To Rebecca
First published 1990 by Westview Press, Inc.
Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1981 Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sokolovsky, Joan.
Peasants and Power: state autonomy and the collectivization of agriculture in Eastern Europe / by Joan Sokolovsky.
p. cm.(Westview special studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Collective farmsEurope, Eastern. I. Title. II. Series.
HD1492.E8S65 1990
338.7'.63'.0947dc20
90-12829
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-891-58870-2 (hbk)
This study was conceived during my tenure as a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department of the Johns Hopkins University. Many of my teachers and fellow students helped contribute to the formation of my ideas there but I drew particular inspiration and guidance from my association with Christopher Chase-Dunn, Richard Rubinson and Stephen Bunker. All of my work has been enriched by my contact with them.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Keith Hurt. His expertise, friendship and concern rescued this work from the edge of oblivion.
Lastly, this work could not have been completed without the love and support of my family and especially Rebecca who is always there for me.
Joan Sokolovsky
1
Collectivization and Theory-Building
In the wake of the reform movements sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the international community has become absorbed by the dramatic events taking place in the area. Whether the focus is on the consolidation of Solidarity as a political force in Poland or the reorganization of political parties in Hungary, attention has centered on economic and political changes emanating from the urban centers of the region. Although it is often noted that economic crisis has fostered political change, there has been relatively little interest in the agricultural sector of both countries despite their key role in relation to overall economic production within these nations. This lack of attention to rural matters mirrors overall developmental policy in Eastern Europe where the demands of heavy industry have always been given ideological and economic priority. Yet agricultural policy-makers in Hungary have been experimenting for over twenty years with the kind of market-based reforms that are only now being discussed in an urban context and private enterprise has never lost its dominance in the Polish countryside.
This work is concerned with the development of these agricultural policies out of the crisis that shook Eastern Europe following the death of Stalin in 1953. Utilizing theoretical insights gained from a study of social change in the Third World, it seeks to unravel the dynamics behind the initiation and implementation of a collectivization policy in Poland and Hungary and to analyze the structure of forces in each nation that led to the creation of agricultural sectors unique to the region. The central question is to determine why agriculture in Poland was left essentially in private hands after 1956 while enormous resources were devoted to the nearly complete socialization of agriculture in Hungary in little more than two years. While I focus on events occurring between 1948 and 1960, this work is written with the underlying assumption that the resolution of a crisis in one era creates structures that both limit and facilitate options that can be taken in response to future conditions.
Although agricultural policy in both countries has gone through many twists and turns since 1960, one continuing irony has been the ability of Hungarian agricultural producers to take advantage of economic incentives provided by the government through a collective structure while Polish peasants have been generally constrained by the state's monopoly over inputs and marketing. I argue that this situation followed logically from the relative position of the peasantry vis vis the central state after the upheavals of 1956. Thus understanding the dynamics of collectivization and decollectivization as they occurred in the 1950s provides a unique perspective on the course of events in contemporary Eastern Europe.
Collectivization: Peasants and the State in Eastern Europe
Following World War II and the establishment of the People's Democracies, the largely agrarian states of Eastern Europe experienced rapid industrialization, urbanization and the restructuring of class relations. In the course of these transformations, rural social structure was affected by successive state policies of land reform and the collectivization of agriculture. By 1962, socialization of agriculture under state control was nearly completed in all the countries of Eastern Europe except Poland and Yugoslavia. In a period when the peasantries of the Third World were pressing their claims to international attention through wars of national liberation and social revolution, little has been heard from the rural population of Eastern Europe. Further, there has been scant systematic analysis of the transformation of the rural landscape in the region from the perspective of theories of social change.
Focusing on Hungary and Poland, with additional reference to events in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, my aim is to place the processes of agricultural change in Eastern Europe in the general context of state-peasant confrontations in the modem world. Beginning with three rationales for collectivization policies derived from studies of the collectivization of Russian agriculture in the 1930s, analysis will center on the variation in results of the collectivization drives in the two countries.
The countries of Eastern Europe provide an excellent arena for the application of comparative methods to the study of historical phenomena. In each case, the Communist Party consolidated state power in the years following World War II. Except for the case of Yugoslavia, the autonomy of state policymakers was limited by their dependence on Soviet power to maintain their regimes. With the notable exception of Czechoslovakia, peasant majorities existed in each of the states. Finally each embarked upon a program of collectivization of agriculture following a model of development arising out of the earlier experiences of the Soviet Union. The advancement of heavy industry was given priority over the needs of the agricultural sector of the economy.
Broadly speaking, the implementation of policy occurred within a similar time sequence: postwar land reform; initial collectivization drive begun in the period 1948-49; a period of retreat following Stalin's death in 1953 and the introduction of the Soviet New Course under Malenkov; a brief resumption in 1955 as Khrushchev gained ascendancy (temporarily disrupted by events in Hungary and Poland in 1956); followed by a less coercive but more effective final push in the late fifties that resulted in the general collectivization of agriculture by 1962 in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. The most obvious variations from the pattern took place in Bulgaria where collectivization was pushed most forcefully and completed most quickly and Poland and Yugoslavia where a second drive was never really implemented.
