Peasants And Power

State Autonomy And The Collectivization Of Agriculture In Eastern Europe

Joan Sokolovsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000314700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on events in Hungary and Poland from 1948 to 1962, Dr Sokolovsky shows why collectivization can best be understood as an element in state-building for the new regimes of Eastern Europe. For these countries policy options were constrained by dependence upon the Soviet Union and the economic demands of a newly industrializing society. Econom

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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 à 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.

Analysis centers specifically on Poland and Hungary because these two nations faced a similar crisis in 1956 which left the issue of the eventual collectivization of agriculture very much in doubt. In Poland, the movement was never revived while in Hungary it was fully accomplished only five years later. The reasons behind this disparity and its actual effects upon the rural sectors in each country will be scrutinized.

Collectivization and Types of Collectives

The blueprint for the transformation of agrarian structure that occurred in Eastern Europe following the creation of the People's Democracies was based upon earlier Soviet experience in changing a production system based upon individual peasant households into a network of large scale agricultural enterprises subject to central planning and control. Collectivization is the overall term used to describe the process of achieving the socialization of agriculture.

The Soviet model of agricultural organization emerged as a result of contradictory pressures upon Communist Party economic planners. For a combination of economic, political and ideological reasons, policymakers decided to eliminate private property in agriculture and create large scale production units under state control. At the same time, concentration of national resources in a massive industrialization drive made it impossible for the state to supply sufficient machinery and equipment to establish a system of industrial farming that had been considered a prerequisite of collectivization in Marxist theory. The result was the institution of four types of production units that have been reproduced in the Eastern European context.

The state farm (Soviet Sovkhoz ) is an agricultural enterprise owned by the state on which farmers work as wage laborers. This type of production unit is seen as the highest form of collective and often gets a disproportionate share of agricultural investment.

The collective farm (Soviet K.olkhoz ) is a transitional form between the state farm and individual peasant plots. In theory owned by its members, the collective is composed of a large area cultivated in common and small private plots controlled by the separate households. Aside from access to the private plots, members are paid according to the type and amount of their work, depending upon the profits of the enterprise. The collective became the dominant form of agricultural unit in the Soviet Union as well as for most of the countries of Eastern Europe. The size of private plots on the collectives has varied according to country but they tend to produce a significant portion of the nation's agricultural surplus.

Machine-Tractor Stations (MTS) are not really production units but concentrations of agricultural machinery which are hired by the rural enterprises for specific tasks. In the initial collectivization phase, workers on Machine Tractor Stations have often been responsible for political monitoring of neighboring collectives.

Private farms are still the dominant form of agricultural unit in Poland and Yugoslavia. They are linked to government planning through tax, credit and pricing policies. They also purchase the services of Machine-Tractor Stations or the collectives.

Although the models for the forms of collective agriculture were taken from Soviet experience, the process of socializing agriculture in the Eastern European context has resulted in variation in the structure and size of units within each country. In particular, the collective has taken a range of forms depending upon the amount of land and equipment held in common by the members and the extent of collective organization of work. For example, tillage associations (TOZ) are the simplest form of socialized agriculture. Members pool their resources for the common cultivation of the soil but retain ownership of lands, tools and livestock. These groups have often been established before the complete collectivization of agriculture.

Theoretical Context

Collectivization is only one form which the transformation of rural society has taken in this century. Seen as part of a strategy for economic change, the socialization of agriculture can be understood in terms of competing theoretical perspectives on development. From the standpoint of modernization theory, collectivization promotes economic growth by providing an organizational framework for the diffusion and adoption of new technologies. Economies of scale, mechanization and scientific farming principles can reduce labor requirements in the countryside and free workers to staff newly created industrial enterprises in the cities (see for example Volgyes, 1979b). Institution of the collective also provides a means by which policymakers can effect changes in the value system of the rural population by giving expression to new norms of political decision-making and social worth (Hajda, 1979).

Agricultural collectivization can also be conceptualized as a means of breaking the cycle of dependency that had linked the economies of Eastern Europe to the core of the capitalist world economy before World War II. Berend and Ranki (1974a) contend that the dominant role played by foreign capital is what most distinguished the economic development of Eastern Europe from the earlier experiences of the West. The nations of the region produced agricultural goods for export to the West in return for manufactured goods and technology. Foreign capital facilitated this process through, for example, the construction of railroad lines that served the extraction needs of the core economies. In contrast, postwar Eastern Europe sought to increase the pace of economic development without recourse to sources of foreign capital. For Amin (1976:370-8), collectivization is part of an overall strategy for maximizing capital accumulation at the level of the state through discipline of the labor force and protection of the economy from international competition.

In essence, the agricultural collective is an organizational form which not only can accommodate many theories of development but also facilitate different strategies for economic growth and social change. Thus even within the programs of ruling Communist Parties, collectivization can serve as the basis for opposing conceptions of the relationship between the agrarian and industrial sectors of the economy. The contrast here is between the Soviet Model which stresses the transfer of resources from agriculture to the heavy industry sector of the economy and the Chinese Model which in theory proscribes that "if you have a strong desire to develop heavy industry then you will pay attention to the development of light industry and agriculture" (Mao, 1974:63).

