Introduction
The intensification of state control over Greece’s agricultural economy and institutions was a central feature of Ioannēs Metaxas’s Fourth of August Regime (1936–41). In this article, we discuss a series of developments in some of the most important institutions within Greece’s agricultural economy. By analysing the centralising drive of Metaxas’s dictatorial regime in the interwar period, we intend to address two questions that have already attracted the interest of historians with regard to what Fernández Prieto et al. have called the ‘fascist agrarian regimes’.Footnote 1 The first question is how much of what these authoritarian regimes did was new, and how much was not, when we consider the trajectory of agricultural policy before their emergence. The second is to what extent the cadres of specialists in agricultural matters participated in, or at least accommodated, the new regimes.Footnote 2
Our research shows that Metaxas was able to rally some support from the agronomists that had been active in Greece under liberal regimes since the mid-1920s. Such support was rarely explicit in the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, sometimes combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. The reward was employment in state service. Our research also shows that most traits that make Metaxas’s dictatorship a fascist agricultural regime had been inherited from the period of liberal rule under Eleftherios Venizelos (1928–32). What made the Fourth of August Regime distinct was the extent to which it suppressed dissent and increased the level of supervision. In terms of specific policy goals, there were obvious continuities with the previous period. The evidence presented in this article has been drawn mainly from legislation from the interwar period, political speeches, and texts published by some of the main figures in Greece’s agricultural institutions.
Greece’s fascist agrarian regime
The historiography on agriculture under fascist and para-fascist regimes has identified a ‘fascist minimum’ with regard to rural society. The notion of fascist agrarian regimes allows us to study the rural societies of those authoritarian regimes widely considered fascist (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) together with those that only fall within the category of fascist depending on how restrictive a definition of the term we use (for example, Franco’s Spain). The similarities between these regimes in terms of agricultural policy and the social relations that they fostered on the countryside justify their integrated study. Metaxas’s Greece certainly meets the criteria of the ‘fascist minimum’ as it is formulated in Fernandez Prieto et al. It presents the particularity of having inherited most of the traits that made it a fascist agrarian regime from the previous liberal period. Let us take, for instance, the rhetoric that idealised rural life. Metaxas characterised himself as the ‘First Peasant’ (Prōtos Agrotēs), thereby linking his legitimacy as Greece’s leader to his commitment to rural development. Setting aside the stridency of Metaxas’s persona, it is easy to find a precedent in the idealisation of the countryside as a site of production and virtue, different from the unproductive, morally dubious cities. During Venizelos’s liberal rule, active measures had been taken to incentivise the settlement of the urban unemployed in the countryside.Footnote 3 The city was the place were subversive ideology could take root among the idle. Moreover, the liberal government restricted machinery imports in order to prevent excessive industrialisation.Footnote 4
Fernandez Prieto et al. have pointed out that peasantist rhetoric was, in most fascist agrarian regimes, inconsistent with the policies actually implemented. Agricultural development was a strategy in the pursuit of other economic goals, such as industrialisation or rearmament. In the case of Greece, a country dependent on the export of non-basic agricultural products such as tobacco and currants, there was no sharp dichotomy between agriculture and the other sectors of the economy. Industry represented a small portion of the country’s output, while the war-readiness of the military depended on imported equipment. Elected governments first, and then Metaxas, strengthened commercial relationships with Germany through bilateral treaties that opened up export markets for Greek agricultural products, and increased the flow of military equipment into the country. In this regard, Greece is a particular case within the broader European context.Footnote 5
The idealisation of the countryside was not the only feature of Metaxas’s agrarian policy inherited from the liberal period. The goal of autarky had been on the liberal agenda as part of a broader strategy to tackle the ruinous effects of the Great Depression.Footnote 6 Metaxas intensified a pre-existing successful policy of incentivising grain production in order to reduce the Greek dependency on imported foodstuffs. Furthermore, the willingness to use state resources to safeguard certain values (for example, peasant life) from the vagaries of the market, another component of the fascist minimum, was also a trait of Metaxas’s agricultural policy with very obvious precedents. Both Metaxas and Venizelos passed legislation granting debt relief to the peasant population.Footnote 7
The exposure of the Greek peasantry to excessive indebtedness brings us to an important aspect in the analysis of any rural economy: the pattern of land ownership. For all their self-depiction as an alternative to capitalism, fascist regimes rarely, if ever, questioned private property in general, and land ownership in particular. Granted, in some instances they did restrict the partition and transfer of property. Such limitations on property rights, however, were not intended to abolish the institution of private property, but to protect it from market forces.Footnote 8 In this regard, Metaxas’s regime was no exception, although it did present an interesting feature: it inherited a rural society recently transformed by the land reform of the 1920s, one of the most radical instances of land redistribution in Europe. The partition of large estates and their allocation to peasant families had been a demand of the urban bourgeoisie since the turn of the twentieth century, and even more so from the 1910s onwards under Venizelos. The demographic pressure caused by the population exchange with Turkey in the 1920s and the availability of land left behind by Muslim landlords in northern Greece created the necessary conditions for the reform to take off.Footnote 9 Greece became predominantly a country of small landholders with incomplete property rights. There were restrictions on the capacity to sell land, or collateralise it to access credit. Combined with the underdevelopment of the banking system, this pattern of land ownership was at the core of the problem of rural overindebtedness. Metaxas’s policies with regard to land ownership merely cemented the status quo that the land reform had already created.
