2. Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1993), 164.
3. Jane Perlez, "Welcome Back, Lenin," The New York Times (31 May 1994): AI, A9.
4. "Bulgarian Socialists Win," Washington Post (20 December 1994): A35 (my emphasis). Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995)
5. Maria Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 453-82.
6. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 177. Similar observations were common in popular reports of the election, e.g. Celestine Bohlen, "Ex-communists Decisively Lead Bulgaria Voting," The New York Times (11 June 1990): A12.
7. Luan Troxel, "Socialist Persistence in the Bulgarian Elections of 1990-1991," East European Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1993): 415.
8. Ibid., 409.
9. Robert Begg and Mieke Meurs, "Writing a New Song: State Policy and Path Dependence in Bulgarian Agriculture" (unpublished manuscript).
10. In an earlier analysis I documented rural-urban differences in the interpretation of socialist achievements, but I believe these differences also follow from the role of agriculture developed here. See Gerald W. Creed, "Rural-Urban Oppositions in the Bulgarian Political Transition," Siidosteuropa 42, no. 6 (1993): 369-82.
11. The most obvious example is their support for the Agrarian Party in the interwar period, which I discuss briefly in the conclusion. It is also noteworthy that the "overwhelming majority" of communist party members in the interwar period continued to be peasants, which could hardly be called conservative in that historical context (Nissan Oren, Bulgarian Communism: The Road to Power, 1934-1944 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1971], 109). See also Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, 1883-1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 27.
12. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork in Bulgaria January 1987 November 1988, June-July 1992, July 1993, July 1994 and July 1995. Most of the research was conducted in a village in northwestern Bulgaria, with side trips to villages in several other regions of the country. I also gathered materials during two short trips to Sofia in October 1993 and November 1994.
13. This suggestion complements Troxel's (op. cit.) attribution of Bulgarian socialist support to the BSP's manipulation of fear, notably popular fears over the loss of social securities, civil instability and ethnic conflict. My contribution, however, places agriculture and identity at the center of this fear and attempts to explain why such fears were available to be manipulated by the socialists.
14. Statisticheski Godishnik, 1993 (Sofia: Natsionalen Statisticheski Institut, 1993), 25.
15. See Eleanor Wenkart Smollett, "The Economy of Jars: Kindred Relationships in Bulgaria--An Exploration," Ethnologia Europaea 19, no. 2 (1989): 125-40.
16. The following description provides only the necessary background for subsequent discussions. Those interested in more detail on Bulgarian politics since 1989 may refer to:John Bell, "Bulgaria," in Developments in East European Politics, eds. Stephen White, Judy Batt and Paul G. Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 83-97; J.F. Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991);Idem., Hopes and Shadows: Eastern Europe After Communism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Gale Stokes, op. cit.; Luan Troxel, op. cit.
17. For example, the International Human Rights Law Group reports that "with relatively minor exceptions, the mechanics of the election, the casting of ballots and the tabulating of results, appear to have been conducted freely and fairly," in "Bulgaria in Transition: Report on the June 1990 Legislative Election and Discussion of Constitutional Considerations for the Grand Nation Assembly" (Washington, DC: International Human Rights Law Group, 1990), 1.
18. The MRF is technically not an "ethnic party" because the establishment of parties on ethnic bases is unconstitutional. However, the vast majority of its supporters are ethnic Turks and the vast majority of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria support the MRF. For more information on the Turkish minority and the MRF, see Daniel Bates, "Uneasy Accommodation: Ethnicity and Politics in Rural Bulgaria" in East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times, ed. David A. Kideckel (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 137-157; and his "What's in a Name?: Minorities, Identity, and Politics in Bulgaria," Identities 1, nos. 2-3 (1994): 201-25.
19. BANU actually received more than 8% of the popular vote but its candidates failed to get an absolute majority in any district, so it got no majority seats.
20. The suggestion that these were ruses by each party to avoid governing cannot be verified but is preferable to the possibility of pure stupidity.
21. These percentages are from Statisticheski Godishnik, 1993, 57, 86, 100, 257.
22. Begg and Meurs, 22.
23. It was possible for the village to receive hard currency credits for this sale, which could be used to purchase machinery and other imports, but this possibility was not always realized. Individual producers saw the value of the activity not in terms of foreign currency but in the high sums they received in Bulgarian money.
