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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:02:59 -0000
From: P.J.Wells@open.ac.uk
Subject: Bulgarian agriculture
Paul wrote [OPE-L:2224]:
> My impression from traveling around Eastern
> Europe in the 80s was that countries like Bulgaria and the GDR which
> had fully collectivised agriculture did not have the visible food
> shortages
> that Poland had.
Bulgaria had a very strong agrarian radical movement, based on the
advocacy (and practice) of peasant co-operatives, which the post-war regime
seemingly avoided trying conclusions with, in either theory or practice --
as I understand it they never formally nationalised real property *outside
urban areas*, and even in the towns only commercial property: Bulgaria had
(and presumably still has) a higher proportion of owner-occupied housing
than the UK (itself, of course, exceptionally high by W. European
standards). Likewise, it is my understanding that it was only in the latter
stages of the regime that they tried to organise the rural sector into
so-called agro-industrial complexes.
Of course, this would still represent a very different situation to
the Polish one -- it has long struck me that the regime there was
"Bonapartist" in both the sense of Trotsky (on Stalin) and Marx (on Louis
Napoleon and his regime's dependence on the peasantry)
Julian
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