Figure 1.--Here a peasant farmer has come into town with his son to sell potatoes. The Soviet Union ended all private opeasant agriculture. The Eastern Europeans vaied in their approach. The Yusoslvs began a collctivization prigram (1946), but endedv it (1952) with many small hoders still in possession of their land. The photograph was taken near Maribor, Slovenia's second largest city, about 1955.

The Partisans prevailed in the World War II guerilla struggle and after the War established another Soviet-style police state and began to pursue Soviet-style economics (1946). There were in sharp contrast to the post-World War I era, major economic changes after Worrd War II. The Communist Government immediately began implementing a Soviet model. The state seized control of private holdings and a major effort was made to industrialize the country. Communists in general see industrialization as the future and generally marginalize agriculture. The Yugoslav Communists were no exception. All industry was nationalized and converted to state ownership. These socialist enterprises had some success, at least within the other largely inefficent countries of COMECON. Few if any could compete with Western capitalist industrues, but within the Soviet bloc did reasonbly well. The new Yugoslavs Communist Government upon seizing power also began to implement a collectivization process, again following the Soviet model. The Communists began the collectivization (kolektivizacija) process (1946). The goal was to 'consolidate' individual landholdings and labor into collective farms (Peasants' Work Cooperatives). They followed the Soviet pattern with two types of farms, the state farms and collective farms. Peasant holdings were operated under government supervision. The state farms were owned and operated by the governments paying workers wages. Tito and his assoociates were committed Communists who believed that Communism and Socialist economics actially worked. Like the Soviets before them and the other Eastern European Communists, they assumed that Socialist economics and the supression of capitalism would immediately result in prosperity. Stalin's efforts to arrest Tito and the experience of running the economy, adjusted their thinking. The poor results achieved by Yugoslavia's orthodox socialist initiatives caused Tito to reconsider his initial doctrinaire economic policy. He began to experiment with economic policy. Political decentralization was followed by comparable economic steps. The Soviet-style central planned economy was replaced by "workers' management councils". These employee groups were given the authority to make economic decisions directing their own enterprises. Each individual factory and collective farm were given the authority to set its own production targets and expected to plan for future initiatives, including investment planning. And wages were tied to enterprise results. Factories that proved unprofitable were allowed to fail. The collectivization process ended (1952). Peasants still owning their land were allowed to contnue to do so. Government investsments, however, were all directed to the state sector. And in industry we have some of the earlist experints with market reforms, albeit minimal. With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of COMECON, few Yugoslav industries were efficent enough to compete on the world market or against imports from Western countries on the domestic market. The Government following Markist doctine and Soviet practices also began collectivizing agriculture, but the resulting drop in harvest levels convinced authorities to discontinue this process.

Created: 1:38 AM 7/15/2018
Last updated: 1:38 AM 7/15/2018