Who Is a Rich Villager?: Identifying Rural Class Enemies during the Czechoslovak Collectivization Campaign

• In Event: Local Dynamics of Collectivization in Central and Southeastern Europe

Abstract

Shortly after their seizure of power in 1948, leaders in the Czechoslovak Communist Party hastily adopted a policy of agricultural collectivization under pressure from the Comintern. Pursuing what they understood as a Soviet strategy of class struggle, they instructed local officials and party activists to enlist small farmers in a crusade for socialist agriculture while identifying rural capitalists for marginalization and persecution. But Communist leaders issued contradictory information about the criteria defining rural class enemies, whom party jargon referred to vaguely as “rich villagers.” Local party functionaries and government leaders were left to interpret official directives through the lens of local experience. This paper examines how rural Communists in Moravian Wallachia — a poor, mountainous region where even prosperous farmers hardly resembled the well-fed, miserly landowner caricatured in propaganda — identified “rich villagers,” and how those designated as “rich villagers” contested their persecution. Rural Communists made use of their close familiarity with their neighbors’ histories and relationships to place local knowledge at the service of the regime. Persecuted farmers, in turn, mobilized village ties to fight their exclusion from society as class enemies. Collectivization required Communist activists to mobilize existing social bonds to serve an official goal, but these same social bonds also prevented them from implementing a coherent strategy of coercion. While scholars of Eastern Europe have often described collectivization as a systematic war against rural society, I argue that the persecution of “rich villagers” instead reveals the ideological and political inconsistency of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in its early years.

Author

• Mira Markham, UNC at Chapel Hill