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The Politics of Agriculture: Identity and Socialist Sentiment in Bulgaria

Research for this analysis was underwritten in various parts by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the PSC-CUNY Faculty Research Awards Program. I am grateful to Daniel Bates for discussions of the ideas presented here, and to Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman for transforming them into a lucid argument (Gail also provided the main title). Donna Buchanan, Deema Kaneff, Mieke Meurs, Luan Troxel and Maria Todorova provided comments on an earlier version of this article which improved it significantly. None of these people or institutions bear any responsibility for the final product. When Bulgarians elected a parliament dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in their first, free postcommunist1 election, they were considered the mavericks of eastern Europe. As Misha Glenny critically points out, "Bulgaria bucks the trend" was a recurrent phrase in English-language reports of the 1990 contest. 2 But four years later, after an intervening non-socialist government, a second socialist victory seemed to be following trends set in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. In a front-page article in The New York Times several months before Bulgaria's 1994 election, the east European trend towards embracing ex-communists is described as beginning in Lithuania, with no mention of Bulgaria's earlier socialist victory and its continual socialist electoral strength. 3 Then, following the election, the Washington Post reported that the results "brought the fourth former Communist Party to power in Eastern Europe, after Hungary, Poland and Lithuania." 4

Thus, in an illustration of what Maria Todorova calls "Balkanism," 5 Bulgaria was cast as an early exception or laggard, then as a "trend surfer," when it could be seen as the political avant-grade of the region. While this critique is directed at the popular press, the general lack of scholarly attention to Bulgaria contributes to popular (mis)perceptions.

My concern is not simply the mistreatment of Bulgaria. Rather I believe the way Bulgaria is viewed affects our appreciation of postcommunist dynamics, especially our understanding of the appeal of socialism in the mid-1990s. To focus primarily on events in Hungary and Poland enables a simplistic explanation of the socialist revival: the costs of transition were too high, provoking popular retreat. If, however, we see the Bulgarian case as an early manifestation of such socialist appeal, this argument fails. Bulgarians voted socialist before the. pain of transition was felt, when their most painful memories were still the privations and oppressions of communism. To look at the Bulgarian case, then, forces us to follow other avenues to explain the revival of socialist sentiment, or what might be reconceptualized as its continuation.

In examining socialist electoral support in Bulgaria, one is immediately struck by its disproportionately rural character. Gale Stokes says that in the first free election the opposition "did well in the cities," but that the Socialist Party managed to pull off a victory by "rallying the countryside." 6 Luan Troxel contrasts the election results of major cities with those of rural districts to make the distinction even clearer: In Sofia and Plovdiv, the anti-socialist coalition won 24 of 26 and 8 of 8 direct mandates, respectively, while in each of three exemplary rural districts--Vidin, Yambol and Smolyan--the Socialist Party won 7 out of 8 seats. 7 She suggests that this had to do with the infrastructural disadvantages faced by the opposition in the countryside, compounded by limited time and resources for campaigning, 8 but this was less true by the time of the second election in 1991, when the rural- urban difference was reproduced. Using municipal election results from 1991, Begg and Meurs demonstrate that "the country remained politically divided, with clear BSP dominance in rural municipalities and in the rural regions bordering cities and towns." 9

There is a stinging paradox here. Socialist development in Bulgaria, as elsewhere in eastern Europe, was built on the backs of rural villagers. By embracing industry as an ideological mantra and tapping agriculture to finance it, the Communist Party forced villagers to work toward their own political and economic marginalization. Requisitions of agricultural produce, forced collectivization, negligible agricultural wages and general privation were the recurrent memories reported to me by villagers who lived through the 1950s and 1960s. They passed these stories on to their children who continue to recount them, often augmented by their own indignation at the continuing disparity between village and city life. So why should villagers, who were in many ways victims of the socialist experiment, turn out to be its strongest supporters? How can the legacy of socialism's exploitation and devaluation of agriculture be a pro-socialist rural sector?

Certainly the Socialist Party gained some legitimacy from the improvements in rural life under socialism, especially in the two decades immediately prior to 1989. Most villagers saw the installation of electricity and running water in their homes, the arrival of more automobiles in the village and, most recently, the availability of telephones (even if unreliable). The mechanization of agriculture and the expansion of nonagricultural employment opportunities were also socialist achievements. Still, the rural countryside remained significantly disadvantaged compared to the city, both ideologically and materially. To mention only the more obvious examples, wages were generally lower for village jobs, villagers had to carry the double burden of wage labor and subsistence production, and educational possibilities were much more limited. So improvements in the countryside alone cannot explain why villagers should be significantly more pro-socialist than urbanites. 10 Similarly, appeals to rural conservatism do not tell the whole story: Bulgarian villagers in the past have been quite capable of voting for change when it was in their perceived interests. 11

I suggest instead that the results of Bulgarian elections have to do with the important role of agriculture under socialism and the threat that economic transition poses to rural identities constructed within that system. The complex interactions, which I attempt to illustrate in this analysis, can be summarized in the following way: 12 agriculture under socialism was far more significant than either macro-level economic statistics or socialist political ideology would suggest. It not only supplied domestic food needs, but provided important export products, fueled the informal economy and reproduced important social relations. This significance helped maintain a cultural association between agriculture, the cooperative farm and the village, even as the latter became economically diversified. Through rural economic diversification, however, villagers developed new identities not linked exclusively to farming, even as they continued the part-time agricultural involvements essential to the socialist system.

