Аннотация:The main goals of our work were the identification of the reasons of land use types changing and determination of the role of soil cover in land use types changing. Work on interpretation of the land cover of the Chernsky, Plavsky and Arsenyevsky districts of the Tula region on an area of 370 000 ha showed the dynamics of land use. The soil cover of the investigated region is represented by eight major soils: soddy strongly podzolic, soddy moderately podzolic, soddy slightly podzolic, light gray forest soils, gray forest soils, dark gray forest soils, podzolized chernozems, and leached chernozems. They replace one another from the west to the east. Agriculture has the most large-scale impact on soil and land cover. In the study area, arable lands occupy from 55 to 70%. When studying the soil cover, it is always necessary to establish whether it was plowed, when the soil cover was involved in agriculture, how long this period lasted, what it led to, and why the changes in the type of land use occurred. At the moment, the maps and other spatially distributed information that answers these questions do not exist. In the course of the study the GIS was created and a technology for retrospective land use monitoring based on the interpretation of remote sensing data from now to 1968 was developed. The technology was implemented on a scale of 1: 10 000. To establish the connection between the type of land use and soil cover, soil maps on a scale of 1 : 10 000 were added to the GIS. A series of land use maps (8 maps) were obtained using retrospective monitoring technology, with a frequency of 5 to 10 years. These maps allowed to track changes in land use types and compare them with the soil cover. It has been established that the intensity of land-use change in general and the abandonment of land in particular are closely related to the soil cover, especially under adverse economic conditions. When moving from a planned economy to a market economy during the collapse of the USSR, the soil cover becomes the main factor in the land use type changing.