Another essential component of fascist politics is corporatism, that is, the state’s mediation in interclass conflict in order to put an end to it. Fascists consider interclass conflict a perversion of politics that harms the national interest. Metaxas and his supporters blamed parliamentarianism for the exacerbation of interclass conflict. However, we should keep in mind that the largest parties in the previous period, Venizelos’s Liberal Party and the monarchist People’s Party, were not class parties. Both parties, and especially the Liberal Party, were catch-all parties that did not represent opposing views about what society should look like, or whose class interests should take priority. Rather, they were two opposing clientelistic networks competing for the control of the state apparatus.Footnote 10 Granted, there were communist and agrarian parties, but their electoral traction was limited. Agricultural institutions representing the interests of multiple classes, such as the German Reichsnährstand or the Spanish Organización Sindical Agraria, never came into existence in the Greek context.Footnote 11 Some Greek institutions did bear some resemblance to these fascist organisations. Such is the case of the Offices for the Protection of Greek Tobacco, which brought together representatives from the peasantry and the leaf trading companies. However, they also appeared before Metaxas’s rise to power.Footnote 12
The continuities with the previous period discussed thus far raise the question of whether Metaxas’s regime proposed any sort of innovation as far as the countryside is concerned. The answer is a qualified yes. The level of centralisation of decision-making in a reduced number of individuals was unprecedented in the Greek context. Once again, the centralising drive was not completely new, as we already encounter signs of it in the years of Venizelist rule (1928–32). The intensification of state control, however, did bring about changes in Greece’s rural society: it disciplined the cadres of agronomist technocrats that had been trained in the previous period, and further alienated the peasant masses from institutions that were clearly not a site for their political and economic empowerment, but ones of state control.
The rural intelligentsia under Metaxas
A productive way of thinking about the stance that many intellectuals and technocrats adopted vis-à-vis Metaxas’s dictatorship is to see them as fellow travellers, rather than outright supporters. This somewhat vague phrase conveys the ambivalent attitude of those agricultural experts and state officials that saw in the dictatorship a chance to further the agenda of rural modernisation, but never became active members in political organisations central to the regime. Neither did they propagandise in its favour. In Greece, there were few, if any, organic intellectuals at the service of Metaxas’s administration.
The relationship between fascist regimes and the educated cadres of technocrats is a phenomenon worth studying not only in the Greek context. The existing literature has highlighted the receptiveness of intellectuals from around Europe to fascist ideology after the First World War. Herf argues that fascism promised an appealing combination of völkisch irrationality and technical progress.Footnote 13 According to Berman, by the late 1920s, western Europe’s two largest political projects, liberalism and Marxism, seemed to have no answers to the most pressing political questions. Untouched by any blame for either the causes or outcome of the Great War, fascism appeared as a more dynamic, ambitious ideological option.Footnote 14 In Greece, a small country on the winning side of the First World War, but dramatically defeated in the Greek-Turkish War (1919–22), the Great Depression set the stage for a more intense engagement of the agricultural experts with politics.
Although Greece was a parliamentary democracy before the rise of Metaxas in 1936, its politics had taken an illiberal turn already during Venizelos’s second four-year term (1928–32).Footnote 15 New legislation suppressed political dissent and labour activism under the pretext of saving democracy from Communism. Metaxas went a step further, taking advantage of an economic and social crisis that had discredited liberalism among Greece’s main political figures. Footnote 16 In a relatively brief period of time (1936–41), Metaxas developed, and partially implemented, a national project that Kallis has described as a hybrid of traditionalist authoritarianism and ‘modern techniques of social mobilisation pioneered elsewhere [that is, in Germany, Italy, and Portugal] at the time’.Footnote 17 Metaxas achieved this in the absence of any noteworthy opposition from either the mainstream parties or organised business interests.