24. See Smollett, "The Economy of Jars."
25. For a further description of the akord system in Bulgaria, see Gerald W. Creed, "Economic Development under Socialism: A Bulgarian Village on the Eve of Transition" (Ph.D. dissertation, CUNY, 1992). For comparable arrangements elsewhere see David A. Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 109-15.
26. This is somewhat curious given that the quintessential objective of most communist regimes was industrial, not agricultural, development, and that some communist countries never collectivized agriculture. Still, collectivization dominated the image of communism for distant observers and local participants alike.
27. Similar patterns were evident elsewhere in eastern Europe; see Peter Bell, Peasants in Socialist Transition: Life in a Collectivized Hungarian Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 138.
28. The exact number of complexes varied over time. On the general process of consolidation, see Michael Boyd, "Organizational Reform and Agricultural Performance: The Case of Bulgarian Agriculture, 1960- 1985," Journal of Comparative Economics 14, no. 1 (1990): 70-87; Eleanor Smollett, "Implications of the Multicommunity Production Cooperative (Agro- Industrial Complex) for Rural Life in Bulgaria or the Demise of the Kara Stoyanka," Bulgarian Journal of Sociology 3 (1980): 42-56; Paul Wiedeman, "The Origins and Development of Agro-Industrial Complexes in Bulgaria," in Agricultural Policies in the USSR and Eastern Europe, eds. Ronald A. Francisco, Betty A. Laird and Roy D. Laird (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980), 97-135.
29. This concept was first developed in Creed, "Economic Development Under Socialism." For a published statement see Gerald W. Creed, "Agriculture and the Domestication of Industry in Rural Bulgaria," American Ethnologist 22, no. 3 (1995): 528- 48.
30. Katherine Verdery, "Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the "Transition," American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 423.
31. Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism, 156.
32. This discussion is based on Creed, "Agriculture and the Domestication of Industry."
33. On socialist agricultural performance, see Michael Boyd, Organization Performance and System Choice: East European Agricultural Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); and Marvin Jackson, "Recent Economic Performance and Policy in Bulgaria," in Joint Economic Committee, East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980s (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1986), 3: 23- 58.
34. I am grateful to Katherine Verdery for capturing my argument in this felicitous way.
35. Katherine Verdery, "The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania," Slavic Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 1107; Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism. I acknowledge the tendency toward atomization in the Bulgarian village but I think it was less complete than Kideckel describes for Romania.
36. See Eleanor Wenkart Smollett, "Settlement Systems in Bulgaria: Socialist Planning for the Integration of Rural and Urban Life," in City and Society: Studies in Urban Ethnicity, Life-style and Class (Leiden: Institute of Cultural and Social Studies, University of Leiden, 1985), 257-79.
37. For nice examples of the conflict between villages that administered cooperative farms and those that were incorporated, see Veska Kouzhouharova, Mieke Meurs and Rositsa Stoyanova, "From Cooperative Village to Agro-Industrial Complex: The Rise and Fall of Bulgarian Collective Agriculture" (unpublished manuscript). 38. Creed, "Economic Development under Socialism," 102-3, 109.
39. This makes the term selyanin inherently ambiguous in contemporary Bulgarian.
40. Some urbanites resented the increased dependence on rural relatives occasioned by the transition but, instead of attacking the changes, they advocated more rapid transition as the best means to autonomy (see Creed, "Rural-Urban Oppositions," 382). Thus, while agriculture touches almost all Bulgarians, the political outcome depends upon the nature of the contact in local, even individual, contexts.
41. For more detail on the legal framework and early progress of land reform, see Diana Kopeva, Plamen Mishev and Keith Howe, "Land Reform and Liquidation of Collective Farm Assets in Bulgarian Agriculture: Progress and Prospects," Communist Economies and Economic Transformation 6, no. 2 (1994): 203-17; and Begg and Meurs, op. cit.
42. The amended land law (art. 33) specified that land commissions should be established at municipal levels but also provided for the establishment of village commissions at the request of municipal councils.
43. Central to this sense of continuity was the image of urban elites enacting and enforcing rural policies. For more parallels, see Gerald W. Creed, "An Old Song in a New Voice: Decollectivization in Bulgaria," in East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times, ed. David A. Kideckel (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 25-46.
44. The same dynamic affected rose farms and vineyards, but the former were localized and the latter often received greater private attention because of the value of homemade wine.