This multifaceted importance of agriculture under socialism combined with the symbolic association between communism and collectivization to make the agricultural system a likely target in any imagined scenario of transition (read "de-communization"). Since the very idea of transition appeared to threaten villagers' economic arrangements and their associated views of themselves as something other than "peasants," rural support gravitated quickly and strongly to the Socialist Party. Simply put, the threat posed to existing agro-industrial arrangements and associated village identities by the platforms of an urban-identified, anti-socialist opposition drove villagers, many of whom had not been supporters of the Bulgarian Communist Party, into the arms of its socialist progeny. 13 The program of decollectivization, which began in earnest under the leadership of the first non-socialist government, confirmed their worst fears and solidified their support for socialism. The resulting rigidity of the socialist/anti-socialist split helps account for recurring political stalemates at the national level.

An appeal to the politics of agriculture to account for socialist sentiment immediately raises other questions: why, for example, did agrarian concerns translate into socialist sentiment rather than support for the various agrarian parties in Bulgaria? 1 discuss this irony in the conclusion but, to anticipate, the lack of agrarian appeal was a result of both historical considerations and issues of identity to be examined here, notably the lack of rural identification with agriculture as an occupation. A second question concerns how agricultural issues could exercise such a decisive influence on elections in a country where approximately 67 percent of the population lives in towns; even when corrected for voting age, the rural population remains under 35 percent of the total. 14 Agriculture, however, may be more significant than rural population percentages suggest. First, the village/town distinction does not fully capture the political role of agrarian issues because many settlements defined as "towns" maintain distinctively rural characteristics, including extensive farming activity. Furthermore, even in large cities many residents depend upon farm produce that they receive from rural relatives, 15 and some even travel to villages on weekends and holidays to assist these relatives and/or cultivate their own subsistence plots. More urbanites expect to acquire arable village land through the restitution process, so the prospect of transition actually expands the potential influence of agrarian concerns.

The politics of agriculture may thus also account for socialist support from urbanites more geographically, emotionally or generationally attached to agriculture, and conversely, socialist opposition from villagers less involved with farming. In this way it may explain another characteristic of socialist sentiment in Bulgaria: its association with older citizens. In towns, older residents are often closely connected to agriculture, many having migrated from villages and having maintained their rural connections. Young people, in both rural and urban contexts, have a more attenuated connection to farming. Still, the proportion of young people in villages is small and, given the rural context, few of them can maintain much distance from farming for very long. Thus, while the politics of agriculture politically divides rural and urban populations generally, it also brings some urbanites into political alliance with most rural residents, and this goes a long way toward explaining socialist electoral victories.

In order to follow the complex influence of agriculture suggested here, a basic understanding of Bulgarian political developments since 1989 is essential. The following section provides such an overview. 16 I then turn back to socialist agriculture in the village prior to 1989 to demonstrate how agricultural concerns dominated the local and national political economy. This provides the basis, in the succeeding section, for linking agricultural developments to local identities, which accounts for the first socialist electoral victory. The political role suggested for agriculture in 1990 was verified by the ensuing process of decollectivization--the subject of the subsequent section. This program set out to obliterate socialist sentiment but ended up enhancing it, contributing significantly to the second socialist victory in 1994. A concluding section speculates on the contribution of this analysis to understanding other political developments in Bulgaria and the continuation of socialist sentiment elsewhere in eastern Europe.

Bulgarian Politics since 1989

The socialist victory was even more significant given the degree of unity among opposition parties. While there were small parties contending independently, most of the major opposition groups were united into a single umbrella organization called the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). The only other major contenders were the Bulgarian National Agrarian Union (BANU), which survived the years of single-party rule by colluding with the Communist Party and was thus a potential competitor with the socialists, and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), which was basically the party of the Turkish minority and rabidly anti-communist due to the horrors of prior assimilation campaigns. 18 BANU received 4 percent of the parliamentary seats; 19 MRF deputies occupied 5.75 percent.

Opponents of the socialists were devastated by the election results and initiated a period of protest, the most visible elements of which were a tent city in downtown Sofia, the defacement of Georgi Dimitrov's mausoleum and the burning of communist party headquarters. The UDF itself embarked upon a policy of noncooperation and, since the socialist majority was far short of the two-thirds needed for many legislative decisions, it effectively stymied political progress. In fact, this strategy gained them the concession of a UDF President, Zhelyu Zhelev, and the eventual resignation of the Socialist government in November of 1990; a week later Zhelev asked Dimitur Popov, an independent judge, to form a quasi-coalition government with the UDF and BSP.{This government survived the horrors of extensive food and fuel shortages in early 1991 to pass the long awaited land law, approve a new constitution and change the structure of parliament, eliminating the majority seats and increasing the number of proportional seats to 240.

New elections were held in October 1991 and, despite having lost a few separatist elements, the Union of Democratic Forces won the elections with 34.4 percent of the popular vote--hardly a mandate, but an important political and psychological victory nonetheless. The UDF ruled in an unofficial coalition with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which was the only other non-socialist party to surpass the 4- percent threshold still required for parliamentary representation, giving it the balance of power. During the first half of 1992 Prime Minister Filip Dimitrov presided over significant legislation, including the passage of laws for the restitution of property and the amendment of the land law to initiate decollectivization. Despite arguable "progress," Dimitrov's coalition began to disintegrate quickly. First, the UDF continued to fracture internally: its unity, based primarily on anti-communism, was ill- suited for developing political and economic policy, areas in which the differences between UDF constituencies were significant. Second, the alliance with the MRF began to unravel as economic programs, such as land-law amendments, began to affect the Turkish population negatively. In brief, the UDF government alienated too many of its own constituencies.

