Agrarian Reforms in East Europe
Peasants in Romania, Croatia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Hungary were encouraged to support political change through land redistribution.
Oct 28, 2006
Peasant reforms swept Eastern Europe following WWI. These came in the form of breaking up large estates and redistributing the land among peasants. While these reforms might have seemed desirable, in actuality they did little to increase agricultural productivity in overpopulated rural areas. In addition, instead of creating a more equal social system, political parties used these reforms to swing peasant sympathies and gain support from this traditionally downtrodden class of people.
While the initial motivation for agrarian reform might have been the alleviation of the social inequities placed on the peasant classes in Eastern Europe, interest in altruistic measures to decrease poverty and heighten the status of the peasants was quickly disregarded in light of political gain from parties that were quickly coming into power. Peasants who saw the land redistribution as a fair and beneficial act were more likely to be in favor of regimes that made these land reforms possible.
However, because the land redistributions amounted to very small portions of land to each peasant, and because rural areas were overpopulated, peasants were no better off than that they were before the reforms. Eastern European nations, all except for the Czech side of Czechoslovakia, were not industrialized enough to attract rural dwellers to city work, so agriculture remained the occupation for the majority of the nations’ populations. Backwards systems of crop rotation, unsophisticated means of harvesting, and wasted land were some of the problems that contributed to stagnant production, and therefore peasant poverty.
In short, agrarian reforms were implemented for the wrong reasons and did not accomplish what they were first meant to. They did, however, contribute to political revolution and regime change.
References
Petrovich, Michael B. “Some of the Problems of Land Tenure in Eastern Europe.” Land Economics, Vol 28 (1952): 30-36.
Seregny, Scott J. “Peasants, Nation, and Local Government in Wartime Russia.” Slavic Review 59 (2000): 336-342.
Thomson, Sarahelen. "Agrarian Reform in Eastern Europe Following World War I:Motives and Outcomes." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 74 (1993): 840-844.
