Comparisons - Central European Villages Repeatedly Visited
Forests and pasture land would dominate this upland economy in most western countries; yet despite low yields, most farmers in Wislok, both in the 1970s and today, devote significant resources to cereal production; a high proportion of their output is consumed by the family.
My first postdoc project was in Poland, deliberately chosen for comparison because here agriculture had never been effectively collectivised. Peasants still owned their plots, yet the whole agricultural sector was inefficient and stagnant, in contrast to the buoyancy of Hungary. Living standards were lower and the rural population was less well integrated into the national society in terms of social security and pension benefits. Whereas in the Hungarian case the ideology had been modified to allow the peasantry to be among the leading beneficiaries of rapid modernization, the Polish peasantry was still seen by the socialist régime as an implacable ideological enemy.
I examined these themes in the village of Wislok Wielki, located in the south-east corner of the country in the Carpathian Mountains, adjacent to the border with Slovakia. In this upland environment, dairy production was the main branch of the agricultural economy, but technology was poorly developed; only three (out of sixty) households had their own tractor, and only the local State Farm Director had a private car.
My choice of Wislok was accidental and had nothing to do with the community's tragic history. Yet the deportation of the indigenous population in 1947, when the new Polish government opted for a variant of 'ethnic cleansing' to deal with the 'terrorist' problem in the south-east, had definite consequences for property relations and sentiments. The new Polish settlers were allocated the houses left behind by their Ukrainian owners. From the mid-1950s, however, it became possible in practice for the latter to return to their homeland from the locations to which they were expelled in the far west and north (on lands previously belonging to Germany). They still encountered many bureaucratic obstructions from the Polish authorities, and most found their houses either destroyed or occupied as private property by Polish immigrants. Even though economic conditions were generally much better in their new locations, some of these Ukrainians could not adapt and were determined to move back to the hills. They could do so only by purchasing what they regarded as 'our' property from the Polish settlers. With the help of relatives in North America, some were then able to build modern homes on the same plot. Most Ukrainians were understandably bitter about this history. At the same time it was difficult not to feel sympathy for some of the Polish immigrants: they stemmed from poor families, had inherited no property in their communities of origin, and now had to live with the possibility that a wealthy man 'from the West' might drive up at any moment, step out of his Mercedes, and insist that this house and/or the adjacent land had been unjustly appropriated from his family.
State Farm accommodation (right) contrasts sharply with typical dwelling from the presocialist period in Wislok.
Many farms in Wislok served little more than to provision the household. Theoretically it was possible to expand one's acreage by applying to the local state, but few took advantage of this possibility. No one believed that the socialist state would ever tolerate entrepreneurial family farmers. People preferred to seek the cash incomes they needed in the nationalized forests, or by working full time for State Farms. Unlike Hungary, there was no productive 'symbiosis' between the state and rural household.
While the villagers of Tázlár were using modern technology in the 1970s (combine harvesters, hired either from the cooperative or privately), those in Wislok tended to rely on more traditional methods.
A road and electricity brought major improvements to Wislok in the 1970s, and several villagers were able to build new homes in this decade. However, there was no piped water supply, and domestic life was much tougher than in the Hungarian village. Settlement retained its scattered character. Rural supplies were extremely poor and broke down almost completely during my fieldwork, when rationing had to be introduced for many basic goods.
Washing clothes with water drawn from the well was still routine in Wislok in the 1970s.
Some of the social problems of this community were clearly alcohol related.