On 28 October 1991 Dimitrov's government failed a confidence vote, provoking a two-month long political crisis, during which the UDF tried to renominate Dimitrov for prime minister and the BSP nominated a French citizen who was not even eligible for the post. 20 New elections were avoided when Lyuben Berov, an economic historian and former advisor to President Zhelev, managed to form a government with a MRF mandate and BSP support. This government managed fairly well given a bi-polar parliament and increasing dissension within the UDF, including conflict with its most popular figure, President Zhelev. Still, these features made the government inherently unstable. By 1994 new elections were being avoided only by near universal apprehension over the likely results. It was clear that the BSP would win, a prospect which the UDF certainly did not relish and the MRF could only be ambivalent about at best. It was also clear that few socialists were anxious to take the reins of leadership during such difficult times. Elections were eventually set for December, but six weeks prior to the event I still found little popular interest in the campaign and a high degree of cynicism. While everyone expected the socialists to win, few expected them to obtain a clear parliamentary majority-which in fact occurred: the BSP coalition got 43.54 percent of the popular vote, which translated into approximately 52 percent of the seats in parliament. As in the previous two elections, rural support was elemental to socialist electoral performance.

Agriculture under Socialism

Such statistics alone, however, can be misleading. In many ways the socialist program perpetuated agriculture's significance. Since many agricultural products, including Bulgaria's famous rose oil, wine and tobacco, were exported to western countries for hard currencies, their contribution to the economy was far more significant than either their numbers or their value in Bulgarian money suggested. Begg and Meurs, for example, point out that agriculture accounted for nearly 27 percent of exports to non-socialist countries in 1989, 22 the proceeds of which financed important hard currency imports. This significance had ramifications at the local level. It was the export value of Bulgarian grapes, for example, that ensured the availability of industrial brigades for the grape harvest. In the northwestern village of Zamfirovo, strawberries took pride of place for a similar reason; refrigerated trailers from northern Europe parked in the village while the berries were picked, washed, put in barrels and loaded directly for export. The hard currency received and the limited processing involved ensured a relatively high return for the state, some of which was passed on to village administrators and producers. 23 This, in turn, ensured that the strawberry harvests received higher priority than the daily routine of industrial and non-agricultural labor.

Also apparent at the village level is the well known importance of so-called "auxiliary" or "subsistence" plots, referred to in Bulgaria as "personal plots." Cultivation of these plots literally kept the national economy afloat by providing subsistence for rural workers under conditions of low wages, shortages and poor distribution. At the same time, rural access to this resource allowed the state to slight rural workers and to privilege cities in wages and allocations of scarce consumer goods. The size and use of personal plots varied according to environmental and economic considerations, but they commonly consisted of one-half hectare per household, usually devoted to corn, wheat, grapes and vegetables. The grain was feed to household livestock, typically including a few sheep, a goat and one or more pigs. Nearly all able-bodied villagers spent a good portion of their time cultivating plots and tending animals, and families with a surfeit of labor found informal ways to expand their access to land.

Personal plots were essential for the country as a whole since villagers not only provided for their immediate families but also supplied urban relatives, 24 town markets and even state procurement agencies. This national significance is reflected in an increasing integration of subsistence production into the official state sector, and in the state's attempt to model agricultural and industrial reforms upon arrangements developed in the personal sector. The state supplied increasing amounts of material and technical support to personal production; for example, personal wheat plots came to be cultivated almost entirely by state machine-tractor stations which provided mechanical plowing, planting and harvesting at reasonable prices. The state's attempt to install the so-called "akord" system of family contract-farming illustrates its recognition of the productivity and value of household-based agricultural production and its attempt to tap such organization for state production. 25 In some cases akord arrangements were even lucrative enough to attract urban residents into agricultural contract work during their free time; of course, informal access to produce was another attraction.

Until the late 1980s, however, such agrarian reforms never actually challenged the central role of cooperative farms in agricultural production, a hesitation that highlights the importance of these units to socialist ideology. Of all the radical changes in eastern Europe after World War II, none were more closely identified with communism than the collectivization of agriculture. 26 If one were to ask any Bulgarian villager about changes in his or her village since World War II, one would be certain to hear first and foremost about collectivization; even older urbanites are likely to respond similarly. The prominence of this event in the Bulgarian historical consciousness is due in large part to the dominance of agriculture at the time of communist ascension: subsequent changes are viewed against this agrarian backdrop, drawing attention to agricultural changes. Thus, for many Bulgarians collectivization became a metaphor for the communist transformation in general, reinforcing the political nature of agriculture. Following collectivization the state continued to manipulate agriculture, keeping it at the center of popular attention.

The completion of collectivization in 1956- 1958 was followed by consolidation of village farms into larger units, a process that was resented by many villagers, including those who had supported collectivization. As with the latter, consolidation alternated between periods of progress and retreat, 27 culminating in the 1970s with the establishment of agro-industrial complexes (APKs), which amalgamated the country's cooperative and state farms into approximately 200 administrative units. 28 The APK system, however, never fulfilled expectations and in the wake of its inefficiencies local farm units regained significant administrative autonomy. Successful or not, such processes kept agricultural reorganization in the forefront of change and development. Furthermore, while industrial expansion promoted a relatively new area of the economy, agricultural development confronted entrenched arrangements. It was, therefore, more experientially significant, commanding more interest and attention even when economically superseded by industrialization.