One central component of Metaxas’s regime was a modernising agenda based on technocratic-authoritarian policies of the type that we encounter elsewhere in Europe in the interwar period. Charged with the implementation of this agenda on the countryside were the Ministry of Agriculture, the agricultural cooperatives, the Agricultural Bank of Greece, the educational institutions for peasants and agronomists, and various research institutes. State interventionism in the rural economy and society enjoyed the approval of almost the whole political spectrum, with the exception of the Communist Party of Greece. Since before the First World War, but even more so from the 1920s onwards, the idea that it was the state’s duty to help modernise the countryside had been gaining purchase.
A sizable number of agronomists and intellectuals interested in agricultural matters, most of whom had once belonged to the Venizelist camp, became an important asset for the Fourth of August Regime.Footnote 18 They contributed to the prestige and legitimacy of the regime. In return, following a deeply rooted tradition in Greek politics, they gained privileged access to state resources and employment in the civil service. The trajectory of Petros Kananginēs is a prominent example of this symbiotic interaction. In a letter to his wife, dated two days after the abolition of the parliament and the establishment of the dictatorship in August of 1936, he expressed his relief in view of the recent political developments.
I heard the political news while I was in Volos. This will calm things down. With these movements and strikes we were about to bury Greece, and go through even worse than Spain. Now there is nothing left for us to do but work, every single one of us, to get the country straight. Only work and frugality will put us ahead of the other Balkan states.Footnote 19
Kananginēs’s reference to ‘work and frugality’ and his call for social orderliness can be interpreted as a desire for a third way, an alternative to both the liberalism of the market and Soviet-style communism. In addition to collective self-denial, the new regime promised the suspension of labour’s rights and freedom of association along the lines of what fascists had already done elsewhere.Footnote 20 The appeal that Petros Kananginēs found in the order and discipline that the regime promised is indicative of a generalised acceptance of the new state of affairs within the cadres of agronomists. Kananginēs was by no means an outsider to the profession’s establishment. He had been a highly ranked official under Venizelos. He had held considerable responsibilities since 1913 in the execution of the agricultural reform. Outmaneuvered by his competitors for state employment, he had been laid off and rehired multiple times throughout his career. The last time had been after the failed Venizelist coup of 1935. Kananginēs himself had not participated in the coup, but being a Venizelist cost him his job nonetheless. Even he, a relatively privileged member of the agronomist intelligentsia, expected to benefit from a new, supposedly more stable form of government.
Kananginēs’s reintegration into the civil service under Metaxas was in part made possible by the agronomist’s relationship with Geōrgios Kyriakos, a moderate anti-Venizelist, who became the regime’s first minister of agriculture.Footnote 21 Kananginēs soon became a distinguished member of the scientific personnel that provided the regime with technocratic credentials. He soon experienced the tight control that the political elite exercised over the technical cadres within the Ministry. Despite his position as Director General, he had to request a special permit from the Minister and the Vice Minister of Public Security before he could become a member in an organisation called the Brotherhood of TiniotsFootnote 22 residing in Athens. In another case, the Minister forced him to write a formal apology for publishing a newspaper article on crop rotation without express ministerial permission.Footnote 23
The accommodating, when not outright passive, attitude of the technocrats that joined the ranks of the regime has been discussed in multiple historical works.Footnote 24 The groundwork of this accommodating stance had been laid previously by both Venizelist and anti-Venizelist governments. The modernising drive of Venizelism, which had created educational and career opportunities for those that later participated in the Metaxist apparatus, had lost vigour even before the abolition of democracy. The illiberal turn of the last years of Venizelist rule coincided with the crisis that hit the Greek agricultural economy in 1931, and the subsequent politicisation of the peasants and the refugees who arrived from Asia Minor. The stance of Ioannēs Sofianopoulos exemplifies how even the progressives among the rural elites welcomed the new regime.
