Research for this analysis was underwritten in various parts by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the PSC-CUNY Faculty Research Awards Program. I am grateful to Daniel Bates for discussions of the ideas presented here, and to Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman for transforming them into a lucid argument (Gail also provided the main title). Donna Buchanan, Deema Kaneff, Mieke Meurs, Luan Troxel and Maria Todorova provided comments on an earlier version of this article which improved it significantly. None of these people or institutions bear any responsibility for the final product.

1. The electoral success of socialist parties in eastern Europe since 1989 renders the term “postsocialist” somewhat imprecise. As an alternative, “postcommunist” suggests a prior state which the Communist Parties of eastern Europe never claimed to have achieved. Given that neither is completely accurate, I use the terms interchangeably to stand for the period since 1989 when communist ideals and socialist systems ceased to define the political field hegemonically. Having made this concession, I see no reason to maintain a meticulous communist/socialist distinction for the period before 1989, although 1 accept the meaning and validity of the difference. My subsequent use of the term “transition” also reflects a concession to contemporary conventions and does not imply an acceptance of its evolutionary/inevitable logic.

2. Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy. 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1993), 164.

3. Perlez, Jane, “Welcome Back, Lenin,” The New York Times (31 May 1994)Google Scholar: Al, A9.

4. “Bulgarian Socialists Win,” Washington Post (20 December 1994)Google Scholar: A35 (my emphasis). Slavic Revie. 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995)Google Scholar

5. Todorova, Maria, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Revie. 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 453-82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Stokes, Gale, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 177 Google Scholar. Similar observations were common in popular reports of the election, e.g. Bohlen, Celestine, “Ex-communists Decisively Lead Bulgaria Voting,” The New York Time. (11 June 1990)Google Scholar: A12.

7. Troxel, Luan, “Socialist Persistence in the Bulgarian Elections of 1990–1991,” East European Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1993): 415 Google Scholar.

8. Ibid. 409.

9. Robert Begg and Mieke Meurs, “Writing a New Song: State Policy and Path Dependence in Bulgarian Agriculture” (unpublished manuscript).

10. In an earlier analysis I documented rural-urban differences in the interpretation of socialist achievements, but I believe these differences also follow from the role of agriculture developed here. See Creed, Gerald W., “Rural-Urban Oppositions in the Bulgarian Political Transition,” Südosleuropa 42, no. 6 (1993): 369-82Google Scholar.

11. The most obvious example is their support for the Agrarian Party in the interwar period, which I discuss briefly in the conclusion. It is also noteworthy that the “overwhelming majority” of communist party members in the interwar period continued to be peasants, which could hardly be called conservative in that historical context ( Oren, Nissan, Bulgarian Communism: The Road to Power, 1934-—1944 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1971], 109 Google Scholar). See also Rothschild, Joseph, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, 1883–193. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 27 Google Scholar.

12. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork in Bulgaria January 1987-November 1988, June-July 1992, July 1993, July 1994 and July 1995. Most of the research was conducted in a village in northwestern Bulgaria, with side trips to villages in several other regions of the country. I also gathered materials during two short trips to Sofia in October 1993 and November 1994.

13. This suggestion complements Troxel's op. cit. attribution of Bulgarian socialist support to the BSP's manipulation of fear, notably popular fears over the loss of social securities, civil instability and ethnic conflict. My contribution, however, places agriculture and identity at the center of this fear and attempts to explain why such fears were available to be manipulated by the socialists.

14. Statisticheski Godishnik, 1993. (Sofia: Natsionalen Statisticheski Institut, 1993), 25 Google Scholar.

15. See Smollett, Eleanor Wenkart, “The Economy of Jars: Kindred Relationships in Bulgaria—An Exploration,” Ethnologia Europae. 19, no. 2 (1989): 125-40Google Scholar.

16. The following description provides only the necessary background for subsequent discussions. Those interested in more detail on Bulgarian politics since 1989 may refer to: Bell, John, “Bulgaria,” in Developments in East European Politics. eds. White, Stephen, Batt, Judy and Lewis, Paul G. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 83-97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, J. F., Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; idem., Hopes and Shadows: Eastern Europe After Communis. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Gale Stokes, op. cit.. Luan Troxel, op. cit.

17. For example, the International Human Rights Law Group reports that “with relatively minor exceptions, the mechanics of the election, the casting of ballots and the tabulating of results, appear to have been conducted freely and fairly,” in “Bulgaria in Transition: Report on the June 1990 Legislative Election and Discussion of Constitutional Considerations for the Grand Nation Assembly” (Washington, DC: International Human Rights Law Group, 1990), 1.

18. The MRF is technically not an “ethnic party” because the establishment of parties on ethnic bases is unconstitutional. However, the vast majority of its supporters are ethnic Turks and the vast majority of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria support the MRF. For more information on the Turkish minority and the MRF, see Daniel Bates, “Uneasy Accommodation: Ethnicity and Politics in Rural Bulgaria” in East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times. ed. Kideckel, David A. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 137-157 Google Scholar; and his “What's in a Name?: Minorities, Identity, and Politics in Bulgaria,” Identities 1, nos. 2-3 (1994): 201-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. BANU actually received more than 8% of the popular vote but its candidates failed to get an absolute majority in any district, so it got no majority seats.