Agriculture was rendered even more significant by socialism's "conflicting complementarity." 29 The totalizing logic of socialism--its holistic integration of political, economic and social structures--forced the state to constantly balance potentially contradictory demands. As a result, functions that seemed problematic in one area were often useful, even necessary, in another. For example, Verdery notes that while the second economy weakened the bureaucracy's control over allocation, it also supplied an essential livelihood to the population, so "there remained a constant tension between suppressing and permitting a certain amount of secondary economic activity." 30 Similarly, Kideckel points out that the socialist state was constantly torn between its need to control property and labor, and its dependence on the capacities and practices of local producers. 31 This type of dilemma, which I call "conflicting complementarity," was the essence of east European socialism. For nearly every problem or failure within the socialist system there were connections that rendered the resulting difficulties useful in another context, so problems were not only tolerated by the state but sometimes even accommodated. In such a system agriculture could exert substantial influence even if farming seemed secondary.

The systematic influence of agriculture in Bulgaria is perhaps clearest in relation to rural industrialization. 32 Agricultural concerns in "industrialized" villages continued to structure non-agricultural developments, even so far as to derail industrial reform programs. For example, in the northwestern village of Zamfirovo in 1987-88, attempts to increase industrial discipline and labor productivity in a branch factory collapsed under village pressure on factory management to provide industrial workers for brigade work during harvests (an obligation that applied to urban workplaces and schools as well). Similarly, village factory workers growing strawberries on akord contracts were likely to be absent during the strawberry harvest and workers in a pharmaceutical packaging enterprise were sometimes without work for several days because farm trucks could not be spared to bring packing materials from Sofia.

Conflict between village agriculture and industry actually reflects a partial success of the rural industrialization policy. As rural to urban migration intensified it increased the importance of agriculture for those left behind, who had to provide for themselves and their urban kin (or, as was more often the case, additional urban kin). Of course there was a limit to this dynamic--a shrinking rural population could not continue to provision an expanding pool of urban migrants--so central planners restricted migration and dispersed industry to the countryside. This was not simply a measure to keep villagers occupied and out of the cities, but also a means to sustain the subsistence production so essential to the whole economy. Policies to promote agricultural production, 33 such as the akord system, furthered the integration of village agrarian arrangements with other sectors of the socialist political economy. Conflict between industry and agriculture ironically verified their continued interaction--an objective of the reform policies. Such strategies, however, also enhanced the influence of agriculture throughout the society. Thus, just as there were formal and informal economies, and first and second societies, the official socialist emphasis on industry was shadowed by the "real" significance of agriculture. 34

Agriculture and Identity

As elsewhere in eastern Europe, ideas of village community in Bulgaria were eroded by capitalist forces prior to World War II and continued to be undermined by communist policies after 1945. In Romania, for example, Verdery points out that farms and other administrative units violated village boundaries, and Kideckel shows how socialist privation and insecurity encouraged a degree of rural household autonomy that rendered suspect the very idea of community. 35 There were similar developments in Bulgaria, including attempts to incorporate villages into large settlement systems 36 and the previously described consolidation of cooperative farms into agro-industrial complexes. But these projects were ultimately unsuccessful and, at the same time, other aspects of socialism actually reinforced village associations and identification. Collectivization, for example, began by metaphorically transforming the village into an agricultural institution: the cooperative farm. Campaigns were organized on a village basis and, in most cases, activists built upon pre-existing cooperative institutions. A farm often adopted the name of a prior village cooperative or another name of local significance, perhaps even the name of the village itself. With the completion of collectivization, then, the cooperative became emblematic of the village, reinforcing and enhancing the village's distinctive, quasi-corporate character.

This association survived the rapid usurpation of cooperative control by the state and ensuing consolidation programs. In fact, it was so strong that the consolidation of farms seemed to imply a degree of village incorporation as well. Residents of the larger villages which served as administrative centers of consolidated cooperatives came to see the villages whose lands they administered as mere hamlets of their own. The residents of incorporated villages expressed the same association inversely through criticism and resistance: they blamed agricultural problems and injustices on the consolidated structure, insisting instead that cooperatives should conform to village boundaries. 37 Those from larger villagers eventually invoked the same idea when criticizing the agro-industrial complex. 38

Another element contributing both to the equation of the village with the cooperative farm and to the endurance of this association was the cultural link between village and agriculture: the village was the site of agricultural production and it was the practice of farming that largely marked an area as "rural." As cooperative farms increased their proportion of the country's agricultural activity, then, they became synonymous with the cultural locus of farming, i.e., villages. In so doing, they dialectically reinforced the cultural association between village and agriculture. As long as agriculture continued to be important, the strength of this association could not be transcended, even by rural industrialization. Industrial and service workers in a village thus remained conceptually bound to agriculture, even as the village became more industrial. Actually, such workers were doubly bound to agriculture: materially through subsistence production and culturally through village residence. Still, the economic transformation of the countryside did affect how villagers saw themselves visa vis agriculture.

