Moscow - President Vladimir Putin yesterday gave his cabinet a May 1st deadline to draft a bill that would enshrine the right of Russian regions to sell land for the first time since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
Regional administrations should be given the right to manage land resources themselves, said Mr Putin, who during his first year in office has generally sought to curtail the powers of provincial leaders.
Land sales could give Russia's 89 regions, only about a dozen of which are net contributors to the federal budget, new economic freedom from the centre.
Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize winning novelist author, Mr Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has criticised the proposal. "We would lose our Russia," he told Interfax. "Land should be owned by the farmer, not a plunderer or a landlord,".