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.” There were always plausible reasons, for example, why indirect 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