The expansion of nonagricultural occupations and the distinction between professional (cooperative) and subsistence (household) production provided villagers personal distance from the culturally demeaning association with agriculture as an occupation. Few villagers in the late 1980s, especially those of working age, considered themselves farmers; their identities were linked instead to non- agricultural jobs in small enterprises or village administrative posts, bringing them closer to the proletarian ideal of communism. Even those employed by cooperative farms saw themselves as "tractor drivers" or "combine operators" rather than as farmers or peasants. Everyone in a village, however, remained undeniably a "villager," and thus potentially a "peasant." This is reflected linguistically, in that the common translation of the English word "peasant" is selyanin, from the word selo, meaning village, i.e., "villager." This cultural association made it difficult to dissociate increasingly pejorative connotations of the "peasant" from the mere fact of village residence. 39 Here, however, the equation between cooperative farm and village provided a solution: the dominant agrarian activity of a village was carried out by a cooperative farm, freeing villagers to develop identities not centrally focused on farming. They could maintain their important village identity without its negative agricultural connotations. Their personal agricultural activities became a subsidiary element in their identity, just as informal subsistence cultivation was a subsidiary contribution to cooperative, village and national economies.

These complex distinctions in villagers' conceptions of self and community were not appreciated by most urbanites, especially those who had never lived in a village or who had left it before alternate identities began to emerge. For them, the cultural logic equating village and agriculture rendered all "villagers" "peasants"; they failed to see that the cooperative farm distinguished and mediated "village" and "peasant" identities. So while "village(r)" continued to be a category of both self-ascription and outside designation, its content diverged according to rural and urban usages. This difference fueled anti- urban sentiment in villages and made it difficult for urbanites to appreciate the potential meaning of decollectivization for rural residents (as I discuss in the next section).

In an atmosphere of rural-urban tension, the urban/intellectual profile of the Union of Democratic Forces could not inspire rural confidence. Villagers feared that the UDF's anti-communist platform would undermine their existing economic arrangements which, although distinct from the cooperative farm system, were still dependent upon it. Given the centrality of agriculture, this was no paranoid suspicion: the intense anti-communism of the UDF and the close communist association with collectivization was a volatile mix. True, in its election campaign the Socialist Party also advocated the restoration of property rights (indeed any other platform was politically untenable in 1990), but villagers expected the socialists to protect the option of cooperative cultivation and to maintain cooperative farm practices essential to private production, such as machine cultivation services. They feared that anti-socialists would eliminate all cooperative elements, which would threaten their very identity as modern villagers.

With the elimination of cooperative farms and the restitution of land to former owners, the burden of agriculture--the cultural essence of "the village" and the basis of its cultural depreciation--would no longer be borne by an institution but by individual households, so villagers opted instead for the Socialist Party. In short, the politics of agriculture interacted with the politics of identity to turn politically ambivalent villagers into socialists.

Although urban workers in 1990 were also concerned about the implications of the transition for their economic well-being, their fears did not always translate into socialist sentiment, precisely because they did not live in the countryside and most were not actively involved with agriculture. The possibility of moving into the small-scale commercial sector held greater promise for townspeople than for villagers and, in an environment of rural-urban tension, the urban-intellectual profile of the early opposition leadership was not as threatening to urban workers as it was for rural residents.

Most importantly, the majority of urban workers could count upon support from village relatives to tide them over potential periods of unemployment or adjustment. Urbanites not directly involved with agriculture themselves saw this reliance as a way to ride out the storm while awaiting new possibilities. Their village kin, however, saw such increased dependence, along with their own increasing subsistence needs, as a process of "re-peasantization" that might force them to do more arduous farming. Thus, the dependence which soothed the fears of many urbanites, allowing them to embrace the uncertainty of radical change, exacerbated. the fears of rural residents, provoking a more conservative reaction. Urbanites more involved with agriculture had concerns similar to villagers, notably the fear that they might lose their city jobs and have to return to full-time farming on newly restituted land. 40

While much of the Bulgarian populace had cause to see the transition as potentially dangerous, people involved in agriculture were triply threatened. They faced an increasing dependence on agricultural activity for subsistence and for supplying urban relatives. At the same time they confronted increasing difficulties in meeting these demands due to a likely decline in cooperative assistance and the certainty of rising costs. Finally, through their efforts to deal with this dilemma, they faced the prospect of being transformed back into peasants, politically marginal to their newly democratized polity. Lithe wonder that they sought solace in the status quo! Villagers rejected the anti-socialist opposition because it threatened the socialist cooperative farm system that made it possible for them to do something other than farm; for them, the politics of agriculture in 1990 was not simply a defense of agriculture but rather the defense of a system that made it possible to do agriculture without being an agriculturalist. Villagers believed that the Socialist Party was more likely to sustain this possibility during its economic reforms than an urban-based opposition which hardly appreciated the subtle differences involved. When the Union of Democratic Forces gained power in 1991, it proved the villagers right.

Agriculture in Transition

One of the first actions of the UDF-controlled parliament in March 1992 was to amend the law, eliminating its "socialist" encouragements: limits on the size of holdings were abolished as were restrictions on who could buy and sell land, and owners were given more latitude in the use of agricultural land. 41 The parliament also repealed 1991 regulations for the registration of new cooperatives, which it saw as a ruse to maintain the old system. It not only disallowed the newly registered cooperatives but also designed a radical system to eliminate all cooperative farms. To achieve this goal two networks of committees were dispersed throughout the country. The first, called "land commissions," received claims and supporting documents from families whose land had been collectivized. Sometimes responsible for a single village but more often for a municipality, 42 these commissions decided how much land claimants would receive and where it would be located. In the meantime, agriculture continued under the auspices of the other arm of the decollectivization program--"liquidation committees."