Since 1931, when Sofianopoulos became the leader of the Agrarian Party (established in 1923), he was quite explicit in his desire to ‘restore the idea of the state as the highest tutor and righteous arbiter of all matters’. According to Sofianopoulos, ‘until now, a poorly understood, and even more poorly applied liberalism of the state has brought about an uncalled-for inner battle between classes’. He criticised the legislative branch of the state as incapable and corrupt, and dismissed all governments as decorative puppets. Sofianopoulos longed for a ruler ‘of tough heart and enlightened mind’, who would be free to put together a cabinet suited to the country’s needs.Footnote 25 Sofianopoulos referred to his preferred form of government as ‘an oligarchy with democratic foundations’. Such oligarchy would have a strong executive branch that would end ‘the immorality of parliamentarism’. The executive would have the power to pass legislative decrees, contradicting the parliament’s opinion whenever necessary. Not surprisingly, Sofianopoulos stated his admiration for Hitler. Making reference to the Führer and his growing support, he wrote the following:
In Germany, these thoughts are attracting the masses as well as the intellectuals to Hitler’s movement. In Britain, the cradle of parliamentarism, they are attracted to the movement led by Labor MP Mosley. Hitler’s harshness and Mosley’s fiery manifesto are the embodiment of the deeper needs of our time. They clearly reveal the instinctive readiness of the masses to be saved from this lack of governance, and to come under the rule of the strong.Footnote 26
Ioannēs Sofianopoulos was one among multiple Greek intellectuals and public figures that lost faith in parliamentarism.Footnote 27 His case is particularly relevant because he was one of the politicians active in the agrarian movement both in the interwar and postwar periods.Footnote 28
The gradual turn towards authoritarianism
The agricultural sector, and the countryside more generally, were the ‘sick men’ not only of interwar Greece, but also of most European countries. Most political programmes promised the development of the countryside and robust support for its population. Eleftherios Venizelos’s Liberal Party was no exception. Its interest in optimising the capabilities of the rural economy inspired the establishment of new institutions for the design, and implementation, of agricultural policies. The redistribution of land, the peasant cooperatives, the research institutes for the improvement of specific crops (cotton, tobacco, grains, etc.), and the state-backed Agricultural Bank of Greece created the conditions for new forms of socialisation and political participation among the peasants. The long-term impact of the Venizelist policies was such that neither Metaxas, nor the Second World War could erase it.Footnote 29 The land reform created hundreds of thousands of small landholders, thereby creating a pattern that survived into the second half of the twentieth century. The unprecedentedly well-trained and ambitious cadres of agronomists and bureaucrats specialised in the management of peasant cooperatives participated in the economic miracle of the postwar decades.Footnote 30 This is not a uniquely Greek phenomenon. To varying degrees, all governments, whether liberal or authoritarian, took on the task of reforming the rural economy.Footnote 31 The distinction between liberal and centrally directed, let us keep in mind, is somewhat blurry. The First World War had taught even the most liberal governments how to instrumentalise the state apparatus in pursue of specific economic outcomes.
The international economic downturn, whose effects became felt in Greece in 1931, revealed the vulnerability of the pattern of small landholding that the agrarian reform had brought about. The scarcity of arable land, the crippling peasant indebtedness, the insufficient availability of equipment (fertilisers, tools, seed, etc.), and the shortage of capital trumped the capacity of the Greek countryside to recover from the crisis. As a result of the growing economic deprivation of the rural population, seasonal migration in search of employment increased, as did participation in electoral and cooperativist politics. Some peasants joined the ranks of the agrarian parties, while others turned away from Venizelism, and towards the conservative People’s Party.Footnote 32 Eleftherios Venizelos’s electoral muscle had started to look weak towards the end of his second four-year term (1928–32). These circumstances motivated the centralising turn of Venizelos’s agricultural policy, which would then be taken to an extreme under Metaxas.
In response to the weakening of his electoral base, Venizelos attempted to manipulate the agricultural sector in the name of the harmonisation of the competing collective interests within Greece. He resorted to increasingly authoritarian methods. This approach becomes particularly evident when we look at the policies of the Ministry of Agriculture and the regulations on peasant organisations. For instance, law 4142 of 1932 sought to reorganise the Ministry of Agriculture. This ‘quite centralising’ reform, as professor Aristotelēs Sideris characterised it, overturned many of the liberal aspects of the legislation that had created the Ministry in 1917. The high-ranking officials within the ministry became more powerful than ever.Footnote 33
The new law was accompanied by pro-peasant rhetoric with populist undertones. Venizelos himself explained that he had started this new round of reforms of the agricultural sector from its top institution, the Ministry, because ‘the fish reeks from its head’, meaning that the Ministry ‘had been diverted from its main objective’, becoming a Ministry of Agriculture ‘by name only’. According to Venizelos, the ultimate target of this ‘quietly accomplished revolution’ was the ‘Greek peasant’, who had remained ‘ignored, isolated, and helpless’. The strategy for carrying out such revolution would be ‘to get all the agricultural services out of their offices, and onto the countryside’. He ended his speech with a flowery description of the new reality that the reform brought about: ‘Confused, the old peasants living on the countryside would cross themselves, because they were seeing agriculturalists [that is, the state] come to the villages and educate them for the first time.’Footnote 34
