Some Peculiarities of Rural Collectivization in Peoples Republic Of Macedonia between 1949 and 1953

Abstract

The author establishes that the process of collectivization of villages in Macedonia was a politically motivated, non-economical nationalization of agriculture. Her findings are based on the archive material of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the material from the Archives of Macedonia and Archives of Yugoslavia. The Communist Party performed these collectivization measures on the basis of their own ideological constructs and voluntarism and did not take into account the specific socio-economic environment. They attempted to create a copy of the Soviet model of agrarian policy and skip certain phases of social and agricultural development in Yugoslavia. Yet, Macedonia was still at the pre-capitalist stage of development. The author finds that in Macedonia, the so-called 'higher' cooperatives were prevalent. These were less favourable to the farmers and included forty-one per cent of all households. The analysis of the national structure in farmer's working cooperatives shows that it was mostly the Macedonian farmers who joined them, while the Albanians were much less present.