As dictated by land law amendments, district governors established these committees in every cooperative farm. Their four to five members were to oversee the cultivation of land until its restitution, while simultaneously liquidating the farms' non-landed property, including livestock and farm equipment. When villagers resisted the installation of liquidating committees, as in the highly publicized case of Zalapitsa in south-central Bulgaria, troops were sent in. It is not surprising that villagers began to draw comparisons with collectivization, actually referring to decollectivization as "an old song in a new voice." 43

The early results of the decollectivization program varied significantly, depending on the abilities and political leanings of liquidation committee members, especially chairs; in addition, the program was highly sensitive to shifts in political control at the national level. Varied and uneven results notwithstanding, there could hardly have been a program with greater potential to alienate villagers. In the context of a cultural association between village, agriculture and cooperative, the liquidation of the farm was interpreted by many as an attack on the village itself.

This interpretation was confirmed by the material consequences of the process. In many villages farm buildings were demolished, leaving eerie ruins across the countryside; this was especially true for animal sheds or stables which were no longer needed once animals had been sold or returned to village families. With restitution still in progress, no one knew who would get the land on which these buildings stood, making it nearly impossible for liquidating committees to sell them. The solution was to take them apart and sell the materials separately or to allow villagers to steal them (both, not coincidentally, also simplified the subsequent restitution of the land itself). While these buildings may have had limited utility, the results of demolition were visually arresting--devastated after-images of previously productive livestock operations-Destruction had additional significance because many of the buildings had been erected manually by large village brigades working together for little or no pay during the heady days of building socialism.

The buildings were thus intensely symbolic of village populations, their labor and their aspirations. There was a similar disregard for the meaning of orchards, which represented years of nurturing by farm(er)s and were once a hallmark of Bulgarian agriculture. Villagers with rights to orchard land refused to pay for the trees in order to take possession and liquidating committees refused to care for them, so the trees simply dried up and died. This, of course, solved the problem of compensation, but it also produced a striking illustration of the destruction and waste of decollectivization--acres of tree skeletons lining the highways in full view of rural and urban travelers. 44 The liquidating committees' treatment of orchards and buildings was paralleled by their treatment of farm machinery. Most committee members were not concerned about maintaining technology they were commissioned to liquidate, especially since much of it was considered antiquated.

Thus, when the theft of parts (a common problem) or normal wear rendered machines and irrigation facilities inoperative, they were abandoned to rust and deteriorate, adding more scars to the village landscape. A villager I met in 1994 kept pointing to the decaying cooperative-farm machinery surrounding us and repeating "graveyard," complete with a solemnity befitting reference to human cemeteries. For him, the morbid allusion was more than a metaphor: liquidation was an attack on his village and the casualties to prove it lay all around us. Liquidation also assailed village social relations. As elsewhere in eastern Europe the problems of property restitution were legion, perhaps most evocatively captured by Verdery's notion of the "elasticity of land" and her description of decollectivization as "a war between competing social memories." 45

In Bulgaria, this "war" has set villager against villager and contributed to the general atmosphere of uncertainty. 46 To cite only one of the most recurrent problems, as a result of the extensive consolidation and reallocation of land by cooperative farms since the 1950s, villagers often have personal plots on land that belonged to another family prior to collectivization. If these plots have permanent crops, such as vineyards or fruit trees, then restitution immediately puts two families at odds over whose rights will prevail-those of the former owner or' those of the laborer who planted and tended the crops. While there are regulations requiring owners to compensate planters at specified rates, legal wrangling may drag on for years and juridical decisions will not erase the enmities generated in the process. Many villagers blame the urban architects of liquidation for these hostilities. Meanwhile, urban residents pursuing land claims against villagers cause further antagonism and reinforce the image of an outside assault.

The original decollectivization program also confirmed villagers' fears of being turned back into "peasants." With no remaining cooperative resources and no legal supports (such as to force land exchange when needed to consolidate cooperative members' plots), private production appeared to be the only possible outcome. At the same time, there was no mechanism to ensure owners access to mechanical assistance, nor could they be assured of affording necessary supplies, such as chemical fertilizers. 47 In fact, since the owners expected only sma11 amounts of land, any economy of scale seemed unlikely. Thus, just as villagers had anticipated, decollectivization seemed to be forcing them back into arduous and demeaning manual farm-work.

At the same time, many of the non-agricultural enterprises in villages and neighboring towns were closing or slowing down, making the transition from worker to peasant seem all the more imminent. 48 Villagers were threatened by both industrial and agricultural decline; non- agricultural livelihoods and associated identities were disappearing along with the liquidated farms. Together, these economic trends, their social consequences and the cultural interpretation of both, not only fueled rural antagonism toward the urban framers of decollectivization, but also prompted reaction to transition in general, diminishing support for the Union of Democratic Forces and increasing that for the Socialist Party.

The difference between decollectivization and other transition reforms deepened the pre-existing rural/urban political division. While urban workers could look forward to new structures of ownership in industry and commerce through privatization, rural residents faced a return to old structures through restitution (intimating a restoration of the inter-war situation which most villagers recalled negatively). Certainly not all urbanites were optimistic about the future but the very discourse of transition seemed to give them more hope than it granted villagers. The reality of decollectivization, however, was so devastating that it even taxed urban optimism and probably contributed to the collapse of the government in October 1992. 49 Not surprisingly, then, the successor government quickly suspended some of the extreme elements of decollectivization: a moratorium was placed on selling cooperative livestock and the legality of voluntary cooperatives was tacitly reinstated. More accurately, there was no attempt to prohibit or disband "new" cooperatives, even though most of their members still had not received the necessary legal documentation of land ownership from the land commissions.