Venizelos’s attempt to control the institutions of the rural economy becomes particularly evident when turning to the peasant cooperatives. Law 4640 of 1930 was passed to prevent their politicisation. At the expense of the freedom of association, the new law prevented anyone involved in party politics and elections at any level from occupying positions of responsibility in a cooperative. Granted, the ideal of the apolitical cooperative was not new in Greece. When professor Sokratēs Iasemidēs wrote the state-endorsed templates for cooperative bylaws in the 1910s, he included a clause establishing that ‘within the council meetings, and in the business of the cooperative, there shall be no discussion or initiative of political character’. By 1930, Venizelos was concerned about the rise not only of the agrarian parties, but also of communism. With the pretext of political stability and public order, he took the ideal of apoliticism to an illiberal extreme.Footnote 35
Another legal instrument that further limited the freedom of the cooperatives to act based on the will of their members was law 5289 of 1931. The law placed restrictions on how cooperatives could buy supplies for their members. It also limited the geographic jurisdiction of all cooperatives to either one municipal district, or two contiguous rural communities. Furthermore, in all executive board and council meetings there would be an inspector from the Agricultural Bank who had the right to participate in debates, although no right to vote.Footnote 36 By restricting the independence and growth potential, both functional and geographic, of the cooperatives, the law made the emergence of a full-fledged agrarian movement less likely. Furthermore, law 5289 accelerated what agrarian leader Th. Tzortzakēs referred to as a ‘tendency towards the replacement of the free agricultural cooperatives with compulsory ones, which are intended to perform tasks unrelated to the cooperatives’ original mission’. Here Tzortzakēs is referring to cooperatives created by the political authorities, to which peasants had to belong in order to access certain resources, such as land during the agrarian reform, or the right to grow a specific crop in a particular location. Whereas compulsory cooperatives were not a novelty introduced by law 5289, the model certainly gained prevalence as a result of it.Footnote 37 In a series of articles, Tzortzakēs also spoke of the new legislation (law 5289 and others) as an ‘encroachment upon the freedom and the entrepreneurship of the cooperatives’. He protested the growing interference of the state in the decisions and activities of these associations. Tzortzakēs was critical of the new requirements that the administrators and clerical staff of the cooperatives had to meet, and of the compulsory presence of state-appointed individuals in the cooperatives’ council meetings.Footnote 38
The legal innovations of the 1930 s would allow Venizelism to secure rural votes. At the very least, the reform would prevent the cooperatives from being infiltrated by members of subversive groups. In a sense, certain elements of this policy were authoritarian in nature, despite Venizelos’s belief in formally liberal politics and economics. It is therefore not surprising to encounter similarities between Venizelos’s discourse in this period, and that of Babēs Alivizatos, a prestigious economist of socialist convictions who would eventually occupy positions of high responsibility in Metaxas’s regime.
Metaxas’s strong man and the legitimising intelligentsia
After his doctoral studies in economics at the University of Paris, Alivizatos taught political economy at the University of Athens. He became governor of the district of Heraklion in 1933. His political career truly took off soon after Metaxas took power. Between 1936 and 1939, he held the positions of Secretary General of the Ministry of Agriculture, Vice Director of the Agricultural Bank of Greece, and President of the Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives.Footnote 39 Briefly put, Alivizatos was Metaxas’s right-hand man. Both men stemmed from Cephalonia. No other politician or technocrat was ever able to hold as many offices simultaneously as Alivizatos did. He was the conceiver and executor of the regime’s agricultural policies. As Secretary General of the Ministry of Agriculture, he deepened the process of ministerial reform initiated by previous administrations. He moved forward with the relocation of the offices of the agricultural services from the urban centres to the countryside. Alivizatos described his project as an attempt to have ‘the state come to the peasant, instead of expecting the peasant to come to the state’. He wanted the agronomists to be ‘in direct contact with the peasant’. Even more descriptive was Metaxas when he addressed the peasants of Serres in October of 1937:
We have rearranged the Ministry of Agriculture … so that the agronomists get relieved from all other duties, so that you can have them close to you … in your villages. They will also dress as villagers, and help you … by directing you in your work.Footnote 40
One could interpret these declarations of intent as manifestations of a modernising agenda. The picture of the agronomist arriving at the village to teach peasants how to work more efficiently brings to mind the agricultural extension services seen elsewhere in Europe and especially the United States. However, in the case of Greece, these educational missions often sought an impressive, even propagandistic effect, rather than long-term productivity increases. While it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince urban workers to remain loyal to bourgeois regimes, there was still hope regarding the peasants. Agricultural extension programmes became a noteworthy element of Greece’s rural economy only after 1950, with the assistance of American specialists.Footnote 41 The declarations of intent by Alivizatos and Metaxas are, more than anything else, examples of the political parlance of a time when rural development was considered a priority across the ideological spectrum. The real innovation under Metaxas and Alivizatos was the power that one single man would hold within the state apparatus that was expected to guide such development.
