Peasant land tenure of Eastern Galicia in the second half of 19th – early 20th centuries

We consider the problems of development of small land tenure in Eastern Galicia in the second half of 19th – early of 20th century. We show the dynamics of the property stratification of peasant population, the reasons for the households fragmentation. We characterize the develop-ment of the rural bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat, the growth of the number of small-land and landless peasant households among the Rusyns-Ukrainian population is shown. We show the change in the peasants’ social and economic status, the dynamics of demonstrations related to the problems of land parcelling between landowners and peasants after the serfdom abolition. For the purpose of lands protection the peasants resorted to the demonstrations including, first of all, such forms of fight as disruption of works (performed in the withdrawn territory by woodcutters, shepherds, ploughmen, etc.). We conclude that in Galicia, the vast majority of peasant families could not feed themselves from their land, and therefore a huge number of poor low-income and landless peasants were forced to leave their native land, looking for work mainly in the New World counties and Prussia. We characterize an unequal taxation of the peasant and landowner households. The land cadastre was carried out so that quite identical lands of peasants and landowners were assigned to different categories, always considering peasant lands better than landowners’.

Caste and the Andhra Communists

The primary raw material of Communist power in economically less developed regions of the world is neither the landless peasant with outstretched rice bowl nor the intellectual in search of a cause. Even more basic than these frequently summoned symbols, the realpolitik of social tensions determines political events where economic scarcity aggravates the particularisms dividing man from man.This contention gains strength from a study of Communist fortunes in a representative Asian setting. With little or no industrial economy to ease population density and underemployment, Andhra State on the southeast coast of India bears the familiar marks of Asian poverty. Here has emerged the most successful regional Communist movement in India. Yet the explanation for Andhra Communist strength does not lie in economic factors. The postwar decade in Andhra demonstrates that social factors can relegate even unusually powerful economic factors to a position of secondary importance.