Cooperatives were needed not only to work the land but also to provide various supports (primarily machine services) to the expanding private sector, which now included the essential subsistence production previously referred to as "personal." Village households with able-bodied members expanded their subsistence activity to compensate for inflation and the loss of other jobs, so the importance of cooperative farms may have actually increased with expanding private production. At the same time, expanding subsistence activity could exacerbate some of the complaints and associated socialist sentiments suggested here--notably, villagers' concerns about being returned to the peasantry. This explains the apparent paradox evident in some regions of Bulgaria of increasing private cultivation of fields combined with increasing village disgruntlement over decollectivization. It also helps explain the greater anxiety of older villagers who were physically unable to expand subsistence activity to compensate for the declining real value of their pensions. 50

A similar situation emerged around the decisions of the land commissions. As soon as commissions began issuing their proposals in 1994, villagers began to complain about not receiving the exact plots of land that they or their parents had previously owned. In many cases exact restitution was impossible because property had been built upon or submerged under reservoirs. In other cases plot substitution represented a land commission's attempt to consolidate some of the small holdings characteristic of pre-socialist land tenure. Again paradoxically, many villagers who complained about these decisions were those who complained about decollectivization itself and who advocated cooperative production. Why would villagers with strong cooperative predilections be attached to particular pieces of land?

Since villagers expected to be forced into private agricultural production they wanted the best land available; if they thought the decisions of land commissions compromised this in any way, they were likely to resist. Others hoped that by insisting on their original land they might eventually get the buildings or irrigation facilities precluding its restitution. For many villagers, particular plots also carried symbolic meaning and sentimental value: the land provided a physical link to past generations of owners/relatives. Thus, the attachment to particular parcels reflects both a commitment to kinship and self-interest. Villagers' complaints also represented another form of resistance to decollectivization in general: by contesting commissions' decisions they created additional barriers to land entitlement.

Furthermore, if they were successful in increasing the amount of land restored in pre- socialist parcels, they might enhance the attraction of cooperative cultivation since owners of fragmented and dispersed plots were unlikely to find private agriculture attractive. Thus the insistence on particular plots was a means of local political participation--a way to influence the outcome of centrally dictated land restitution programs-- completely consistent with general support for cooperative agriculture.

While rural responses to land reform clearly had economic, political and cultural bases, the association between communism and cooperative production combined with urban stereotypes of rural passivity and conservatism to obscure economic factors. Villagers who believed in the economic soundness of cooperative production were viewed by urbanites as socialists under the thumb of village communist bosses. This illustrates the general way in which the politics, economics and culture of agriculture became entangled, so that economic considerations were translated into political ones by the cultural meanings and interpretations attached to agriculture and the village(r). Of course, urban interpretations of rural developments were not uniform.

The role of agricultural disruption in the general economic crisis was evident to everyone as Bulgaria became "a large net importer of foodstuffs. 51 While some urbanites accused villagers of withholding food in retaliation against urban democrats, 52 others acknowledged the agricultural difficulties generated by the economic transition, especially decollectivization. Some of the latter were likely responding to increasing demands from village kin for more assistance and those who answered the call were no doubt also affected by the deterioration of farm property they saw. In general, the economic difficulties of the early 1990s, including extensive unemployment and rabid inflation, made access to agricultural produce even more essential than it was in the past, moving agriculture closer to the center of urban attention as well.

In this context, the politics of agriculture dovetails with the more common explanation of socialist sentiment based on the privations of transition: agricultural activities and village connections became more important for urbanites and this was viewed as yet another privation. Moreover, such dependence began to take on an aura of permanence following a few years of unsuccessful transition, that is, by the time of the third Bulgarian elections. Thus, the politics of agriculture does not completely belie the idea that socialist sentiment in eastern Europe is generated by the pain of transition, but it does show that this is an incomplete explanation. From the very start the politics of agriculture affected the interpretations and policies of the transition, and its influence was still clearly evident when the socialist parliament elected in December 1994 took steps as early as March 1995 to (again) limit the sale of agricultural land and encourage cooperative production. As one clerk in a "new" village cooperative put it, "we cannot make any progress because every time there is a change of government they change the [land] policies."

Clearly, the politics of agriculture has a self-perpetuating dynamic that contributes to rural uncertainty and undermines initiative. While the role of agriculture may thus be perceived as predominantly conservative, it also contributes significantly to change. For example, an underlying motivation for villagers attempting private commercial farming in the mid-1990s was anti-communism; they saw their efforts as political actions against socialism and the Socialist Party. Other rural opponents of the BSP formed separate, anti-socialist cooperatives for the same reason. 53 In discussions of agricultural strategies with members of these alternative cooperatives and private farmers alike, it was nearly impossible to dissociate their political and economic objectives-anti-socialism was driving rural economic innovation. Such socialist opponents are a decided minority in most villages but the politics of agriculture also facilitates change among socialist supporters-in short, it is the ability to draw on agricultural activity for survival that makes the unemployment, austerity and inflation associated with the transition tolerable, allowing it to continue. Still, as already acknowledged, these "solutions" generate concerns that restrict change, such as rural anxiety about re-peasantization. Thus, the politics of agriculture simultaneously facilitates and limits transition from socialism, and this contradiction explains why agriculture has been a central (if ambiguous) factor in the political economy of eastern Europe since 1989.