45. Verdery, "The Elasticity of Land," 1086. For comparative cases, see Peter Ag6cs and Sandor Ag6cs, "'The Change Was but an Unfulfilled Promise': Agriculture and the Rural Population in Post-Communist Hungary," East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 1 (1994): 32-57; C.M. Hann, "Property Relations in the New Eastern Europe: The Case of Specialist Cooperatives in Hungary," in The Curtain Rises: Rethinking Culture, Ideology, and the State in Eastern Europe, ed. Hermine G. DeSoto and David G. Anderson (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 99-119; David A. Kideckel, "Once Again the Land: Decollectivization and Social Conflict in Rural Romania," in Ibid., 62-75.
46. Villagers from across the country actually commented on the increase in conflict and contentiousness after 1992.
47. See Mieke Meurs and Darren Spreeuw, "Rational Peasants in Eastern Europe: Household Decisions About Organizational Form during the Agarian Transition," Journal of Technical Forecasting and Social Change (forthcoming).
48. Interestingly, similar fears had fueled anti-socialist criticism prior to 1989 (see Creed, "Economic Development Under Socialism," 300). After 1989, however, it seemed more likely to develop from anti-socialist policies than socialist ones.
49. A greater factor was decollectivization's impact on the Turkish minority, which I will discuss in the conclusion.
50. In smaller villages this category might include the entire village population.
51. "State of a Nation: A Snapshot on the Bulgarian Economy," Transitions 5, no. 4 (April 1994): 9. In general, Bulgarian agricultural production has been declining steadily since 1989, with small improvements in 1991 and 1994. Actual numbers vary but one source cites 1994 agricultural production at 71.1 percent of 1989 levels (Sotsialno-ikonomichesko Razvitie na Republika Bulgariia prez Perioda '90-'94 Godina [Sofia: Natsionalert Statisticheski Institut, 1995], 33). See also, Begg and Meurs, op. cit.; and Wyzan, "Stabilisation and Anti- Infiationary Policy," in Bulgaria in a Time of Change: Economic and Political Dimensions, ed. Iliana Zloch-Christy (London: Macmillan Press, forthcoming).
52. Such interpretations were most evident in the period after the first election as many urbanites blamed villagers for the food shortages of 1990-1991. In their view, villagers were withholding products in retribution for urban strikes and political demonstrations. See Troxel, 415.
53. See Deema Kaneff, "Responses to 'Democratic' Land Reforms in a Bulgarian Village," in After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe, ed. R. Abrahams (Oxford: Berghahn Books, in press). This dual cooperative arrangement became increasingly common in villages throughout the country.
54. See "Land for the Landless," Ins/der (February 1993): 7. Begg and Meurs (op. cit.) point out that the collapse of rural industry in Turkish tobacco-growing regions exacerbated discontent and figured in the political backlash. Deema Kaneff ("Defining Ethnicity through Land Privatisation Processes in Rural Bulgaria," paper presented at the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 6- 11 August 1995) shows how decollectivization contributed to ethnic segmentation in a multi-ethnic Bulgarian village.
55. See John D. Bell, The Peasants in Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
56. The Nikola Petkov branch split from BANU in 1945 over the issue of collaboration with the Communist Party. It was subsequently eviscerated by Petkov's execution in 1947.
57. For example, in Dobrudza, the "breadbasket" of Bulgaria located in the northeast, I found significant support for agrarian parties and significant agrarian influence in district politics. Such local strength, however, is significantly diluted on the national level.
58. On connections between the Communist and Agrarian Parties, see Dimitur Dimitrov, "Relations Between the Communist Party and Agrarian Party over the Past 80 Years," in Bulgaria Past and Present, ed. Dimitur Kosev (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1982), 239-48; and Khristo Khristov "Politicheskotot Sutrudnichestvo na BKP i BZNS (1970- 1981)," Istoricheski Pregled 45, no. 10 (1989): 3-14. This relationship appeared to be re- established in the 1994 elections when a major branch of the Agrarian Union entered into coalition with the Socialist Party.
59. For a description of agriculture in Poland see Carole Nagengast, Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs: Class, Culture and the Polish State. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).
60. See Ivan Szelenyi, Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
61. She suggests that support for the agricultural second economy followed rural resistance to official attempts to reduce monetary and institutional supports for household agricultural production ("Pigs, Party Secretaries, and Private Lives in Hungary," American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 [1991]: 465).
62. "Estonia's Government Replaced in Vote Signaling Slower Reform," The New York Times (7 March 1995): AIO.
63. Verdery, "The Elasticity of Land."