ON THE NATURE OF LAND OWNERSHIP IN DAGESTAN IN THE 18<sup>th</sup> - EARLY 20<sup>th</sup> CENTURIES
The article deals with the nature of land ownership in Dagestan in the 19<sup>th</sup> - early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries. Estate and land relations, land and legal problems were the most complex in the socio-economic development of the pre-revolutionary Dagestan. Russian authorities paid much attention to their solution. After joining to Russia, several estate and land commissions were formed and they collected a large amount of material on the estate and land relations in Dagestan. The article covers the forms of land ownership in the 19<sup>th</sup> - early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries. There were communal, waqf (i.e. mosque) lands, state and private lands. The latter were divided into large feudal landownership and peasant landownership - myulks. Pastures were in communal ownership and plowing and hay fields belonged to myulks. On the plain, land ownership was communal. State-owned lands in Dagestan appeared due to confiscation of lands from anti-Russian feudal lords and due to the lands of rural societies as well. Waqf lands were those bequeathed to the mosque. Much attention is paid in the article to redistribution of land ownership, when lands passed from one owner to another. There were several great redistributions of lands in Dagestan. The first of them occurred in the 18<sup>th</sup> century when the feudal lords, in the course of rise of their political and economic power, began to seize peasant lands on the Kumyk plane. By the end of the 18<sup>th</sup> century all the lands were in the hands of ten princely families. The second great redistribution of lands in Dagestan took place in the 1860s when after the agrarian reform half of the feudal lords' lands on the plain and in the foothills passed to the emancipated peasants. Rise and development of capitalist relations were accompanied by the growth of extra estate land ownership. Feudal lords actively pawned their lands and gave them to representatives of other estates, in particular, to rich uzdens. Thus, in the late 19<sup>th</sup> - early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries there was another redistribution of lands in Dagestan. Considerable changes in the sphere of land ownership occurred in Soviet times.