Peter Dobrev (MON Fellow, Oct ’22 – Jul ’22) will talk about his research at CAS:

The Fight against the Kulaks in Bulgaria – the Fate of the Large Landowners in Dobrudja after 1944

on 20 October, 2022 (Thursday) at 16:30h.

Moderated by Martin Ivanov.

– – –

Abstract:

Prior to World War II, the majority of Bulgarian agricultural producers farmed very small, fragmented farms, predominantly producing for their own consumption. Technology was primitive and compared to the rest of Europe, Bulgarian land was the most fragmented. While in 1934 the total number of farms in the country was 884 869, in 1946 the holdings were already 1,1 mln. Large-scale agriculture had a minimal share in the statistics – only 561 holdings that comprised of only 1% of all. But most of these 561 holdigns were chiftliks – well organized capitalist enterprises, where the effective use of agricultural machines was feasible and where the production could be market oriented.

Such estates were predominant in certain areas like Dobrudja, where the rich chiftlikchii were quite influential socially and politically – both locally and nationally. Their economic and political success contradicts to some of the points in mainstream Bulgarian historiography, which usually neglects large-scale argriculture. In the 30s and 40s modernization was visible in some of the smaller holdings as well, mainly due to the increased state intervention. But with the end of World War II the fate of the chiftliks was about to chage.

If by 1946 only 0,8 % of Bulgarian farmers owned more than 20 ha, in 1958 93,2% of the land was collectivized and 3200 TKZS (producers’ cooperatives on the pattern of the Soviet kolhoz) were functioning. Thus the the most important part of the concentration of the land was achieved and large-scale cooperative agriculture started to dominate. Of course, collectivization didn’t come without resistance. Western analysis has emphasised, and recent Bulgarian scholarship has recognised, the role of ‘extra-legal’ pressures that were very frequent at the time – threats, physical beatings and arbitrary arrests. The process of collectivization is painful for an agrarian country like Bulgaria. For this reason, it has not gone unnoticed by historiography, but so far no one has paid attention to the fate of large landholdings.

My research will focus on this issue, hoping in this way not only to shed light on the local example of Dobudja, but also to show the very different manifestations of collectivization depending on the region and the type of farms that were being liquidated. In this sense, I will try to compare the Bulgarian experience with the destruction of large-scale agriculture with what happened in other socialist countries. It will be valuable also to compare it with the general development of the agrarian question in the Balkans in the second half of the twentieth century, where certain studies already exist, but again without focusing on the fate of large-scale agriculture.

Mostly a comparison will be sought with neighboring Romania, which went through many similar processes with Bulgaria in the period 1949-1962. Romania had the highest percentage of large-scale agriculture in the Balkans before World War II, so what happened there was most relevant with Dobrudja, especially since geographically, the northern half of the region was part of the Romanian state both before and after 1944. Personal histories and local specifics will be sought in order to go beyond general political and economic history. In this sense, methods of microhistory and historical anthropology will be extensively used.

With the help of purposeful work in various Bulgarian historical archives I will try to clarify the mechanisms by which the communist state liquidated large farms in Dobrudja, but also in other regions such as Burgas, as far as there were chiftliks there. I will try to see both the various forms of institutional pressure and violence and the resistance to these processes. I will draw the trajectories of a number of landowning families who had lost property and livelihood and had to look for other alternatives for survival and life development. In this way, I hope to fill a hitherto unknown page in the history of the Bulgarian economic elite until 1944, which was literally liquidated as a stratum with collectivization. At the same time, my research will significantly enrich the previous stories about collectivization in Bulgaria, which were either from a “bird’s eye view” or focused only on the Northwest and Plovdiv region. This would be useful for our overall understanding of this aspect of the economic history of socialism. At the same time, for the first time, an attempt will be made to place the Bulgarian historical case in a pan-Balkan perspective, as well as in the context of the Eastern bloc in general.