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Authors: Mark Mazower
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Independence ended neither population pressure on land nor brigandage; indeed, both persisted for decades into the life of independent Greece, Montenegro and Serbia, often to the public embarrassment of the new states’ leaders. But it did increase the overall security of the Christian majority, with immediate results. In 1841 Adolphe Blanqui had correctly predicted that “when Bulgaria enjoys a regime of security, the immense regions which today are left to the ravages of goats and poor pasturage will be put under cultivation.” Crossing from the Ottoman lands into semi-independent Serbia in 1853, one traveler, who was not unsympathetic to the Turks, was struck that “we seemed to enter a new clime: the whole valley teemed with luxuriant crops, the road had been formed with care . . . and everything betokened industry and comfort, the result of security.” As a result, after independence, hill dwellers descended again into the plains, population grew quickly and soon the margin of uncultivated land shrank. 39
The newly enfranchised peasantry, possessed as if “by an insatiable desire for land,” now cut back the ancient forests and extended their own holdings. “During the last decade, a frightful extent of woodland has been cleared,” wrote a German visitor to Romania in 1900. The great forests of the Serbian Shumadija disappeared in a few decades. The shepherding economy, which had flourished for the past three hundred years, was plunged into crisis as pasture came under cultivation and governments carved up landed estates and distributed them to peasant smallholders. The Balkan land reforms of the 1920s, followed by a second wave after 1945 in those countries ruled by Communist parties, parceled up large tracts of land among the farmers of cash crops and deprived sheep of their traditional winter grazing grounds. New political borders severed summer from winter grazings. The transhumant shepherds became a vanishing breed, rare already in the 1950s, and today all but extinct. “Before 1922 it was not exceptional for a man to own 2,000 sheep,” wrote a British anthropologist in 1964. “Today a flock of 500 is considerable.” 40
Thus, independence brought new difficulties to those who worked the land. “Land is becoming a commodity,” noted a Croatian scholar of peasant life in 1935. Peasants were inexorably and often reluctantly drawn into the cash nexus, but on terms that left them less and less equipped to avoid debt. They parceled out holdings among their heirs so that within a few generations farmland was hopelessly fragmented and inefficient. High population growth accelerated this creation of a pattern of tiny, unviable plots. To make matters worse, the old patterns of collective farming, especially strong among the Slavs, began to disappear; the zadruga broke up as each family set up on its own. Atomization made the farmer less self-reliant and more dependent on farming for money. But there were few crops that allowed a peasant family any measure of prosperity for more than a generation or two. Those products—like tobacco or currants, Serbian plums and pigs—grown for export were exposed to the whims of the international market. In independent Romania, which had become one of the world’s chief exporters of grain at the turn of the century, social tensions in the countryside—between the miserably impoverished peasant sharecroppers and the often Jewish merchants who leased the Moldavian estates—exploded in a peasant revolt in 1907. The worst peasant uprising in modern Balkan history was suppressed by the Romanian army only at the cost of an estimated eleven thousand lives. Romania had the least equal pattern of landholding in the Balkans—1 percent of landowners held nearly 50 percent of the arable and grazing lands, while perhaps 85 percent of peasant cultivators were operating at or below subsistence level. But the pressure of high reproduction rates and the fragmentation of landholdings was
The newly enfranchised peasantry, possessed as if “by an insatiable desire for land,” now cut back the ancient forests and extended their own holdings. “During the last decade, a frightful extent of woodland has been cleared,” wrote a German visitor to Romania in 1900. The great forests of the Serbian Shumadija disappeared in a few decades. The shepherding economy, which had flourished for the past three hundred years, was plunged into crisis as pasture came under cultivation and governments carved up landed estates and distributed them to peasant smallholders. The Balkan land reforms of the 1920s, followed by a second wave after 1945 in those countries ruled by Communist parties, parceled up large tracts of land among the farmers of cash crops and deprived sheep of their traditional winter grazing grounds. New political borders severed summer from winter grazings. The transhumant shepherds became a vanishing breed, rare already in the 1950s, and today all but extinct. “Before 1922 it was not exceptional for a man to own 2,000 sheep,” wrote a British anthropologist in 1964. “Today a flock of 500 is considerable.” 40
Thus, independence brought new difficulties to those who worked the land. “Land is becoming a commodity,” noted a Croatian scholar of peasant life in 1935. Peasants were inexorably and often reluctantly drawn into the cash nexus, but on terms that left them less and less equipped to avoid debt. They parceled out holdings among their heirs so that within a few generations farmland was hopelessly fragmented and inefficient. High population growth accelerated this creation of a pattern of tiny, unviable plots. To make matters worse, the old patterns of collective farming, especially strong among the Slavs, began to disappear; the zadruga broke up as each family set up on its own. Atomization made the farmer less self-reliant and more dependent on farming for money. But there were few crops that allowed a peasant family any measure of prosperity for more than a generation or two. Those products—like tobacco or currants, Serbian plums and pigs—grown for export were exposed to the whims of the international market. In independent Romania, which had become one of the world’s chief exporters of grain at the turn of the century, social tensions in the countryside—between the miserably impoverished peasant sharecroppers and the often Jewish merchants who leased the Moldavian estates—exploded in a peasant revolt in 1907. The worst peasant uprising in modern Balkan history was suppressed by the Romanian army only at the cost of an estimated eleven thousand lives. Romania had the least equal pattern of landholding in the Balkans—1 percent of landowners held nearly 50 percent of the arable and grazing lands, while perhaps 85 percent of peasant cultivators were operating at or below subsistence level. But the pressure of high reproduction rates and the fragmentation of landholdings was
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