Areas Of Eastern Europe Research Articles

Seigneurial Authority and Peasant Family Life: The Baltic Area in the Eighteenth Century

in the Eighteenth Century In those Eastern European areas where, by the eighteenth century, the rural economy had come to be dominated by large serf estates, analysis of the organization of peasant domestic groups immediately runs into the problem of the authority of the seigneur. If Gutswirtschaft landowners had the authority to interfere in the formation, composition, and development of rural domestic groups, and if they exercised that authority frequently and at the expense of local custom, what were likely to be the consequences for the developmental cycle of the peasant family and for the macrostructure of domestic groups that combined several families? In an earlier article on one serf estate in the Baltic littoral we suggested this line of inquiry as one of the many on which further work needed to be done if the differences between peasant family life in Eastern and Western Europe were to be elucidated.' The enserfed peasants of the Baltic, as those of other Eastern European areas where serfdom had grown stronger in the period I5oo-800oo, were more likely than their counterparts in the West to experience the intrusion of landowners in everyday life, especially since the rural economy in many such areas was already oriented to an export market.2 In the pages that follow we will explore the connection between seigneurial authority and rural domestic groups by means of data drawn from the fifth Russian Imperial head-tax (or soul) revision carried out by local authorities in the Baltic province of Kurland in

Peasant Farmsteads and Households in the Baltic Littoral, 1797

Although the empirical basis for the comparative study of the history of European family life is expanding, there remain extensive areas of Eastern Europe about which almost nothing is known. This situation weakens all generalizations about Europe as a whole, especially since those localities of Eastern Europe from which family data are available reveal formations very different from what obtains in the West. The most ambitious comparative study to date, Household and Family in Past Time (1972; edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall) has taken a long step in the direction of providing a comparative methodology, but even in this excellent volume Eastern Europe is represented by only three essays dealing with the best known of its areas, the Balkans. In the Preface of the work, Laslett suggests that future historical evidence from the eastern regions ‘may possibly go to show that the extremes of familial organization, from the simplest to the most complex, may have once existed within the confines of the European continent itself’.

Incentives in Communist Agriculture: The Hungarian Models

One of the greatest failures of Communist systems everywhere has been in agricultural productivity. In the Soviet Union some thirty-five years of collectivized agriculture have brought but modest increases in yields and gross production of many crops and livestock; growth of agricultural output per capita since even before the Revolution has been even less impressive. Among the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, although collectivization is much more recent, the pattern has been much the same; yields remain low, and gross production as well as per capita increases has been small.Although some areas of Eastern Europe and large parts of the USSR can be classified as physically marginal for agriculture, the low levels of agricultural productivity are primarily attributable to defective organization and operation. There have been years when crop failure in this or that area was the direct result of drought, flood, or other natural cause, but these catastrophes cannot be blamed for the low yields which characterize the longer run. The major obstacles to production gains lie within the collectivized system.

North Korea and the Path to Socialism

A LTHOUGH INFORMATION on North Korea remains scanty, a certain amount of data is available from Communist sources which, though limited in scope and largely propagandistic, permits some insight into North Korean political and economic trends. This article, based on such sources, attempts trace some of the more important internal developments since the Korean War. North Korea has not always followed the same pattern of socialist development as have the East European satellites of the Soviet Union. This has been particularly true of the North Korean economy in the period since the Korean War. The economic measures which characterized the period of the thaw in Eastern Europe do not seem have manifested themselves in North Korea. At a time when there was a general movement toward relaxation of the collectivization effort and even decollectivization in some areas of Eastern Europe, North Korea embarked on an intensive collectivization program. Thus, the timing of collectivization was much the same as that of China. At the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee in August I953, Kim II Sung called for the collectivization of agriculture commence in 1954; it was be carried out on a voluntary basis and was to preserve the principle of private property.' In North Korea, as in China and the East European countries, a few types of collective farms, characterized by varying degrees of socialization, were utilized. Agricultural cooperatives took three forms.2 In the first, the members preserved their private ownership of land, draft animals, and agricultural implements. The income was not shared but belonged each individual landowner. However, the cattle and agricultural equipment were used for collective working of the fields. In the second form, the land remained the private property of the peasant. His land was given the cooperative as a kind of share, with the exception of his private kitchen garden. The draft animals and agricultural implements were private or cooperative property. The work was performed in common, and income (after payment of the tax in kind, payment for the work of the machine-hire and horse-hire