censuses record not so much a distribution of wealth as a maldistribution of poverty. The main component of this sad spectacle was the so-called peasant question, in both its economic and its ideological manifestations.
Interwar East Central Europe was preponderantly unproductively agricultural. While far higher proportions of its population were engaged in farming than was the case in Western Europe, the productivity of its agriculture in terms both of yield rates per unit of agricultural area and of yield rates per agricultural worker was far lower. The result was a vicious cycle of rural undercapitalization, underproductivity, underconsumption, underemployment, overpopulation, and pervasive misery. Despite strenuous, if often misapplied, efforts to correct these imbalances and to increase the area’s wealth through industrialization, in 1938 East Central Europe still produced only 8 percent of the industrial output of all Europe minus the Soviet Union, and of this small share, a third was recorded by Czechoslovakia. Except for that country, whose western half comprised the area’s most thoroughly industrialized region, the fate of the several states’ economies was annually determined by the single, hazardous, factor of weather.
Problems ancillary to, and aggravating, this low productivity in the agricultural sector were weak transportation, disruption of prewar trade patterns, economic nationalism and competitive striving for autarky (especially prominent and destructive in the Great Depression of the early 1930s), competition of Argentine and North American grains in the markets of Western Europe, and drastic reduction of opportunities for overseas emigration to the United States. The swelling surplus peasant population of East Central Europe vegetated at bare subsistence levels on its holdings, subdividing them into ever smaller and less rational plots. Its very existence and condition of underemployment discouraged any investment in agronomic technology. Even then, it was scarcely permitted to consume an adequate proportion of its relatively low food output as governmental fiscal, tariff, and investment policies consistently forced the undernourished peasants to sell at a pittance far more than any authentic surplus of their produce in order to raise cash for the payment of taxes, debts, fees, and a few astronomically priced (because protected and cartellized) essential industrial products.
Where governments did arrange land reforms for the ostensible benefit of the peasantry, the motivation and hence the application was primarily political—either, as mentioned above, to expropriate ethnically “alien” landlords or to immunize a restless peasantry against the feared attractions of Communism—and was not adequately supplemented with equivalent interest in correcting the economic and agronomic malaise of agriculture. The peasant’s standard of living was falling precisely at a time when his expectations and self-esteem were rising. His travels and other experiences as a mobilized soldier in World War I had not only sophisticated his material wants, but had also shown him how heavily governments and urban populations depended on his docility and labor. He now responded to his interwar lot by vacillating among resentment, mistrust, despair, and rage. In particular the combination of his disasterous impoverishment during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when the industrial-agricultural price scissors opened drastically against him, followed in the decade’s second half by his economic rescue—in the Danubian and Balkan countries, if not in Poland and Czechoslovakia—through Nazi Germany’s bulk purchase at high prices of his produce, served to radicalize the East Central European peasant—occasionally toward the Left but more frequently toward the “new” Right. This trend suggests that a reexamination of the traditional claims and postures of peasantist ideologues and politicians is in order.
Against these ideologues’ claims, in the tradition of Rousseau and Jefferson, that the peasant’s proximity to nature, his rustic life-style, and his sustained work habits allegedly made him a “naturally” democratic, tolerant, peaceable, cooperative citizen, we may offer the suggestion that the East European peasant’s characteristic political behavior, as expressed by long periods of submissiveness interspersed with periodic bouts of jacquerie violence, indicates profound, albeit understandable, apathy, alienation, and rancor. Excluded from the general progress of Europe, he felt himself to be both the guardian and the victim of anachronistic values and institutions, whose very anachronism undermined and negated the potential power of the peasantry as the area’s most numerous class. The peasant’s political stance in the restored or enlarged “new” states of the interwar era was problematic and uneasy. Grateful, on the one hand, for land reform, he also resented that one of its side-effects had been to intensify the control of the state apparatus over his village. This control he felt to be exploitative rather than benevolent, exercised in its own interest by a culturally alien urban bureaucracy which would either neglect or suppress but neither probe nor solve the social tensions accruing from the economic malaise of the countryside.
Against its ideologues’ rhapsodic presentation of peasantism as a supposed humanistic alternative to allegedly crassly materialistic capitalism and socialism, we may legitimately note their naiveté about both the “soulless” industrialism espoused by these two competing ideologies as well as about their own favored “peasantist way of life.” For the hard fact is that the peasants could achieve prosperity only by transforming that way of life into an integrated, productive relationship with urban market needs and industrial capacities. Furthermore, the ideological celebrators of peasantism appear to have misread or misrepresented the real views of their claimed constituents. For the peasant’s actual attitude toward industrialization was less one of hostility than one of ambivalence: he was both fascinated and afraid. He realized that it alone held out the promise of salvation from rural poverty and overpopulation. But he also dreaded industrialization as a threat to his values and traditions. More specifically, he shrewdly suspected that its immediate costs in terms of restricted consumption and increased prices and taxes would be unloaded onto his shoulders, or rather squeezed from his belly.
The general peasant resentment and mistrust of urban society extended also to the proletariat, the area’s other interwar “outsider” class. The East Central European Socialist parties and workers, in turn, feared and shunned the peasant masses as incarnating an allegedly reactionary, clericalist threat to economic and social progress. It was, indeed, true that the only political parties other than explicitly peasantist ones that the East Central European peasantry occasionally supported were explicitly Christian-denominational ones in the 1920s and then also Right-Radical ones in the depression decade of the 1930s. More generally, the area’s still young and small urban proletariat, in its anxiety to avoid being weakened or manipulated from any quarter, tended to isolate itself from social alliances with any older and larger classes even on the rare occasions where these were available as would-be allies.
The potential political power placed in the peasantry’s hands by the universal suffrage introduced throughout interwar East Central Europe, except in Hungary, was soon blunted by the emergence of a specific political ruling class. This class initially coopted peasant political leaders and eroded the peasantist component of their political commitments; later, alarmed by escalating social and political unrest, it simply replaced the formally democratic political institutions with authoritarian ones everywhere except in Czechoslovakia. This political ruling class was not, contrary to conventional assumptions, the bourgeoisie, which was quite weak and either dependent on state subsidies or else ethnically “alien” and hence vulnerable. Rather it was the bureaucracy, which was allied with, and recruited from, the intelligentsia.
The conduct of peasant political leaders and the strategies of peasantist political parties will be analyzed and compared in detail in the chapters on individual countries. Briefly, the leaders ran the gamut from “bearer of the national conscience” or “peasant Gracchus,” through “statesman,” “pragmatist,” and “power-broker,” to sheer “betrayer-of-trust” and “office-seeker,” or, alternatively, “opposition demagogue.” None adequately benefited their village constituencies, which were nevertheless pathetically loyal to them. In many cases, the peasant politician’s class pride was accompanied and corroded by a residual political inferiority complex. This led him to overvalue the sheer fact of his admission into the councils of government, where his often vague programs and generalized aspirations were promptly and easily neutralized by cabinet colleagues who appealed to his sense of “realism” or “patriotism.”
