Land Cadastre

the aggregate of authentic information on the natural condition, economic use, and legal status of the land.

In the USSR, the keeping of the land cadastre is provided for in the Basic Principles of Land Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics of 1968 (art. 46). A uniform system is used throughout the country for the national accounting of the land. The system includes registration data on land allotment and use, the account of the size and quality of the land, data on soil appraisal, and the economic assessment of all the lands of the single united national land fund. These data are essential for the organization of a rational utilization of land and its conservation, the planning of the national economy, the rational distribution and specialization of agricultural production, and land reclamation, as well as for the implementation of other economic measures in connection with land utilization. The procedure of the keeping of the cadastre, the prescribed forms of documentation, and the intervals for updating and specifying the relevant information are established by the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

Land cadastres are also kept in foreign socialist countries. In most European socialist countries, considerable effort went into renewing the land cadastres established before the people’s democracies came to power.

In the majority of bourgeois countries land cadastres are also kept, and the available information is widely used for such purposes as the taxation of landowners and the registration of land transactions and land mortgages.