The Balkans: A Short History (8 page)

Most peasants remained self-sufficient and mistrustful of money—with good reason, since they were probably worse off for capitalism’s triumph. They faced now a centralized imperial state that was trying to collect taxes more efficiently, giving more legal power to landlords and whittling away customary peasant rights to land and produce. Capitalism was forcing change upon the Ottoman empire—the most threatening solvent of that sense of customary fairness that underpinned the Balkan peasantry’s sense of the natural order. Over time, this led peasants toward what Stoianovich concisely describes as “a strategy of demanding the abolition both of the landlords and of the state that refused to abolish the landlords.” Capitalism, in other words, and the modernization of the Ottoman state had political consequences. In the Turkish empire—as in Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia—the coming of a money economy and the modern state disrupted older patterns of social relations and helped pave the way for political changes as well.
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Only in the light of this dramatic economic and societal disruption can one understand the emergence of mass nationalism in the nineteenth-century Balkans. Nationalism as a mass movement inevitably involved the peasants, yet for them what counted was not the Nation or other abstract political concepts, but their rights to land, livelihood and fair taxes. As farming was monetized and traditional dues were replaced by cash obligations, class tensions increased in the countryside. The 1875 Hercegovina revolt, which triggered off a major collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans, was provoked by harvest failure and the subsequent maltreatment of peasants by soldiers accompanying the tax farmers. It began, wrote the French consul in Sarajevo, “with protests of subjects of all religions against excessive tax demands.” Another eyewitness was even clearer: “It is mainly an agrarian war . . . in its origin Agrarian rather than Political.” Class antagonism and nationalism emerged together.
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The peasants were basically right: political independence favored them by creating conditions of relative tranquillity and security of property. Independence ended neither population pressure on land nor brigandage; indeed, both persisted for decades into the life of independent Greece, Montenegro and Serbia, often to the public embarrassment of the new states’ leaders. But it did increase the overall security of the Christian majority, with immediate results. In 1841 Adolphe Blanqui had correctly predicted that “when Bulgaria enjoys a regime of security, the immense regions which today are left to the ravages of goats and poor pasturage will be put under cultivation.” Crossing from the Ottoman lands into semi-independent Serbia in 1853, one traveler, who was not unsympathetic to the Turks, was struck that “we seemed to enter a new clime: the whole valley teemed with luxuriant crops, the road had been formed with care . . . and everything betokened industry and comfort, the result of security.” As a result, after independence, hill dwellers descended again into the plains, population grew quickly and soon the margin of uncultivated land shrank.
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The newly enfranchised peasantry, possessed as if “by an insatiable desire for land,” now cut back the ancient forests and extended their own holdings. “During the last decade, a frightful extent of woodland has been cleared,” wrote a German visitor to Romania in 1900. The great forests of the Serbian Shumadija disappeared in a few decades. The shepherding economy, which had flourished for the past three hundred years, was plunged into crisis as pasture came under cultivation and governments carved up landed estates and distributed them to peasant smallholders. The Balkan land reforms of the 1920s, followed by a second wave after 1945 in those countries ruled by Communist parties, parceled up large tracts of land among the farmers of cash crops and deprived sheep of their traditional winter grazing grounds. New political borders severed summer from winter grazings. The transhumant shepherds became a vanishing breed, rare already in the 1950s, and today all but extinct. “Before 1922 it was not exceptional for a man to own 2,000 sheep,” wrote a British anthropologist in 1964. “Today a flock of 500 is considerable.”
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Thus, independence brought new difficulties to those who worked the land. “Land is becoming a commodity,” noted a Croatian scholar of peasant life in 1935. Peasants were inexorably and often reluctantly drawn into the cash nexus, but on terms that left them less and less equipped to avoid debt. They parceled out holdings among their heirs so that within a few generations farmland was hopelessly fragmented and inefficient. High population growth accelerated this creation of a pattern of tiny, unviable plots. To make matters worse, the old patterns of collective farming, especially strong among the Slavs, began to disappear; the
zadruga
broke up as each family set up on its own. Atomization made the farmer less self-reliant and more dependent on farming for money. But there were few crops that allowed a peasant family any measure of prosperity for more than a generation or two. Those products—like tobacco or currants, Serbian plums and pigs—grown for export were exposed to the whims of the international market. In independent Romania, which had become one of the world’s chief exporters of grain at the turn of the century, social tensions in the countryside—between the miserably impoverished peasant sharecroppers and the often Jewish merchants who leased the Moldavian estates—exploded in a peasant revolt in 1907. The worst peasant uprising in modern Balkan history was suppressed by the Romanian army only at the cost of an estimated eleven thousand lives. Romania had the least equal pattern of landholding in the Balkans—1 percent of landowners held nearly 50 percent of the arable and grazing lands, while perhaps 85 percent of peasant cultivators were operating at or below subsistence level. But the pressure of high reproduction rates and the fragmentation of landholdings was impoverishing other Balkan farming populations too.
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Mass emigration, especially overseas, demonstrated how hard the newly independent states were finding it to make peasant farming work. The portraits of Montenegrin, Croatian, Greek and Romanian Jewish country folk stare down at visitors to the Ellis Island Museum in New York, testifying to the great wave of immigrants to America from the Balkans. Migration had begun to gather pace in the last decades of Ottoman rule, but continued thereafter. By 1912, 250,000 Greeks had left for the United States, nearly 10 percent of the population and the largest proportion from any European state after 1900. Entire villages became dependent on remittances from overseas. Some areas started to suffer from labor shortages before the First World War, then U.S. immigration restrictions cut off the outflow. In the 1950s, the same pattern would emerge as Greek and Yugoslav peasants again fled the land for Australia and Germany: the land simply could not support the highest reproduction rates in Europe.

