
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 20, 1990                   TAG: 9005200079
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Short

SOVIET PRIVATE PROPERTY DECREED

President Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday called for legalizing private ownership of homes and residential lots, challenging a 73-year-old Communist law that stipulates state ownership of all such property.

The official Tass news agency said Gorbachev made the proposal in an attempt to solve the nation's critical shortage of housing.

All Soviet land is now owned by the state, under one of the strongest tenets of Communism. However, Soviet leaders have already approved private ownership of buildings, equipment and factories.

Gorbachev's decree instructed the government to formulate new measures by Sept. 1 that would double the pace of building individual homes and apartments.

Tass said Gorbachev ordered a housing plan that "removes the whole number of restrictions on building individual housing in the Soviet Union, grants the right to own and inherit housing and the plots on which it is built."

The housing plan would overturn the Land Decree of 1917 that nationalized all private land holdings.

The law was the precursor to dictator Josef Stalin's massive collectivization of farms in the 1930s. The collectivization cost of millions of lives through starvation, and many peasants who resisted were sent to forced labor camps.

Gorbachev's order Saturday called for at least 30 million new apartments and houses by the year 2000 to meet Gorbachev's pledge of individual dwellings for all Soviets by the end of the century.

by CNB