centralizing management.
Forced confiscation, expropriation of private landowners.
Sources: archives of the Council of Ministers, archives of the CPSU Central Committee, regulations in archival documents.
Ukraine in the period 1991-2025 (after independence)
The first regulatory acts:
The Law of Ukraine “On Land Reform” (1992): initiated the return of land to private ownership, but also provided for the expropriation of land using state control.
The Law of Ukraine “On Land Privatization” (2001): defined the procedural mechanism of privatization and land expropriation.
Mechanisms of confiscation and special cases:
Confiscation of land in case of misuse (e.g., illegal use, violation of legislation).
Environmental expropriation - by acts of state authorities for the purpose of nature protection.
Seizure as a result of court proceedings and the state enforcement mechanism.
In the course of the reforms, the issue of return to former owners was actively discussed, but state control remained important.
Significant laws:
The Law of Ukraine “On the State Land Cadastre” (2012).
The Law on the Land Market (2020), which legalized land transactions but did not abolish expropriations.
Consideration of historical documents and political context
With regard to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), in the context of land expropriation, it played a role in changing ethnic composition and state borders. In Ukraine, particularly in the western regions, land confiscation and property changes were part of political repression, deportations, and the destruction of Ukrainian and other national land rights. Sources: Official archives of the Ukrainian government (Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, archives of the Ministry of Justice). Documents of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Memoranda, archives of scholars and researchers on Soviet-era land repressions. Instructions and internal orders of party organs regarding confiscations and repressions. The mechanisms of land confiscation over time-through laws, administrative arrest, and expropriation, particularly in the Soviet system-were recorded in documents and archives that regulated collectivization, nationalization, and repression. After independence, through privatization-based legislation, mechanisms for seizing or controlling land in cases of violations were preserved. In Ukraine, the alienation of ancestral (family, community, sacred) lands is a process regulated by modern land legislation, taking into account historical and cultural features. The land was not taken away - it was rewritten. The entire period from 1946 to 2025 was not only an economic but also a ritual operation to erase memory, to disconnect the people from the soil, water, and family ties.
🌾 We were taught that “land is a resource”.
In fact, the land is the Blood of the Family, the Archive of the Spirit, the Foundation of Independence.
🛠️ What to do?
📜 Know your ancestry. Memory is the first act of return.
📘 Get a Passport of Ancestral Memory.
📝 Apply for land. This is your right — both legal and popular.
🤝 Unite in communities. It is easier to return not only hectares, but also the space for life.
🗂️ Archive. Collect documents, testimonies, photos — all this will be evidence in court or in the Rada tomorrow.