Peasants tried to resist the incursions of modernity. Their generosity and hospitality toward travelers—often codified into custom—existed alongside a deep suspicion of neighbors and the inhabitants of the next village, not to mention landlords. The hatred that existed between hill and valley was well known. “I’d rather marry a Turk than have to go around in black and wear a kerchief,” was how sophisticated Dalmatian lowland girls mocked the highland shepherds who came to market in the early seventeenth century. “The plains were always held by someone alien to the mountaineers, who were hungry for bread and land, and tired of the bare, though beautiful crags that were their home,” wrote the Montenegrin Milovan Djilas. In his memoirs, Djilas vividly conveys the mutual bitterness felt between peasant and town folk. “If the townspeople, erstwhile peasants, had contempt for the peasants,” he writes, “the peasants in turn hated them. . . . The peasants looked down upon the townspeople as a sluggish, wily, and lying breed, who ate little and delicately, fancy soups, tripes and pastries—and wasted away in damp, crowded, little rooms.”
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For centuries, the village had been the main political, administrative, fiscal and military unit organizing the collective lives of rural inhabitants of the Balkans. It was the village which they referred to as their “fatherland” and its representatives spoke for them before the dignitaries of the state and other intruders. In the nineteenth century, this isolated collectivity began to change in ways its inhabitants found hard to comprehend. Used to a world in which towns were centers of administration and trade, inhabited chiefly by Turks and foreign merchants and shopkeepers, peasants were inclined to identify themselves with the moral essence of national life. “There are no members of the Serbian nation but peasants,” pronounced Vuk KaradŽic early in the nineteenth century. Money meant exploitation, shops and commerce implied degeneration. Some peasants complained that young people were tempted “to steal food from their homes to procure useless, cheap goods at the shop.”
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But now they found that independence brought no escape from these evils. They had expelled the Turkish landlords and officials, only to find that a new governing class had taken their place, with new means of enrichment and new pretensions. “In analyzing the national character,” a young British diplomat commented on
fin de siècle
Serbia, “you have two distinct classes to deal with—the governmental and commercial, which wears coats, trousers and boots—but not always socks; and the peasant, which affects jackets, petticoats and sandals.”
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The arbitrary and corrupt Ottoman tax farmer had been superseded by a salaried and modernizing bureaucracy, eager to replace the old “money anarchy” with a single currency, to send out gendarmes, teachers, surveyors and census takers to classify, register and chart the land and educate those who worked it. All this sounded like more interference and exploitation, not less. The modern Balkan state undoubtedly intruded further into the farmer’s life than the Ottoman state had done; there were more civil servants per capita in the Balkans than in Germany or Britain. “Better the Turkish bullet than the Greek pen”—the expression I heard from one Macedonian peasant in the 1990s—was no doubt uttered by many of his forebears in the age of Balkan independence.

Yet with only limited success in articulating their grievances in the new parliaments, there was little the peasants could do about this. Politically their inability to organize cost them dear. Despite their overwhelming numbers they remained politically negligible. Other parties co-opted them through networks of clientilism while the state used the gendarme, the schoolteacher and tax collector to keep an eye on the villages. Independence, therefore, turned out to be the Balkan peasantry’s final victory. Land reforms in the 1920s, which were a peasant success of sorts, reflected fears among Balkan politicians that without buying off the peasants, they might not be able to prevent revolutionary Bolshevism from subverting society. Yet land reform alone did not guarantee peasants a living. On the contrary, the outcome by the 1930s was greater fragmentation of holdings and an even less efficient pattern of land tenure than before. The peasant’s political triumph led to his economic ruin. Flight from the land was inexorable, hindered only by muddy roads and the lack of prospects elsewhere.

The deeper problem was that peasant values offered no solution to the demographic and economic dilemmas facing the new Balkan states. Smallholdings simply did not create enough wealth, even in good times, to satisfy a newly consumerist society; villages lacked cinemas, phonographs and the other amusements that dazzled the minds of young people. In the 1930s, Croatian peasant girls “chatted . . . glibly about makeup, of patent leather shoes and high heels.” They told a visitor that they preferred finer clothes to better food on the grounds that “no one can see what I’ve got inside me, but all can tell what I’ve got on.” However, economic depression allowed them neither new clothes nor sufficient food. Between the wars, almost all crops went down in price and plunged peasants into debt. Interwar economists calculated that six to eight million of a rural labor force of just under thirty million had no real work, thanks to what one described as “the vicious circle of population pressure, poverty and lack of industries.”
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To some extent, the war years allowed country dwellers to gain their revenge on townspeople; for a brief period in the 1940s, to be a producer of food was to be master once more. But when peace returned, the locus of political action and wealth creation reverted to the cities. In 1974 the historian Steven Runciman bemoaned the modern Balkan “megalopolis” that had brought high-rise apartments, traffic jams and atmospheric pollution to the small sleepy capitals he had first visited half a century earlier. But the mountains no longer offered an option for communal life in the way they had done two centuries earlier, and there was no replacing the destroyed forests. Village populations in the Pindos Mountains dropped from thousands in the nineteenth century to a few hundred today. Except through tourism and remittances, there is no way these settlements can continue. The movement of peoples from the hills to the plains has been succeeded by a further movement into the towns. In fifty years, the total share of the working population employed on the land fell from 80 percent to 37 percent in Bulgaria, from 78 percent to 29 percent in Yugoslavia and from 77 percent to 29 percent in Romania. In the Balkans we are dealing no longer with a peasant society, but with its successor.
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2

BEFORE THE NATION

The ecclesiastic geography of these degraded regions must of course be only interesting to the mere antiquary, as it can throw no light on its history and little even on its topography.