Peasants and Communists

Peasants and Communists PDF Author: Melissa Katherine Bokovoy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Melissa K. Bokovoy explores the dynamic relationship between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and Yugoslavia's peasantry majority from 1941-1953. She challenges current explanations for the party's decision to end all efforts at collectivization. Her argument rests on an extensive examination of the uneasy coalition between a radical, revolutionary elite, hoping to move from a predominantly rural country to a modernized state, and an insurgent peasantry, utterly resistant to change.

The Workers' and Peasants' State

The Workers' and Peasants' State PDF Author: Patrick Major
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719062896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Medical histories of Belgium reshapes Belgian history of medicine by bringing together a new generation of scholars. Going beyond a chronological narrative, the book offers new insights by questioning classic themes of the history of medicine: physicians, institutions and the nation state. While retracing specific Belgian characteristics, it also engages with broader European developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Medical histories of Belgium will appeal to Historians of Belgium in various subfields, especially cultural history and political history and medical historians and medical practitioners seeking the historical context of their activities.

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power PDF Author: Chalmers A. Johnson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804700740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This author researches the Chinese Communists' wartime expansion, according to the documentation recorded by Japanese intelligence, then compares that expansion with that of the Yugoslav Communists.

Power over Property

Power over Property PDF Author: Matthew Noellert
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472127101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.

A Tale of Two Villages

A Tale of Two Villages PDF Author: Alina Mungiu
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9639776785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”

The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe

The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe PDF Author: Constantin Iordachi
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 615522563X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
ÿThis book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.

Stalin's Peasants

Stalin's Peasants PDF Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195104592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Drawing on Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, this work analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village

Peasants under Siege

Peasants under Siege PDF Author: Gail Kligman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles. Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

Transforming Peasants, Property and Power

Transforming Peasants, Property and Power PDF Author: Constantin Iordachi
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155211728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
The subject matter of the volume is part of larger research agenda on the process of land collectivization in the former communist camp, focusing on state, identity and property. The main innovation of the volume is to apply recent interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the collectivization process, asking what types of new peasant-state relations it formed and how it transformed notions of self, persons, and things (such as land). The project conceived of changes in the system of ownership as causing changes in the identity and attitude of people; similarly, it regarded the study of personal identities as essential for understanding changes in the system of ownership. This perspective is rare in the area-studies approaches to the topic.

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

The Peasant in Postsocialist China PDF Author: Alexander F. Day
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107039673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A radical new appraisal of the role of the peasant in post-socialist China, putting recent debates into historical perspective.