Peasant revolutionaries and partisan power: Rural resistance to communist agrarian policies in Croatia, 1941-1953

My dissertation is a case study of the contradictory agrarian policies followed by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) between 1945 and 1953. During World War II, the CPY rejected collectivization and promised peasants land, debt relief and private property guarantees in return for their support. However, the CPY also decided to use the agricultural economy to finance industrialization. In order to reconcile these conflicting commitments, the CPY placed the entire agricultural production process under state authority, but never nationalized peasant land. By 1948, these policies had transformed the tenuous coalition between peasants and the state into a major conflict over who controlled the agricultural economy. The alliance collapsed completely with the CPY's attempt to forcibly collectivize in January 1949. Peasants countered the Party's coercive tactics with massive resistance which undermined the CPY's ability to control agriculture and paralyzed the economy. Consequently, the CPY began to back away from socialized agriculture. In 1951, it repealed production quotas and freed prices. In 1952, it allowed peasants to withdraw from collectives without penalty. By 1953, the CPY had abandoned socialized agriculture and pledged to guarantee private property.;Historians have never closely examined the development of agricultural policy in Yugoslavia despite its importance in post-1945 politics. Scholarship on postwar Yugoslavia has focused on its unique role in the Cold War and ignored important domestic concerns. It has failed to adequately consider the struggle between peasants and the state over private property, a central conflict in postwar Yugoslavia. My dissertation, in contrast, emphasizes the role domestic politics played in agrarian policy shifts. I argue that peasant resistance to socialized agriculture was the principal force driving policy reversals. Peasants responded to CPY attempts to socialize the rural economy by refusing to participate in the state-dominated agricultural sector. This non-compliance caused food production and sales to decline precipitating food shortages and political crisis. The CPY reacted to this resistance by collectivizing farms and increasing coercion against peasants in 1949. However, peasants' continued non-compliance undermined Party legitimacy. Such resistance eventually paralyzed the economy and led the state to retreat from socializing agriculture.