RUSSIA - Jan. 18 - Russians May Soon Own Land.

The Duma is drafting amendments that would enable the free sale and purchase of land (for the first time since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917), which could come into force as early as May. The reform is seen as a crucial and long-awaited step towards the creation of a middle class of property owners in Russia. The new law would also help a land mortgage market to develop, which would significantly increase access to credit lines and loans for individuals and companies. (Foreign investors view the law as an extra set of legal guarantees for their assets in Russia. "This could have a positive impact on the investment climate in Russia", says Francois Renard, head of the Moscow office of Rhodia, the French chemicals company, which invested $25m in a cigarette filter factory near the capital in 1997). However, the new law would exclude agricultural land. Communists and the agrarian party are strongly represented in parliament and continue to oppose the privatisation of arable lands. They believe it would lead to the expulsion of thousands of workers from kolkhoz and sovkhoz, Soviet-style collective farms, and kill the country's agriculture. (Russian farmers, many of them living on subsistence level salaries, would not be able to compete with large commercial companies to purchase the land, they argue. "Russian farmers live on the food they produce, not on the salaries they receive", says Nikolai Kharitonov, agrarian party deputy. "The development of our agriculture depends on government support". But liberal economists say that Russia's agricultural industry is in a shambles because state ownership has failed for decades to provide investment in farming technology and equipment). The new land law will undergo its first reading in parliament on Jan. 25.