As de Janvry (1981:94-140) contends, units of agricultural production can be the building blocks for many kinds of societies. The determining factors are the class structure of the society as a whole and control of the state. Thus although industrial development may require increased inputs from agriculture in the form of food supplies and state revenue, the means by which governments attempt to achieve this result vary. In essence, policies may favor either market incentives to encourage agricultural producers to increase their output or subsidized agricultural development projects designed to boost productivity. In choosing a specific strategy, governments are influenced by the coalition of interests that dominate the state. In particular, the political importance of the urban work force and the bureaucracy in industrializing societies favors the implementation of the second strategy which couples low food prices in the city with an expanding bureaucratic job market in the administration of agricultural development projects (Bates, 1981:4-5).

At the same time, the majority of the rural population must be reconciled to a policy which sacrifices their material interests to the demands of a development policy which offers no immediate benefits to them. Bates (1981:120) identifies four tactics that the state can adopt in relation to the peasantry: repression; co-optation; organization; and the promotion of factional conflict. It is possible to conceptualize collectivization policies in terms of each of these strategies. It may be seen as a form of politico-military coercion of a hostile population. A stratum of the rural population may be coopted into leadership roles on the collectives through control of new technologies or the administrative apparatus. Clearly collectives represent a new organizational form geared to the direct extraction of resources from the peasantry. Finally, the process of collectivization may be conceived of as a technique designed to divide the rural population and mobilize the poorest segment in support of the government. The choice of strategies will vary according to the political base of the state, its legitimating ideology and the total resources available to it.

As indicated by the previous discussion, an examination of the role of the state is crucial to any comparative understanding of the collectivization process. The ability of the state, caught between world market imperatives and an entrenched local class structure, to reshape rural realities is an important determinant of its capacity to direct its own development. It is axiomatic to state formation¹ theorists (see for example Tilly, 1978; Skocpol, 1979; Aya, 1984) that competing centers of sovereignty must be eliminated from the territorial borders of the nation-state before state policy-makers can realize their project for the construction of a new national society.

The peasant village in prerevolutionary France and Russia is often cited as a model of a rival local authority structure. Its control of communal resources and day to day political authority gave the peasant community a real power base from which to organize resistance to the encroachments of the central state. Collective action by the communal village has figured largely in studies of rural social revolution (see for example Wolf, 1969; Womack, 1968). It is for this reason that Skocpol (1979) contends that the Bolsheviks were forced to end the power of the community by reorganizing the peasantry into collectives under state control.

In a similar vein, Jowitt (1971) approaches the problem of the collectivization of Romanian agriculture from the perspective of political development. He argues that a new state that does not go through a "breaking through" process in which old institutions and local loyalties are destroyed will be crippled in its attempt to create a new social structure.

Although this study cannot directly address the inevitability of this central tenet of the state formation argument, it can test the assumptions of the model in several ways. Firstly, by examining the relationship between areas that policy-makers concentrate on collectivizing first with the history of resistance to state authority experienced in those areas, we can test the priority given to state formation imperatives over other possible reasons for the collectivization of agriculture. Secondly, a corollary to state formation theories is that the ability to resist state-making initiatives depends upon the potential of groups to defend their interests through some form of collective action. Within the six countries considered in this study were a range of peasant social and political arrangements -- areas in which rural families lived on isolated homesteads, areas in which villages had no particular authority, places where villages still controlled significant pasture and forest lands, areas in which peasants had their primary political orientation through organized national peasant parties. In analyzing peasant response to collectivization drives, we can see the relationship between collective action and state formation on the basis of the specific organization of the peasant communities.

Finally, Tilly (1984:315) notes that the repertoire of collective actions available to a people at any given time "constrains the paths of a social movement and influences its outcome." Thus machine-breaking movements of the early Industrial Revolution gave way to the formation of trade unions and the institution of the strike. Since in all the countries under study, collectivization drives occurred in a series of waves, we can examine if and how the repertoire of actions by both the peasantry and the state changed over time as the new regimes became institutionalized.

It must be acknowledged here that analysis of Eastern Europe in the postwar era from a state formation perspective is complicated by the difficulty in determining exactly which states were being constructed. If a monopoly of legitimate force within a territory is the hallmark of an independent state, then control of much of the region by the Red Army of the Soviet Union would suggest the integration of Eastern Europe within an enlarged Soviet state. Yet the "derivative regimes" (Jowitt, 1971:73) established in the area were more than just bureaucracies staffed by local politicians on behalf of Soviet authorities who held real state power. Control of the state apparatus provided a base from which local elites gradually, and with varying success, were able to institutionalize their own regimes with considerable independence from Soviet domination.

Additionally, because the Soviet Union itself was changing during the period in which Eastern Europe was undergoing collectivization, both the manner in which it exerted its influence in the area and the objectives which it sought to attain were constantly evolving. While Stalin lived, the nations of Eastern Europe were treated largely as colonies of the USSR. After the ravages of the World War II, ensuring that the regimes in the area would be friendly to the Soviet Union was the ultimate objective. Particularly in the case of the army and security police, Soviet advisors functioned in supervisory capacities at every level of the bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, in the immediate postwar years local regimes showed a great deal of flexibility in dealing with specific national conditions. However with the onset of the Cold War and the assertion of independence by the Yugoslav re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Collectivization and Theory-Building
• 2 The Implementation of Collectivization in Poland
• 3 The Second Phase
• 4 The Implementation of Collectivization in Hungary
• 5 Hungary: The Second Phase
• 6 Collectivization and State-Building: Poland and Hungary Compared
• Bibliography