20. The suggestion that these were ruses by each party to avoid governing cannot be verified but is preferable to the possibility of pure stupidity.

21. These percentages are from Statisticheski Godishnik, 1993. 57, 86, 100, 257.

22. Begg and Meurs, 22.

23. It was possible for the village to receive hard currency credits for this sale, which could be used to purchase machinery and other imports, but this possibility was not always realized. Individual producers saw the value of the activity not in terms of foreign currency but in the high sums they received in Bulgarian money.

24. See Smollett, “The Economy of Jars.”

25. For a further description of the akord system in Bulgaria, see Gerald W. Creed, “Economic Development under Socialism: A Bulgarian Village on the Eve of Transition” (Ph.D. dissertation, CUNY, 1992). For comparable arrangements elsewhere see Kideckel, David A., The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 109-15.Google Scholar

26. This is somewhat curious given that the quintessential objective of most communist regimes was industrial, not agricultural, development, and that some communist countries never collectivized agriculture. Still, collectivization dominated the image of communism for distant observers and local participants alike.

27. Similar patterns were evident elsewhere in eastern Europe; see Bell, Peter, Peasants in Socialist Transition: Life in a Collectivized Hungarian Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 138.Google Scholar

28. The exact number of complexes varied over time. On the general process of consolidation, see Boyd, Michael , “Organizational Reform and Agricultural Performance: The Case of Bulgarian Agriculture, 1960-1985,“ Journal of Comparative Economics 14, no. 1 (1990): 70-87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smollett, Eleanor, “Implications of the Multicommunity Production Cooperative (Agro-Industrial Complex) for Rural Life in Bulgaria or the Demise of the Kara Stoyanka,” Bulgarian Journal of Sociology. 3 (1980): 42-56 Google Scholar; Wiedeman, Paul, “The Origins and Development of Agro-Industrial Complexes in Bulgaria,” in Agricultural Policies in the USSR and Eastern Europe. eds. Francisco, Ronald A., Laird, Betty A. and Laird, Roy D. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980), 97-135 Google Scholar.

29. This concept was first developed in Creed, “Economic Development Under Socialism.” For a published statement see Creed, Gerald W., “Agriculture and the Domestication of Industry in Rural Bulgaria,” American Ethnologist. 22, no. 3 (1995): 528-48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Verdery, Katherine, “Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the “Transition,” American Ethnologist. 18, no. 3 (1991): 423 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Kideckel, , The Solitude of Collectivism. 156 Google Scholar.

32. This discussion is based on Creed, “Agriculture and the Domestication of Industry.”

33. On socialist agricultural performance, see Boyd, Michael, Organization Performance and System Choice: East European Agricultural Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Jackson, Marvin, “Recent Economic Performance and Policy in Bulgaria,” in Joint Economic Committee, East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980. (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1986), 3: 23-58 Google Scholar.

34. I am grateful to Katherine Verdery for capturing my argument in this felicitous way.

35. Verdery, Katherine, “The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania,” Slavic Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 1107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kideckel, , The Solitude of Collectivism Google Scholar. I acknowledge the tendency toward atomization in the Bulgarian village but I think it was less complete than Kideckel describes for Romania.

36. See Smollett, Eleanor Wenkart, “Settlement Systems in Bulgaria: Socialist Planning for the Integration of Rural and Urban Life,” in City and Society: Studies in Urban Ethnicity, Life-style and Class (Leiden: Institute of Cultural and Social Studies, University of Leiden, 1985), 257-79Google Scholar.

37. For nice examples of the conflict between villages that administered cooperative farms and those that were incorporated, see Veska Kouzhouharova, Mieke Meurs and Rositsa Stoyanova, “From Cooperative Village to Agro-Industrial Complex: The Rise and Fall of Bulgarian Collective Agriculture” (unpublished manuscript).

38. Creed, “Economic Development under Socialism,” 102-3, 109.

39. This makes the term selyanin. inherently ambiguous in contemporary Bulgarian.

40. Some urbanites resented the increased dependence on rural relatives occasioned by the transition but, instead of attacking the changes, they advocated more rapid transition as the best means to autonomy (see Creed, “Rural-Urban Oppositions,” 382). Thus, while agriculture touches almost all Bulgarians, the political outcome depends upon the nature of the contact in local, even individual, contexts.

41. For more detail on the legal framework and early progress of land reform, see Kopeva, Diana, Mishev, Plamen and Howe, Keith, “Land Reform and Liquidation of Collective Farm Assets in Bulgarian Agriculture: Progress and Prospects,” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation 6, no. 2 (1994): 203-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Begg and Meurs, op. cit.

42. The amended land law (art. 33) specified that land commissions should be established at municipal levels but also provided for the establishment of village commissions at the request of municipal councils.