The continuities between the Venizelos and Metaxas administrations, as well as the increased level of state control under Metaxas, become particularly visible in the case of the High Economic Council (Anōtato Oikonomiko Symvoulio, AOS in its Greek acronym). From 1929 onwards, this committee of experts would produce studies on the Greek economy’s most pressing issues (foreign trade, public works, industrialisation, etc.). The AOS played a strictly advisory role in policymaking.Footnote 42 Under Metaxas, it took on the additional task of legitimising the regime by covering it with the cloak of academic respectability. During the dictatorship, the presence of economists and technocrats from the university became more prominent within the AOS. Some of these academics had once belonged to Venizelist, even centre-left circles. Under Metaxas, they never challenged the status quo. The only exception was progressive law professor Alexandros Svolos, who remained quite vocal. He was therefore removed from the council and sent into exile.
For the most part, the AOS was made up of experts that already enjoyed professional prestige before the establishment of the dictatorship. They retained it under Metaxas. The list of members includes well-known economists such as Angelos Angelopoulos, Kyriakos Varvaresos, Xenofōn Zolōtas, and Geōrgios Pesmazoglou. It also includes agronomists Panagiōtēs Dekazos, Chrysos Evelpidēs, Ioannēs Karamanos, Stavros Papandreou, and Aristotelēs Sideris, as well as chemist Kōnstantinos Nevros, and other distinguished scientists. The AOS presidency was assigned to whoever would be the head of the Council of Ministers at any given time, while the vice presidency was given to the director of the National Bank of Greece Alexandros Diomidēs.Footnote 43 He was also a former Venizelist that integrated himself seamlessly into the new regime.
The continuities discussed above are exemplified in the twenty-sixth volume produced by the AOS, published in 1939. It contains works by Papandreou, Nevros, Evelpidēs, and Geroulanou.Footnote 44 The technical validity of the studies and policy recommendations published under Metaxas cannot be put into question, at least not by the standards of the time. Dissenting voices, however, were absent throughout the period. This applies not only to the AOS, which was a state office after all, but also to more autonomous initiatives. In the previous period, the new institutions created for the purpose of implementing agricultural policy (that is, the Ministry of Agriculture, the agricultural cooperatives, the Agricultural Bank of Greece, and the schools of agronomists) had facilitated the emergence of new socio-political subjectivities. New groups of interest and of knowledge-making appeared. The agronomists, for instance, started a series of periodicals in which they disseminated ideas about what they considered the pressing needs of the Greek rural economy. The future that they wanted for their country and the measures that they proposed were quite different from those of the old urban elites, trained according to the ‘classical’ Greek curriculum.Footnote 45 The increasingly autonomous intellectual and social life fell victim to the Regime’s corporatist drive. Once again, Babēs Alivizatos, simultaneous holder of multiple offices, serves as an example of this process of centralisation.
In State and Agricultural Policy,Footnote 46 Alivizatos speaks of the Ministry of Agriculture before his arrival as a place overrun by ‘cliques’. He denounces the pressure exerted by ‘groups, associations, unions, etc.’.Footnote 47 He refers to a memorandum submitted to the ministry shortly before the beginning of the dictatorship. The memorandum presented
with an admirably unitary voice, the requests of tens of such ‘associations’, with the signature of the same individuals claiming to be the representatives of those studying abroad and those studying in the country, claiming to be the presidents of the ‘scientists’, the Secretaries General of the ‘technicians’. Here they were the representatives of the tenured functionaries, and there they were ‘defending’ the interests of the non-tenured.Footnote 48
Alivizatos concludes with ‘and so was the public opinion created while the state would cave in’. The groups and practices that Alivizatos refers to appear as a threat throughout his book. In Alivizatos’s view, these ‘cliques’ were the reason why the state lacked ‘any sort of substantial direction’, and was incapable of implementing agricultural policy. In this context, Alivizatos’s most important duty was to reinstate order in the ministry, and put it back to work. The same logic applied to the Agricultural Bank of Greece and the agricultural cooperatives. Following the commonsensical trend of the time, he also criticised the concentration of agriculture-related offices in the urban centres. He promised to bring them closer to the peasant, who features as an ideal, morally impeccable subject.Footnote 49
As Vice Director of the Agricultural Bank, Alivizatos promoted exactly the same ideas that he endorsed within the Ministry, in particular with regard to peasant organisations. Before the dictatorship, the Agricultural Bank had already been given extended control over the peasant cooperatives. Alivizatos went a step further with his simultaneous holding of the vice presidency of the bank and of the presidency of the National Confederation of Cooperatives of Greece (Ethnikē Synomospondia Synetairismōn Ellados, ESSE in its Greek acronym). The regime furthered the corporatist character of this institution with law 1154 of 1938. Alivizatos’s views on the cooperatives become clear in the following excerpt of his book on agrarian corporatism:
I have the right to discipline the employees of the Agricultural Bank, and the Directors have the right to discipline the employees that they supervise, and so on. This is a fundamental right that we have. In the same way, [the ESSE] has the fundamental right to exert control upon the cooperative organizations, which stems from its status as highest authority with regard to the cooperatives.Footnote 50
The ESSE even had the power to dismiss the governing bodies of a cooperative whenever it considered that they were not fulfilling their duties. The highest level of authority with regard to the cooperatives resided in the High Council of Agricultural Cooperatives (Anōtato Symvoulio Geōrgikōn Synetairismōn). Three of its five members were appointed directly by the Prime Minister (that is, Metaxas). The other two were simultaneously members of the executive board of the ESSE. As Papageorgiou has pointed out, the ESSE
was no longer a coordinating mechanism for its member organizations, but the supervisor, at all levels and in all capacities, of the cooperative organizations, endorsed by the state and commissioned to enforce the state’s agricultural policy.Footnote 51
‘The dictatorship’, Papageorgiou continues, ‘made sure that it would have the cooperatives’ administrative staff on its side by pushing forward corporatist forms of organization, giving them tenured jobs … and establishing a Pension Fund [for them].’Footnote 52 The educational institutions created to promote the modernisation of the Greek countryside did not escape the regime’s authoritarian hand either. The heavy-handed shutting down of the School of Agronomy (Anōtatē Geōponikē Scholē), today still in existence as the Agricultural University of Athens, provides the most illustrative example of the dictatorship’s approach to any form of dissent.
