New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

SRÐAN ÄLJUKIÇ
political elite) served only to speed up the collectivization of agriculture.
Collectivization was accompanied by higher delivery quotas, and this
only served to make the peasant resistance stronger and more violent,
particularly in Northern Serbia (Vojvodina). From 1948 to 1951, the
number of SRZ rose from 1,318 to 6,797 (Vujatovic-Zakic, 2000: 291).
Most of the SRZ were formed in Serbia. This was because the Serbian
peasants, who represented the overwhelming majority in the formations
of the National Liberation Army during the war, as well as in the units of
the Royal Army in the Fatherland (RAF), were considered by communist
leaders to be the most dangerous element. What followed made
Yugoslavia, together with Poland, an exception in the socialist countries
of Eastern Europe.
In 1953, the communists realized that the kolkhoz system was not
working and that output was falling. Stalin died that same year and the
Yugoslav communist elite introduced a “softer” version of the communist
ideology and social system called “self-management”. Most Yugoslav
kolkhozes were dismantled almost over night. The second agrarian reform
came into play: those leaving the SRZ could take with them a maximum
of 10 hectares of land (15 in mountainous areas). The rest of land would
be given to state farms and remaining co-operatives and this agrarian
maximum (10 or 15 hectares, respectively) became a constitutional
category. Following these events, over 80% of all arable land was in
private ownership.
However, the communists did not give up the so-called “socialization
of agriculture”. By using various means and forms of organization, they
tried to include peasantry in socialist systems. First, after 1957, they
experimented with “general agricultural co-operatives” (OOZ – Opèta
zemljoradniéka zadruga). During the 1960s, however, they changed their
minds and introduced “self-management” in the existing co-operatives,
transforming them into enterprises in which the peasant members lost all
their legal rights to the benefit of the employees (and, of course,
management). Finally, in the first half of the 1970s, the remaining cooperatives
were merged with large agro-industrial companies as their
source of raw materials. At the same time, private (peasant) agriculture,
together with peasantry as a social class, were systematically suppressed.
The use of non-family labor force was forbidden and peasants could not
buy tractors or combine harvesters until 1967. They were also forced, by
means of economic monopoly, to sell their output to state-run agroindustrial
companies and co-operatives, which were characterized by
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