taxes on necessities consumed in the village were more “feasible” than direct taxes on the incomes of the urban entrepreneurial, professional, and bureaucratic classes, or why the “national interest” required that the resultant revenue be spent on the army and on subsidized industry rather than reinvested in agriculture or in rural amenities. While prominent peasant “tribunes” were often thus coopted at the top, their party machines were always infiltrated at the less visible middle echelons by the same political class of lawyers and bureaucrats that had already captured control of other political parties and of the state apparatus as such. To the limited extent that this type was at all responsive to peasant needs, it served the interests of the more prosperous stratum of the peasantry.
International peasantist solidarity was articulated by the so-called Green International, an appellation intended to symbolize its supposed historic role as an alternative to the “Red” International of Communists and the “White” International of capitalists and landlords. Its institutional expression was an International Agrarian Bureau established in Prague by several East Central European peasantist parties. Organizationally and financially, it was controlled by the Czechoslovak Agrarians, who sought to give it a Slavophile flavor, to the irritation of its Romanian member. Despite high rhetoric, it never had much political influence; its constituent peasantist parties either failed to master domestic power in their respective countries or, in the few cases where they did so, became absorbed in the desperate but vain pursuit of purely domestic solutions to area-wide problems. In or out of power, these parties were quite nationalistic. The one authentic internationalist exception here was the Bulgarian peasant leader Aleksandŭr Stamboliski—and he was soon murdered for his pains by domestic supernationalists. The Green International’s particular irrelevance, and peasantism’s general inadequacy, were later exposed by the Great Depression.
6
The Communist parties, which came to power after World War II thanks to the Soviet armies’ conquest of the area, were politically weak during the interwar era. Though they might attract many genuine idealists, and though their cadres usually bore persecution with courage, and though they benefited from the irascible habit of many local regimes of labeling all opposition as communistic, these parties were often discredited by their “antinational” identification with: Russia (perceived as a historic foe and potential threat in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states); the local ethnic minorities (popularly suspected as subversive); and atheism (especially damaging in the Roman Catholic countries). They were also hampered by their often inappropriate and vacillating approaches to issues of territorial revisionism, to the agrarian question, and to the peasantry as a class (was it a solid bloc or internally differentiated?)—a weakness which, in turn, flowed from their organizational, financial, and moral dependence on the Comintern. Occasional lapses from slavish imitation of the vagaries of the Moscow party-line resulted in drastic purges, which racked the Polish, Yugoslav, and Bulgarian Communist parties with particular severity. Hence, zombie-like obedience and the ritual discharge of assigned tasks became both a necessity for survival and a kind of psychological compensation for the Communist cadres’ lack of real political influence.
On the other hand, the Communists could capitalize on the pervasive discontent with poverty and oppression, on the peasants’ resentful alienation from the bureaucratic state apparatus, and on the related failure of the peasantist parties and leaders. Here their appeals to social justice and revolution, while eliciting no immediate response, nevertheless sustained an awareness of them as representing a political alternative. Under Nazi occupation the Communists finally enjoyed the advantage of long experience at underground organization, survival, and action. Ultimately, however, their conquest of power was determined less by local factors than by the decisive intervention of the Soviet Union. The one exception was in Yugoslavia, where they fought independently and won a revolutionary national and civil war.
7
Trends and styles of governmental activity passed through several similar sequences in the interwar East Central European countries. Yet throughout these changes and phases the bureaucratic “political class,” to which allusion has been made above as coopting peasantist leaders, formed the effective and, except in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the virtually autonomous ruling class of interwar East Central Europe. Both its civilian and military components were recruited from the so-called intelligentsia which, in turn, was simply identified by its possession of academic diplomas. The intelligentsia and, through it, the bureaucracy might be descended from the gentry, the middle class, or the peasantry; in the last-mentioned case, it tended to sever its cultural and political ties with the village despite sentimental and propagandistic professions of attachment. It might rule in association with the landed and entrepreneurial classes, but it was never a mere tool of the aristocracy or bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage did not protect the peasant masses from the intimidation or manipulation of this political class of bureaucrats and intelligentsia, and election results generally reflected its overall priorities, if not always its particular preferences. Indeed, in the area’s more primitive regions, universal suffrage functioned as the bureaucracy’s tool for breaking the traditional power of “feudal” notables over their dependent peasant clientèles.
Given the high prestige of formal academic education in the “new” interwar states of East Central Europe, the investment in higher education tended to be disproportionately large relative both to their investments in primary education as well as to the absorptive capacities of their still basically agrarian, or at most transitional, societies. The failure of industrialization to develop with sufficient rapidity and depth to absorb the surplus peasant population was paralleled by its analogous failure to absorb the surplus academic proletariat into economically or socially functional employment. Politics and state-service remained the only career-lines for these university alumni, who were heavily biased in their studies toward law or humanities and away from science and technology. Thus, land-hunger among the peasantry was matched by office-hunger among the intelligentsia. The result was a proliferation of political parties more concerned with patronage than with policy (“program” parties fared badly), and a swollen, nepotistic, underpaid, callous, routine-ridden bureaucracy that was open to corruption. All this deepened the peasant’s alienation from, and contempt for, the state, the city, and politics, which consistently confronted him as an impenetrable and hostile maze of linked fiefdoms and privileged connections.
The tenacious but essentially stagnant power of this bureaucratic class largely accounts for the peculiar syndrome of immobility and instability in interwar East Central European politics—a syndrome to which, as has been indicated, Great Power pressures and ethnic tensions also contributed. Changes in cabinets were frequent, in constitutions occasional, but the fundamental political reflections of social transitions were suffocated by these bureaucracies, and the social transitions themselves were often deliberately braked and slowed. When the resulting tensions, aggravated by the depression, became so acute as to erode the reliability of the parliamentary regimes of the 1920s as shields for the bureaucracy’s ongoing power, it initiated or endorsed coups d’état that replaced the old regimes with royal, military, or political dictatorships or semidictatorships. The exception to this trend was Czechoslovakia, the area’s economically most mature society.
This East Central European shift from parliamentary to authoritarian institutions was also facilitated and supposedly vindicated by the impressive performance of the Great Power dictatorships, especially of Nazi Germany, in energizing their economies and consolidating their societies. Over the great esteem in which German culture had traditionally been held in East Central Europe was now superimposed a new fascination, which was grudging or enthusiastic as the case might be, but always respectful, with the Nazi political model. The imposing domestic and diplomatic successes of the Nazis, which contrasted vividly with the apparent stagnation and decadence of France, projected the impression that authoritarian dictatorship was the wave of the future. States of lesser power, especially new or restored states, generally take as their model the political institutions and values of the seemingly strongest and most successful Great Power of the day. On the morrow of World War I, this appeared to be France; after the depression, it became Germany. Furthermore, and with specific reference to
