Serbian & Bulgarian Peasant Leaders

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 261-263:

Though an underproductive agricultural regime also dominated the economies of Serbia and Bulgaria, a relation developed between elites and people in these countries that was more reminiscent of the Czech case, with national leaders drawn not from the gentry but rather from the common people; there was no native class of large landholders. Though like Romania, Serbia was a former Ottoman possession, where the overwhelming majority lived in the countryside, and socioeconomic development lagged, as in Bohemia, the medieval nobility had been destroyed. Also similar to the Czech areas of Bohemia, the emerging national elite was of peasant origin, and in the following generation, like the Czech lands, Serbia produced no significant native fascism.

In Ottoman times, spahis had held the land and produce of peasants in return for service, and then came janissaries, who later degenerated into marauding raiders. But although the right to extract dues and tributes remained in Turkish hands, unlike rural populations in Hungary or Romania, Serb peasants were not enserfed. When the Serb principality took form in the decades after 1817, the Turkish landholders gradually left, and the Serb leader Miloš Obrenović refused to permit the emergence of large landed estates, fearing they might dilute his power (he became fabulously wealthy). Thus, he left Serb society mostly of one class, a highly undifferentiated peasantry. Besides him, none of the few power holders who emerged after the 1840s had more than a few hundred hectares of land, and no one was tempted to trace a grand lineage to noble or racially superior forebears.

The Serb state at first seemed to rule by liberal principles. The constitution of 1868 provided for a legislature, and beginning in 1880, political parties developed. There were three centers of power: the bureaucracy, the politicians who had success in electoral politics, and the prince. Like Romania’s king, the prince constantly interfered, preventing the emergence of a bona fide democracy. The most important political movement was the Serb Radicals, co-founded as a peasant party in 1881 by Nikola Pašić, a peasant’s son who fell in with socialist circles during engineering studies in Zurich—a crossroads of East European Marxism—becoming Serbia’s and then Yugoslavia’s uncontested political leader until his death in 1926.

But rather than act in the peasants’ interest by promoting rural development, the Radicals evolved into an establishment political machine, advancing the state’s power and wealth by focusing public resources on the army, bureaucracy, railroads, and diplomatic service, fostering virtually every civic project short of the needs of peasants. In 1908, the Ministry of Agriculture received only 3 percent of the annual budget, while 23 percent of that budget went directly to the military and 28 percent to debt services (mostly interest on loans for railroads and the army). The justification for these expenditures was to spread the Serb state into areas considered ethnically Serb.

Yet because that agenda was broadly supported, the Serb Radical Party never sacrificed the loyalties of the peasantry, and indeed used the education system to stoke irredentist feeling. It helped that the per capita debt burden on the peasants decreased in the decades before World War I. But the Radicals also had good fortune in timing: they had claimed peasants’ loyalty from the first days of independence, through the semi-populist program of Pašić’s friend and mentor Svetozar Marković, Serbia’s first socialist, who promised to lessen state intervention into peasants’ lives. Although the Radicals were an establishment party, its intellectuals and professional politicians never lost contact with the villages, where they kept networks of supporters. When necessary, they could speak perfect peasant vernacular. Society and government thus remained cohesive, even if the competing wings of the Radical party vigorously debated politics and went in and out of government from 1892 to 1900.

Bulgaria was similar in terms of the landholding regime. When the Bulgarian national renaissance began in the mid-nineteenth century, the country was almost completely rural, run by Turkish landlords. After independence in 1878, the Turkish landowners were ejected, leaving Bulgaria a place of smallholding peasants who produced for subsistence. The most coherent institution, as in Serbia, was the state, which grew beginning in the 1870s, becoming a kind of “class” in itself and filling a social vacuum. But as we will see in Chapter 11, in contrast to Serbia, a major peasant movement emerged here—the Bulgarian Agrarian Union—with an original political philosophy that challenged the liberal state machine and irredentist nationalism as well as the monarch who pursued it.