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Local Dynamics of Collectivization in Central and Southeastern Europe
Sat, November 23, 4:00 to 5:45pm EST (4:00 to 5:45pm EST), Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 4th Floor, Grand Ballroom Salon DSession Submission Type: Panel
Brief Description
Scholarship on agricultural collectivization has long presented it as a Communist device to rule and control the peasantry by remaking rural society along ideological lines. This panel complicates established narratives of the countryside under Communist rule by exploring the complex dynamics of collectivization in three different local contexts. Artan R. Hoxha's contribution problematizes ideas of rationality and irrationality in agriculture by highlighting the role of technology in reshaping the plain of Maliq into Albania’s center of sugar production. Mira Markham's paper examines how both rural Communist activists and persecuted farmers in the Czech region of Moravian Wallachia made use of local experiences and relationships to construct and contest ideas of the class enemy in the countryside. Finally, Tereza Juhászová's contribution emphasizes the agency of a single German-speaking peasant in a multiethnic part of Slovakia through post-World War II land reform and subsequent collectivization efforts, all integral to the broader changes in property, power, and social relations in postwar Central Europe. By examining the material, social, and technological forces that shaped agriculture at the local level, as well as the importance of individual choice and personal relationships, this panel challenges the idea of collectivization as simply a politically driven, top-down process, seeking to liberate the history of rural society in Central and Southeastern Europe from old theoretical paradigms.
Sub Unit
Chair
Papers
'Big is Good!': Or How Factory Machineries Industrialized Agriculture (A Technology-Based Approach to Collectivization in Communist Albania’s Land of Sugar) - Artan R. Hoxha, Academy of Sciences of Albania (Albania)
Who Is a Rich Villager?: Identifying Rural Class Enemies during the Czechoslovak Collectivization Campaign - Mira Markham, UNC at Chapel Hill
From German Peasant to 'Exemplary Cooperative Member': A Microhistory of Rural Transformations in Eastern Slovakia after 1945 - Tereza Juhaszova, U of Regensburg (Germany)