Since its establishment in 1920, the School of Agronomy had functioned as a division within the Ministry of Agriculture, from which most of the teaching staff stemmed.Footnote 53 Its graduates were a unique asset for the Greek economy. The only similar institution of any relevance, a school within the University of Salonika, would not be active until 1928. In addition to promoting technical innovation, the School of Agronomy’s graduates became articulate opinion-makers on the Greek countryside. The agronomists functioned as a bridge between the urban and the rural. There are multiple examples of the progressive, sometimes even radical, political tendencies within this milieu. In this regard, Minister of Education G. Papandreou said the following in a Senate session in 1930: ‘most agronomists have ignored their mission in society and have gotten involved in politics’.Footnote 54 Already before the dictatorship, Papandreou and others advocated the adoption of measures to rein the agronomists in and limit their influence among the peasant population. The Fourth of August Regime went a step further along the path that, once again, previous administrations had already taken.
Metaxas closed the School of Agronomy down by decree in 1937, reassigning its functions to the University of Salonika.Footnote 55 The same decree put the School’s staff at the service of the Ministry of Agriculture. Its facilities became the location of a variety of offices within the Ministry. Many offices such as these had previously been located in provincial towns. That much for the statements announcing the spatial decentralisation of the Ministry’s services. Such services were not taken closer to the peasant. Much the opposite occurred.
The decision to close down the School is a telling event because of the context in which it was taken. Kōstas Krimpas, a professor at the institution with first-hand knowledge of the affair, speaks of a ‘dirty deed’ disguised as support for the recently established University of Salonika. Kōstas Krimpas’s father Vasos, also a professor at the School, had at the time been ready to protest the decision to relocate the School. However, his own brother, a minister under Metaxas, discouraged him from doing so, warning him that he could end up in exile.Footnote 56 The reason for the draconian move, according to Kōstas Krimpas, was that the School’s refusal to appoint Alivizatos as professor had infuriated Metaxas. During the School’s internal discussions about the candidates for the position, there were two camps. Some recognised Alivizatos’s academic attainment and could foresee the negative consequences that not appointing him could have for the institution. Others, probably also in part for political reasons, were opposed to his appointment. The latter position prevailed, with dramatic consequences for the School.Footnote 57 Vasos Krimpas commented on the affair in a letter that he sent in 1945 to the political journal Politikē Epitheōrēsis:
in case [the editor of the journal] does not know why the School was closed down in 1937, let me inform you that a powerful individual at the time opposed the creation of a chair that he wanted for himself. All that was written about saving resources, about Salonika being in an agricultural environment, etc. was camouflage for the real reason. The minutes of the meetings of the Academic Council of the School of Agronomy of the time bear evidence of this.Footnote 58
Before Metaxas’s rise to power, the School of Agronomy and its faculty had become a relatively autonomous intellectual and professional community. The refusal to bow to political pressures in the case of Alivizatos’s candidacy is quite indicative of such autonomy. The closing down of the School was the way to rein this academic body in, under the guise of institutional support for the economic development of northern Greece.