Other Times, Other Places, Other Parties

The MRF then found itself tacitly working with the BSP, even though MRF leaders had previously claimed that they would never ally with former communists, and BSP leaders had maintained a nationalistic rhetoric hardly supportive of minority rights. It was the politics of agriculture that brought them together; like the politics of agriculture itself, however, the alliance remained informal and unofficial.

While I have stressed the legacy of socialism in the political centrality of agriculture, the politics of agriculture is not solely a socialist creation. Indeed, it has been an aspect of Bulgarian political struggle since at least World War I, and probably since the beginnings of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Following the consolidation of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) at the end of that century and its subsequent decision to engage directly in political activity, agriculture and agrarian issues became constants in Bulgarian politics. In fact, agrarian governments, headed by Alexander Stamboliiski, were formed in 1919 and 1920. 55 A 1923 coup brought the Agrarian era (and Stamboliiski's life) to an end, but the Union survived and was the only other political party allowed to exist during the communist era. This helped sustain a pro-peasant discourse in Bulgarian culture throughout socialist industrialization and urbanization, albeit an increasingly ambivalent one.

Given the survival of the Agrarian Union under communism and the centrality of the politics of agriculture in the second half of the twentieth century, a paradox emerges as to the relatively poor electoral performance of agrarian parties in Bulgaria after 1989. In the first free election BANU received only 8 percent of the popular vote, although some agrarian support may have gone to the UDF since the revived Nikola Petkov branch of the Agrarian Union joined the UDF alliance. 56 Still, in the second elections, after an incomplete union, two agrarian parties contended independently and received less than a total of 8 percent of the vote (3.86% for the united party, 3.44% for the still defiant Petkov branch). In the 1994 elections the agrarian parties participated in separate coalitions so that support for them is difficult to track, but political discussions with villagers in different parts of the country suggested that it was still limited and fairly localized. 57

If the politics of agriculture was so important, why were agrarians unable to capitalize on it? First, since BANU had served as basically a handmaiden of the Communist Party between 1945 and 1989, 58 it had a very limited independent base upon which to build support. Those supporting the Socialist Party, with which BANU previously had been associated, were more likely to vote for the BSP directly; those opposed to the socialists were unlikely to choose a prior collaborator over an opposition with anti-communist pedigrees. Subsequent splintering of agrarian parties made it nearly impossible to consolidate agrarian support into a unified and distinctive political force. More significantly, as I have argued above, many villagers ceased to think of themselves as "peasants" during collectivization and rural industrialization, and for these individuals the old "Peasant Party" seemed atavistic. In fact, to the degree that agrarian parties advocated a "small- holders" platform, they were perceived as yet another force in the attempt to turn villagers back into peasants. The failure of agrarian parties thus may be attributed to the same interaction between agriculture and identity that generated rural opposition to the UDF.

As in Bulgaria, the politics of agriculture may be significant in other eastern Europe countries where the pain of transition could be obscuring underlying reasons for a "revival of socialism." Clearly there are differences: several other east Europe countries followed socialist agricultural policies broadly similar to those in Bulgaria, yet none chose a socialist government in the first elections after 1989. This suggests that socialism had greater support in Bulgaria prior to the transition, which may in turn reflect even deeper historical differences: socialist sentiment in Bulgaria in the inter-war period was certainly not dominant, nor so significant as it was in Yugoslavia, but it was more vital than in many other east European countries. Perhaps the socialist and pre-socialist experiences of Bulgaria made the associations I have discussed, such as that between the village and the cooperative farm, more complete and meaningful than they were elsewhere. In Poland and Yugoslavia throughout the communist era, agriculture remained an area of private production, so the transformations and threats that I have outlined for Bulgaria in 1990 were less evident and the appeal of peasant/agrarian parties more meaningful. 59

In Hungary the extensive liberalization of informal agricultural production and marketing made agriculture an important means of mobility so that the situation of villagers there in 1989 was quite distinct from that in Bulgaria. 60 However, according to Martha Lampland's discussion, the Hungarian state's liberal support for an agricultural second economy represented a policy reversal which was itself a demonstration of the politics of agriculture. 61 Furthermore, in both Hungary and Poland the electoral successes of socialist parties following earlier rejections may be tied to the difficulties experienced by farmers as a result of new economic policies-much as I have suggested for Bulgaria's second socialist victory in 1994. For example, a New York Times' report on the 1995 Estonian elections claims that the ruling party lost to those advocating a "greater commitment to social protection and agriculture" due to "dissatisfaction among elderly and rural voters who felt that they had been left out of the economic revival." 62

Of course, the politics of agriculture is not predestined to produce socialist sentiment or socialist governments. In the Romanian case described by Verdery, a government of former communists (albeit self-defined as anti-communist) was the advocate of decollectivization, making the politics of agriculture much more ambiguous in terms of the socialist/anti- socialist distinction found in Bulgaria. 63 The extreme illegitimacy of the Ceausescu regime, which was identified with collectivized agriculture and communism, is another major factor limiting the associations that developed in rural Bulgaria. The politics of agriculture may not have a predictable or uniform effect throughout eastern Europe but the centrality of agriculture was to some degree a general socialist characteristic.

Given this common legacy, our attempt to understand what is happening politically throughout the area must include attention to the countryside. I do not deny the importance of other factors in accounting for political developments, many of which can be summarized as the pain of transition. Rather I suggest that we can also find political motives and forces where they are less expected: in considerations that cut across political groupings as they are commonly delineated in the west, just as agriculture in Bulgaria cuts across generations, ethnic divisions and even rural-urban distinctions. In postcommunist eastern Europe agriculture is predisposed to play this role.