43. Central to this sense of continuity was the image of urban elites enacting and enforcing rural policies. For more parallels, see Creed, Gerald W., “An Old Song in a New Voice: Decollectivization in Bulgaria,” in East European Communities: The Struggle for Balance in Turbulent Times. ed. Kideckel, David A. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 25-46 Google Scholar.

44. The same dynamic affected rose farms and vineyards, but the former were localized and the latter often received greater private attention because of the value of homemade wine.

45. Verdery, “The Elasticity of Land,” 1086. For comparative cases, see Agócs, Peter and Sándor Agócs, ‘“The Change Was but an Unfulfilled Promise': Agriculture and the Rural Population in Post-Communist Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 1 (1994): 32-57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hann, CM., “Property Relations in the New Eastern Europe: The Case of Specialist Cooperatives in Hungary,” in The Curtain Rises: Rethinking Culture, Ideology, and the State in Eastern Europe. ed. DeSoto, Hermine G. and Anderson, David G. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 99-119 Google Scholar; Kideckel, David A., “Once Again the Land: Decollectivization and Social Conflict in Rural Romania,” in Ibid. 62-75 Google Scholar.

46. Villagers from across the country actually commented on the increase in conflict and contentiousness after 1992.

47. See Mieke Meurs and Darren Spreeuw, “Rational Peasants in Eastern Europe: Household Decisions About Organizational Form during the Agarian Transition,” Journal of Technical Forecasting and Social Change (forthcoming).

48. Interestingly, similar fears had fueled anti-socialist criticism prior to 1989 (see Creed, “Economic Development Under Socialism,” 300). After 1989, however, it seemed more likely to develop from anti-socialist policies than socialist ones.

49. A greater factor was decollectivization's impact on the Turkish minority, which I will discuss in the conclusion.

50. In smaller villages this category might include the entire village population.

51. “State of a Nation: A Snapshot on the Bulgarian Economy,” Transitions 5, no. 4 (April 1994). 9 Google Scholar: In general, Bulgarian agricultural production has been declining steadily since 1989, with small improvements in 1991 and 1994. Actual numbers vary but one source cites 1994 agricultural production at 71.1 percent of 1989 levels (Sotsialno-ikonomichesko Razvitie na Republika Bulgariia prez Perioda ‘90-'94 Godin. [Sofia: Natsionalen Statisticheski Institut, 1995], 33). See also, Begg and Meurs, op. cit.. and Wyzan, , “Stabilisation and Anti-Inflationary Policy,” in Bulgaria in a Time of Change: Economic and Political Dimensions. ed. Iliana Zloch-Christy (London: Macmillan Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

52. Such interpretations were most evident in the period after the first election as many urbanites blamed villagers for the food shortages of 1990-1991. In their view, villagers were withholding products in retribution for urban strikes and political demonstrations. See Troxel, 415.

53. See Kaneff, Deema, “Responses to ‘Democratic’ Land Reforms in a Bulgarian Village,” in After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe. ed. Abrahams, R. (Oxford: Berghahn Books), in pressGoogle Scholar. This dual cooperative arrangement became increasingly common in villages throughout the country.

54. See “Land for the Landless,” Inside. (February 1993): 7. Begg and Meurs op. cit.. point out that the collapse of rural industry in Turkish tobacco-growing regions exacerbated discontent and figured in the political backlash. Deema Kaneff (“Defining Ethnicity through Land Privatisation Processes in Rural Bulgaria,” paper presented at the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 6-11 August 1995) shows how decollectivization contributed to ethnic segmentation in a multi-ethnic Bulgarian village.

55. See Bell, John D., The Peasants in Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

56. The Nikola Petkov branch split from BANU in 1945 over the issue of collaboration with the Communist Party. It was subsequendy eviscerated by Petkov's execution in 1947.

57. For example, in Dobrudza, the “breadbasket” of Bulgaria located in the northeast, I found significant support for agrarian parties and significant agrarian influence in district politics. Such local strength, however, is significantly diluted on the national level.

58. On connections between the Communist and Agrarian Parties, see Dimitrov, Dimitur, “Relations Between the Communist Party and Agrarian Party over the Past 80 Years,” in Bulgaria Past and Present, ed. Kosev, Dimitur (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1982), 239-48Google Scholar; and Khristov, Khristo “Politicheskotot Sutrudnichestvo na BKP i BZNS (1970-1981),” Istoricheski Pregled. 45, no. 10 (1989): 3-14 Google Scholar. This relationship appeared to be re-established in the 1994 elections when a major branch of the Agrarian Union entered into coalition with the Socialist Party.

59. For a description of agriculture in Poland see Nagengast, Carole, Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs: Class, Culture and the Polish State. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

60. See Szelenyi, Ivan, Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

61. She suggests that support for the agricultural second economy followed rural resistance to official attempts to reduce monetary and institutional supports for household agricultural production (“Pigs, Party Secretaries, and Private Lives in Hungary,” American Ethnologist. 18, no. 3 [1991]: 465 Google Scholar).

62. “Estonia's Government Replaced in Vote Signaling Slower Reform,” The New York Times (7 March 1995)Google Scholar: A10.

63. Verdery, “The Elasticity of Land.”