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The Rise and Fall of the Green International: Stamboliiski and his Legacy in East European Agrarianism, 1919-1939 Alex Toshkov Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Alex Toshkov All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Rise and Fall of the Green International: Stamboliiski and his Legacy in East European Agrarianism, 1919-1939 Alex Toshkov At the height of his power in 1923, the head of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), Alexander Stamboliiski, summed up the significance of his politics for European history in the following way: “Today there are only two interesting social experiments: the experiment of Lenin and my own.”1 Taking the aspirations reflected in the quotation above seriously and rescuing the agrarian project from the enormous condescension of posterity is the foundation of this dissertation. Briefly, it is about unpacking and restoring the significance of the Golden Age of the European Peasantry between the two world wars by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The dissertation proposes a novel synoptic approach with regards to interwar agrarianism as a counterpoint to ideology driven classifications or structuralist synthesis. Its thematic chapters alternate between strategic probes of evocative micro histories and broader theoretically informed overviews in order to illustrate and clarify the analytical frame. The most radical expression of interwar agrarianism, that of Bulgaria, and the 1 Tsentralen Durzhaven Arhiv (Bulgarian Central State Archives, TsDA), Fond 361k, opis 1, a.e.9, p.7. man responsible for it, Alexander Stamboliiski, serve as the center of this dissertation. The juxtaposition of this center to the development of agrarianism in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as to various oppositional formations such as the Communist International Peasant Union allows this dissertation to overcome the national parochialism that has contributed to the sidelining of the study of agrarianism. The innovative structure of the dissertation is above all a demonstration of the rich possibilities still open to researchers in this field to reinsert the study of agrarianism into contemporary theoretical debates and developments in the historiography. The dissertation explicitly engages agrarianism with the theoretical literature on nationalism, corruption, the subaltern, as well as makes possible the connection to the problematics of modernity, politics as systemic change, transnational and global history. Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Crucible of War 22 Chapter 2. Projecting the Peasant on the World Stage 52 Chapter 3. Reimagining the Nation 86 Chapter 4. Between Expectations and Limitations 139 Chapter 5. Delegitimizing the Agrarian Alternative: The Diptych of Stamboliiski's Corruption and Radić's Treason 179 Chapter 6. Drawing the Curtain 231 Recapitulation 256 Bibliography 265 i List of Abbreviations BANU - Bulgarian Agrarian National Union -- Bulgarski Zemedelski Naroden Suiuz (BZNS) CPPP - Croat People's Peasant Party -- Hrvatska Pučka Seljačka Stranka (HPSS) CRPP – Croat Republican Peasant Party -- Hrvatska Republikanska Seljačka Stranka (HRSS) ECCI – Executive Committee of the Communist International IPC – International Peasant Council, Krestintern MAB – International Agrarian Bureau, the Green International (Mezinarodni Agrarni Bureau) RPCC – Republican Party of the Czechoslovak Countryside -- Republikánská Strana Československého Venkova (RSČV) UA – Union of Agriculturalists -- Savez Zemljoradnika (SZ) ii Introduction Even more so than the ancien régime, the casualty of modernity has been the peasantry. In Europe, it was squeezed, eroded, and relegated to the dust bin of history, even as its image as the repository of the nation was appropriated from the Left, Right, and Center. The renewed interest in the study of the peasantry in the 1970s, which saw the creation of The Journal of Peasant Studies, included the work of Teodor Shanin, Eric Wolf, or James C. Scott, and was marked by the "rediscovery" of Alexander Chayanov's Theory of the Peasant Economy in 1966, sought to return agency to the peasantry ironically at the moment when the European peasantry had finally disappeared.2 The linkage of the peasant subject to resistance was thus explored in South-East Asia or the Third World where it still had radical potential. The relatively quick manner in which the destruction of the European peasantry occurred, however, has unfortunately strengthened the teleological orthodoxy that argues that the preservation of the peasantry was incompatible with the modern development of Europe. Given the often brutal means by which the countryside and agriculture were placed in the service of urbanization and industrialization, the arguments that slate the peasantry as doomed to extinction ring hollow. The circularity of these arguments often hinges on nothing more than the smugness 2 See for example Alexander V. Chayanov. The Theory of the Peasant Economy. In Thorner, D, et al. American Economic Association Translation Series. 1966; James C. Scott. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; Theodore Shanin, ed. Peasants and Peasant Societies. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971; Erik Wolf. Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. 1 of the victor over the inevitable loss of the vanquished. In this view, the interwar period cannot be anything but the graveyard for agrarianism, given that it did not survive the Second World War. Yet the enormous condescension of posterity is not easy to overturn, and definitely not via the route of counterfactuals. Historical inquiry obsessed by questions of peasant viability or the exact causes of its failure to survive, do not advance analysis in any meaningful way. Akin to debates such as those over the assignment of blame for the origins of the First World War, this type of inquiry produces a self-referential insularity that cannot hope to justify the reexamination of the past from the perspective of the present. This dissertation is above all an attempt to suggest an alternative approach to the unsatisfying neglect of the European peasant subject in the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than looking at the interwar decades as the nadir of agrarianism, I provocatively designate the years between the First and Second World Wars as the Golden Age of the European Peasantry in order to first rupture the premise that significance and achievement have to be necessarily tied to socio-political success. Second, the designation of a Golden Age is made necessary by the undisputable construction of a peasant subjectivity in that period that entered mass politics via peasant and agrarian parties, that made claims on the nation as an articulate citizenry, and that sought in some cases to elaborate and institutionalize a more ethical modernity, a third road between capitalism and communism. In insisting that the interwar period cannot be properly understood historically without taking peasant politics seriously, this dissertation consequently is also predicated on the claim that the peasantry's competitors in the political arena during the interwar period could not ignore it. Although the constitutive role of the peasant question on the policies and practices of bourgeois parties, royalists, the right, or communists is not systematically explored in the dissertation, it 2 remains a foundation which runs through this work. The structure of this foundation is most visible in the choices not to examine agrarianism sui generis either in its own historical context, or in relation to historiography in the present. Attention to the broader context serves not only to enrich the reading of agrarianism and correct its unwarranted marginalization. Analytical complementarity also demands the localization and examination of those sites where an archaeology of the past grounded in agrarianism can inform or recast the current historiography of the interwar period. Thus, the present analysis of the Golden Age of the European Peasantry moves beyond history as just a corrective to omissions, to history conceived as a reexamination of the past that can contribute to and inform broader and current debates on topics such as nationalism, corruption, modernity, or the dualism of democracy and populism. The implication of this two-fold re-contextualization of peasant politics in the interwar period is a methodological solution to the problem of synthesizing agrarianism above the level of national politics. This dissertation situates itself within a literature and historiography that is at times staggering in its depth and at others astounding in its paucity. At the national level it has been impacted by the relative fortunes of the agrarian parties during the communist period, with the most developed being that of Bulgaria (Luiza. Reviakina, Tsanko Barev, Dimitrina Petrova, Nikolai Poppetrov, Tsocho Biliarski)3, and the least developed, that of Serbia (Momčilo Isić, 3 Luiza Reviakina, Kominternut i Selskite Partii na Balkanite: 1923-1931. Sofia: Akademichno Izdatelstvo "Prof. M. Drinov,” 2003; Tsenko Barev. Prinos kum istoriiata na Bulgarskiia Zemedelski Naroden Suiuz. Sofia: Bulvest 2000, 1994; Dimitrina Petrova. Bîlgarskiiat Zemedelski Naroden Sîiuz, 1899-1944. Sofia: Fondatsiia “Detelina,” 1999; Dimitrina