As far as the individual trajectories of technocrats who easily came to terms with Metaxas’s authoritarian programme, one might be tempted to think of Babēs Alivizatos as an extreme case. After all, he was a socialist who eventually became Metaxas’s strong man in agricultural affairs. He was one, however, among multiple members of Greece’s most qualified labour force that joined the Metaxist camp, thereby legitimising it, and furthering its étatist agenda. Others might not have endorsed socialist ideas publicly in the previous period, but came from Venizelos’s liberal camp, when not from further left. The Fourth of August Regime rewarded them the good old Greek way: in the form of employment in the state apparatus. Metaxas put moderate conservative agronomist Geōrgios Kyriakos at the head of the Ministry of Agriculture. Venizelist agronomist Petros Kananginēs held multiple offices throughout the period. Agronomists Aristeidēs Mouratouglou and Kōnstantinos Nevros (the latter a Venizelist) publicly extolled the achievements of Fascist Italy’s agricultural policy. Dēmētrios Panou, an agronomist specialised in genetics, celebrated the success of national-socialist policies on the German countryside.Footnote 59
The rapprochement between the regime and the cadres of specialists in agronomy and cognate fields can be partially explained by the absence of a similar human capital within Metaxas’s Nationalist Party. There was, simply put, no extreme conservative equivalent tο reward with employment and professional distinction. Petros Kananginēs is an illustrative example. Although Kananginēs was from the Venizelist camp, his career had been negatively affected by the rise of Ioannēs Karamanos as Venizelos’s most trusted technocrat in agricultural matters. Karamanos, not Kananginēs, was appointed General Director of the Ministry of Agriculture in 1929. Under Metaxas, Kananginēs’s star rose again. He entered the directing board of the Greek Company of Chemical Products and Fertilizers (Anonymos Ellenikē Etairia Chēmikōn Lipasmatōn). He was also a collaborator, and personal friend, of businessman Prodromos Bodosakēs, one of the strong men in Metaxas’s Greece, and a bridge between the worlds of politics and business. It is a well-known fact among Greek historians that Bodosakēs, who had benefited from his connections to Venizelos, further increased his fortune under Metaxas.Footnote 60
Kananginēs kept receiving appointments throughout the authoritarian period. The titles of some of these positions reveal how inventive the regime could be when it came to creating new offices. He became member, for instance, of the Interior Ministry’s Council for ‘De-Recentralisation’ (sic ‘Symvoulio Aposynkentroseōs’), as well as of the committee charged with organising the Special Fund for Water Works in Macedonia. Both appointments took place also in October of 1936. In June of 1937, he was appointed to the Council for Horses, and the Executive Board of the Fund for Horse Production (!). Later he would occupy more important positions. He became, for instance, member of the Permanent Committee for the Study of Tariff and Commercial Treaties (November 1937), the Supervising Committee of the Cotton Institute (December 1938), the Council of the Institute of Meteorology at the Ministry of Aviation (April 1938), among others.Footnote 61
Kananginēs’s trajectory gives us an idea of the reasons why the ‘agricultural technocrats’ legitimised the new regime by putting their expertise at its service, and by reinforcing the state-led approach to rural modernisation. In this regard, the centralising, almost authoritarian tendencies of late Venizelism had already set the tone for the five years of dictatorial regime. The Ministry of Agriculture had already become a microcosm of interest groups competing to occupy offices that were proliferating rapidly. Under Metaxas, it was clear which group was going to win.
Conclusions
In this article we have discussed what was new and what was not in Metaxas’s fascist agrarian regime. The Fourth of August dictatorship increased the level of centralisation and bureaucratisation of Greece’s agricultural institutions, but it did so by furthering an agenda that was already in place towards the end of Venizelos’s second term (1928–32). The same applies to the corporatist approach to interclass conflict, the goal of autarky, and the protection of the pre-existing pattern of land tenure. Unprecedented in the history of Greece was the heavy-handedness with which the regime suppressed dissent, as in the case of the removal of Alexandros Svolos from the AOS, the shutting down of the School of Agronomy, or the gagging of agricultural cooperatives. Unprecedented was also the accumulation of offices in the hands of those technocrats that legitimised the regime under a cloak of technical expertise, as exemplified by Babēs Alivizatos and Petros Kananginēs, but also by multiple members of the AOS and others.
It would be a mistake to think of the years of the dictatorship (1936–41) as a regressive period when it comes to agricultural policy. The modernisation of the Greek countryside did not come to a halt, although the people in charge of implementing the modernising agenda certainly had to face serious challenges. They suffered higher levels of interference from above in their work, and faced the risk of professional exclusion, sometimes even legal consequences, if they failed to comply with the dictates of the regime. More research is necessary for us to understand how these developments affected the lives of the ultimate objects of agricultural policy, that is, the peasant population, in the last years of the interwar period. What becomes clear upon consideration of the evidence presented in this article is that the regime was virtually closed to all forms of input from below as far as the formulation of policy and the appointment of decision-makers was concerned.
