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Yugoslavia The Peasantry
Under the post-World War II communist regime, Yugoslavia
experienced one of the quickest transformations from an
agricultural to an industrial society that history has ever
witnessed. The agricultural population shrank from 86.1 percent
of the total population in 1921 to 67.1 percent in 1948 and to
16.7 percent in 1984. By comparison, it took the United States
ninety years to drop from a 72 percent farm population in 1840 to
32 percent in 1930. Aside from government economic policies that
intentionally deprived agriculture of resources after World War
II, social factors also pushed peasants off the land
(see Application of Stalinist Economics
, ch. 3). The lack of pension
benefits for peasants, the absence of social benefits for their
children, limited availability of state housing in rural areas,
and isolation from the lively cultural and social life of the
urban centers accelerated the process.
Despite their dramatic shift from agricultural to
non-agricultural activities, Yugoslavs remained linked to the
soil in many ways. The country's agricultural population still
numbered 4.3 million in 1981; of that number, 2.2 to 2.9 million
tilled small private plots, including about 1.5 million people
who held regular jobs elsewhere. Even before the economic turmoil
of the late 1980s, many city dwellers, especially retirees with
inadequate pensions, supplemented their income and their diet by
selling or consuming produce they grew or livestock they raised
on small plots in nearby villages.
The average age of Yugoslavia's peasant population rose
rapidly after World War II. Moreover, given the outward migration
of young men, by the 1970s women accounted for 60 percent of the
agricultural work force. In 35 percent of farm households, no
children remained to operate the farm when the older generation
retired. In 1990 the federal government proposed a law to provide
pensions for individual peasant farmers and to give young people
greater incentive not to abandon the land for city jobs.
The Soviet-style agricultural collectivization program began
in Yugoslavia in 1949 and ended less than four years later.
Abandonment of collectivization left the country's prewar
patchwork of small private landholdings virtually intact.
Peasants accounted for 95 percent of the agricultural work force
and owned about 82 percent of Yugoslavia's arable land in 1989.
The average peasant farm had eight or nine parcels of land
totaling about 3.4 hectares (see Glossary). Constitutional
amendments adopted in 1988 raised the ceiling on land ownership
from 10 to 30 hectares in flatland areas and 60 hectares in hilly
and mountainous regions.
Conditions on the average Yugoslav peasant farm have changed
dramatically since 1945; significant differences remained,
however, between peasant life in the more developed northwestern
parts of the country and that in the less developed southeastern
regions. In 1990 electricity was available virtually everywhere,
and many peasant households had artificial lighting,
refrigeration, freezers, radios, and televisions. Few peasants,
however, had telephones. The number of tractors had risen, but
fragmented land ownership made large-scale mechanized farming
impossible in most areas. Mechanization of farm activities in
more developed regions reduced the necessity for human toil, but
the overall efficiency of Yugoslav farms lagged far behind that
of farms in the West. On the average, one Yugoslav farmer
produced enough agricultural goods for five people, whereas in
Western industrial countries average production fed sixty-five
people.
In part, the exodus from agricultural life in Yugoslavia was
also driven by a desire to cast off ways of life that peasants
themselves often considered obsolete. Older villagers, frequently
painfully aware of their backwardness, wished to see their
children and grandchildren find a life for themselves in what
they called the "wide world." Yugoslavia's peasant villages,
however, shed many traditions only very slowly. In 1990 older men
and women still wore folk costumes in some parts of Hercegovina,
Macedonia, and Kosovo. Peasant dances, handicrafts, and powerful
locally distilled beverages remained part of everyday life.
Priests baptized most newborns and buried most of the dead, but
villagers in many areas still visited traditional folk healers
and fortune tellers who read the future in coffee grounds. While
all was amiable on the surface, behind the scenes family and
neighborhood animosities persisted through the generations, and
villagers squabbled bitterly over scarce resources and
inheritances. Cafés were filled with old men during the day and
younger men at night. Alcoholism commonly afflicted both men and
women, and alcohol-related road and farm accidents claimed an
inordinate number of lives.
Transportation improvements after the war gave many peasants
the opportunity to work away from the family farm and still
retain close links with their homes. Uprooted peasants accounted
for about half the Yugoslav guest workers in Western Europe
(see Guest Workers
, this ch.). By 1970 some 1.5 million peasants,
about 25 percent of the economically active rural population,
held jobs outside agriculture, and about half Yugoslavia's rural
population lived in households with at least one member who held
an industrial job. Money sent home by guest workers abroad
created a boom of new rural home building, even in some of the
least accessible mountain areas. In eastern Serbia, this
prosperity was expressed in the building of extravagant cemetery
monuments, including graveside cottages.
Data as of December 1990
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