The Close-down of Peasant Labour Cooperatives in Karlovac District (1953)

Abstract

The initiative to initiate peasant labour cooperatives in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was introduced at the Second Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia which took place from January 29 to 30, 1949. Based on the decisions, the Basic Law on Agricultural Cooperatives was adopted on May 28, 1949. This Law was the legal basis for the accelerated forming of peasant labour cooperatives and the enforced collectivisation of peasantry in accordance with the Soviet model.

There are several reasons why the Communist Party of Yugoslavia lost the political will to continue establishing peasant labour cooperatives and supporting their development. Firstly, the peasants worked less on common properties than on their own, secondly, they did not receive any equipment to compensate for the decline of labour productivity; hence, the state had to compensate for the losses of cooperatives from the budget. Furthermore, the tendency of parasitism appeared among peasants. Some of the members of the cooperatives would neglect their work obligations expecting that another member would do the work. The collapse of peasant labour cooperatives started in March 1953 when the government of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia published the Decree on the reorganization of peasant cooperatives. They were gradually liquidated by the withdrawal of individual peasant farms. The rest of the property was primarily annexed to general agricultural cooperatives.

The subject of this article is the liquidation of peasant labour cooperatives in the territory of Karlovac District in 1953. The article was written on the basis of unpublished archival sources and of articles published in the Karlovac Weekly, the newspaper of the Socialist League of Working People of the city of Karlovac. At the beginning of 1953 a total of 18 peasant labour cooperatives were operating in Karlovac District. By September of the same year, 15 of them had been liquidated. Due to a lack of archival records, it was possible to present only the liquidations of four peasant labour cooperatives in this paper: 9 maj from Kašt, Narodni borac from Ladešić Draga, Ozalj and Josip Boljkovac from Vukova Gorica.