Peasants and communists: politics and ideology in the Yugoslav countryside, 1941-1953

Peasants and Communists : Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941-1953 by Melissa K. Bokovoy is a part of the Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. "[The book] adds an important dimension to our understanding of Yugoslav communist agricultural policy. This study focuses on the conflict between the Yugoslav Communists and their former anti-Fascist allies, the peasants, in the early years of the Tito regime. It is a quietly revisionist work which shows that political power can never be 'total,' that there were strong regional interests in the Yugoslav party from the start, and that it was not simply pressures from outside which forced the Yugoslav Communists to drop their plans for collectivization. Bokovoy emphasizes, instead, the importance of peasant resistance to collectivization, the unpreparedness of rural cadres to lead reform in the villages, and the divisions at the top of the party on how to modernize agriculture on a shoestring. this