Analysis
Stephen Dalziel BBC Russian Affairs Analyst

The decision by the Russian parliament to approve the sale of land for the first time since Tsarist days is a huge step away from the country's communist legacy.

But anyone who thinks that it will produce a free and fair sell off is likely to be deluding themselves.

It would be naive in the extreme to assume that... each bidder will have equal access to all land

It has taken 10 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Russian Parliament to agree on a formula for selling off land.

That delay has not been caused by careful planning - it is the result of the kind of in-fighting which dogged the sale of other state assets, such as oil, gas and timber.

In the first years of post-communist Russia, a handful of people made themselves very wealthy at the state's expense.

The so-called "oligarchs" used their new-found economic strength to wield massive political power.

President Vladimir Putin exercises a much closer form of state control than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

But there is no guarantee that the best land will not be seized by a select few.

Financial advantage

Indeed, the wealth already in the hands of the few - thanks to their activities in the early 1990s - means that they are the ones best placed to take advantage of the land sale.

It would be naive in the extreme to assume that, when the law comes into effect in six months' time, each bidder will have equal access to all land.

The future of the best of Russia's huge expanses of rich farmland has already been decided around the tables of the rich and powerful.