Alex Toshkov’s book is an impressive tour de force in the national archives of four Eastern European countries and the Russian State Archives in an attempt to place agrarianism at the heart of political history in Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar period. The aim of the book is that of taking the agrarian project seriously as the road not taken and exploring the agrarians’ bid to elaborate ‘a more ethical modernity, a third way between capitalism and communism’ (p. 7). The author concentrates on the socio-political factors that ‘allowed peasant parties to stake out a space for themselves’ (p. 8) in national politics and internationally. The book follows a thematic rather than chronological structure and relies on a composite theoretical framework bringing together insights from nationalism, subaltern, corruption and transnational studies. The focus of analysis is placed on Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia while the choice of agrarian movements aims to showcase different faces of modernity: radical agrarianism in Bulgaria, national agrarianism in Yugoslavia and parliamentary agrarianism in Czechoslovakia.
The first chapter focuses on the impact of the war and consequent political radicalisation in Bulgaria as a defeated country. Chapter Two pieces together the fate of the International Agrarian Bureau starting from a fragmentary archive and trying to sidestep communist mystification. The third chapter explores a double-case study, Bulgarian and Croatian nationalism and its relationship to the respective agrarian movements, and draws on insights from subordinate studies. Chapter Four highlights vital characteristics of agrarianism as both context specific but also following three guiding principles: parliamentarism, land reform and the cooperative movement. The fifth chapter provides an analysis of the delegitimation campaigns against Bulgarian and Croatian agrarians and uses theories of corruption as an explanatory framework. The conclusion shows how the Second World War changed societies dramatically; both the political elites and the masses they claimed to represent, and thus rendered agrarian politics irrelevant before the actual onslaught of communism.
Toshkov’s method of zooming in and out, alternating between case study and broad synoptic analysis, is well suited to the concept of the book and helps overcome national parochialism. As the author himself puts it, the book is a stimulating ‘experiment in how national historiographies can be stitched together to provide a whole that is greater than the individual parts’ (p. 9). The important achievements of this monograph are thus several: revaluating interwar agrarianism from a fresh perspective untainted by the negative teleology of the movements’ wartime decline; basing this revaluation on a wealth of new primary sources; and placing the analysis in a broader European context, rather than remaining anchored in narrow national contexts. Given that well into the twentieth century, Europe’s population was still predominantly rural, Toshkov’s analysis of agrarianism as ‘the imagination and articulation of a peasant political subject’ (p. 10) is therefore highly relevant for, and highlights the dilemmas of modernity implicit in, an important part of interwar European politics.
