During the Cold War, peasant parties and the corresponding “ideology” of agrarianism were largely forgotten by historians and political scientists in the East and West. Communist historians considered peasant parties leftist traitors to the Marxist-Leninist cause, akin to the narodniki and Social Revolutionaries. To Anglo-Saxon historians, the peasant leaders had failed to turn their parties into viable alternatives to communist dictatorship, both in the interwar period and in the immediate postwar years. With the end of the Cold War came a revival of sorts for the peasant parties that had existed in almost every Eastern European country before World War II. In some cases, quite literally, with newly founded post-communist parties brandishing old party names in, for instance, Poland or Romania. More importantly, historians became interested in the ideas of agrarianism and the parties’ life stories of fusions, feuds, and splits.
Social and economic historians have demonstrated that neither the end of the second serfdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor the land reforms after World War I did much to improve the life of the starving villagers. Historians of ideas, however, find much to their taste in the rich supply of political ideals and visions in agrarianism. As the title suggests, the book by Alex Toshkov (Columbia University) belongs to the second category: few peasants in Bulgaria or Latvia are likely to have considered the interwar years “a golden age” in terms of economic subsistence and social stability. In his endeavour to capture “the aspirations and limitations of the golden age of the European peasantry”, Toshkov takes a keen interest in agrarianism's most extreme figure, Alexandar Stamboliiski, and is determined to recover the peasantry “from the dustbin of history” (p. 5).
The author argues that the peasant has been relegated to this dustbin as he was considered anathema to modernity, and that decades of history writing have been unable to reverse this image of failure and doom, but for a handful of dedicated historians. Given this historiographical quagmire, his decision to use a caricature on the cover of his book that, at first sight, depicts a starving peasant and typical capitalist who turns out to be heavy-set peasantist Stamboliiski, is ill-advised. Similarly, the realization that the title “golden age” is intended as an ironic swipe at the literature that defines progress solely in terms of political success and socio-economic reform will be understood only by those who buy and actually read Toshkov's book. (As proof, I left my initial hunch on the purpose of the book in the first paragraph of this review.)
Toshkov's alternative hypothesis is the impossibility for other parties and movements in the interwar period to ignore or marginalize agrarianism. Thus, its impact has been largely implicit, subverting the strategies of others and constraining their options. Apart from decades of conflicting historiographical biases and partisanship, the multilingual, multi-archival nature of such an endeavour has been another compelling reason for historians to steer clear of agrarianism and focus on individual cases of national parties and their leaders instead. Toshkov's achievement in studying such a disparate corpus of literature in Bulgarian, Czech, English, French, Russian, Croatian, and German cannot be overestimated. This achievement is surpassed only by his relentless quest for the archives of the various movements and parties. In this respect, future historians are indebted to Toshkov for, for instance, determining once and for all that the coveted archive of the Prague-based Green International did not survive the troubles of the twentieth century.
For good reason, the author refuses to structure his study along the lines of national case studies, as they inevitably highlight national idiosyncrasies rather than common traits of peasant parties. He also turns down the option of giving centre stage to his debunking of existing historiographies on agrarianism, as he feels such a debate would produce an antithesis rather than a new synthesis. Eager to dissect various aspects, such as the consequences of the two world wars (Chapter One), Toshkov is oblivious to his readers’ need for a basic factual introduction to the history of Yugoslav, Czech, and Bulgarian agrarianism as well as to the key players of the drama and its socio-economic context.
Thus, Chapter One narrates and analyses Stamboliiski's 1915 audience with Tsar Ferdinand. Amidst Toshkov's historical details, conceptual analyses, and historiographical excursions, the reader is very much left to their own devices to piece together the bigger picture. The author's ambition to escape the frame of parochial national studies and even to bring the relevance of the peasant parties home to non-East Europeanists is explicit in the Introduction. Toshkov's refusal to make any concessions to a classic book composition, alas, defeats this laudable ambition. It is implicit associations of persons and events that seem to drive the narrative forward, rather than a carefully crafted composition balancing generic trends and national specificities, a chronology of events and structural developments.
Chapter Two addresses efforts to organize the so-called Green Peasant International as a third way, in-between capitalism and communism; Chapter Three looks at the redefining of nation and citizenship by the agrarianists. Individual historical sources – be it a letter from the archives, a specific pamphlet, or a newspaper article – are used to illustrate rather than prove the author's arguments. The national issue in Stamboliiski's Bulgaria, for instance, is exemplified by analysing the plans of his Minister of Education, Omarchevski, to reform orthography and the ensuing conflict between the ministry and the University of Sofia. The conflict is obviously linked to the tension between paternalistic and populist understandings of nationalism and the underlying issue of democratization. Using such illustrative case studies, the author engages in equally thorough exchanges with other scholars’ work, including Ivo Banac on (Yugoslav) nationalism studies and Partha Chatterjee on subaltern studies. The author insists that the chapters “are self-contained thematic explorations of key aspects of the interwar agrarian experience” (p. 168). Yet, without the support of a stringent narrative, all these empirical and theoretical elements fail to produce a convincing synthesis that might serve as a robust alternative to the established truisms on agrarianism.
Entitled “Drawing the Curtain”, Chapter Six, too, shows a degree of regret at the historical demise of agrarianism as an intellectual and political phenomenon, as does the “golden age” in the book title. The objective of the book is restated in the Recapitulation: “This book has been about capturing the richness of the agrarian moment in a historical setting that empowered the peasant subject and mobilized that subject toward a revision and reimagination of the social field” (p. 167). Next, the author takes previous historians to task for having been dismissive of agrarianism for decades. He criticizes Richard Crampton for not recognizing agrarianism as a full-blown ideology on a par with fascism and communism, and scathes, quite unfairly, a famous, but outdated, textbook by Barbara Jelavich.Footnote 1 His criticism of the more generic literature on Eastern Europe – “the condescension of posterity” (p. 168) – holds more than a grain of truth. Yet, doubts remain as to whether Agrarianism as Modernity is the best way to remedy this historiographic fallacy and “allow agrarianism to receive its proper due as one of the most original and significant political currents of twentieth-century Europe” (p. 73).
In sum, Agrarianism as Modernity is an extraordinary combination of disappointment and accomplishment. On the one hand, Toshkov's command of the complex literature is exemplary, as is his quest to piece together and study the relevant archival sources. On the other hand, the learning curve for the reader is extremely steep. The concise monograph reveals its insights and genius only to readers who have first familiarized themselves with the arcane history and intricate historiography around Alexandar Stamboliiski, Stjepan Radić, and Antonin Švehla. Thus, the monograph is certainly not the definitive comparative study of agrarianism in Eastern Europe. Yet, no less certain, even if this field of study continues to expand at its present rate, Toshkov's pointers will be considered of value in the new historiography on agrarianism for many years to come.
