Land reform in interwar Yugoslavia

An unrealistically idyllic image of Serbian villages in the region of Šumadija was touted as the model of national awareness and peasant liberty sought by the reform, which was aimed at dismantling remnants of serfdom and sharecropping in parts of the country, as well as at breaking up large agricultural estates.

The colonisation process was used by the Yugoslav authorities as a means of ethnic engineering, seeking to increase the proportion of South Slavic peoples (predominantly Serbs), especially in border regions such as Banat, Bačka and Baranja and the present-day territories of Kosovo and North Macedonia.

The reform and colonisation were conducted against the backdrop of ethnic violence against the Moslem population in Bosnia and Herzegovina; in Kosovo, guerilla warfare waged by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation; and civil unrest elsewhere.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (subsequently renamed Yugoslavia) was established by a proclamation of Prince Regent Alexander of Serbia on 1 December 1918.

Serbia had annexed the territories of Banat, Bačka and Baranja (also referred to as Vojvodina) and the Kingdom of Montenegro in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

[1] The additions of Vojvodina and Montenegro followed the annexation of Sandžak and areas of present-day Kosovo and North Macedonia in the immediate aftermath of the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars.

The Slovene Lands were organised similarly to the Cisleithanian (Austrian) part of the former Austria-Hungary, while Croatia-Slavonia had been previously linked more closely to the Kingdom of Hungary.

In South Serbia, Albanians in the Kachak Movement resisted the new state, and there was a pro-Bulgarian, anti-Yugoslav struggle championed by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO).

[8] On 24 December 1918, within the four weeks following the proclamation of Yugoslavia, Regent Alexander issued a declaration asking peasants to calmly wait for the state to settle the agrarian question and give them land that will be "only God's and theirs".

[10] The main objective of the land reform appeared to be forging closer ties between the peasantry and the monarchy, to reduce the likelihood of a revolution.

[12] Social affairs minister and co-author of the Interim Decree Vitomir Korać unsuccessfully argued against compensation as "parliamentary and judicial nonsense".

[16] According to economist Mijo Mirković, the government committed "a range of revolutionary acts" and went against its principles as it feared unrest among the peasants or even a revolution.

[12] Conversely, economist Doreen Warriner deemed the reform to be in line with similar processes in Eastern Europe at the time, which were marked by gradual development of agricultural relations rather than revolutionary change.

[21] According to historian Srđan Milošević, the Šumadija countryside was not selected because it was a particularly successful role-model, but because it was customary to extend solutions previously applied in Serbia to Yugoslavia.

[23] In a speech of 16 March 1919, Regent Alexander asked for urgent land reform by application of the Serbian ownership model to other parts of Yugoslavia.

[37] Implementation of the reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina was accompanied by widespread inter-ethnic violence, as the Bosnian Serbs attacked Muslim farmers and landowners.

[43] The colonisation of Vojvodina, a territory that passed from Hungarian to Serbian (and subsequently Yugoslav) control following the 1918 Armistice of Belgrade, was a significant element of the interwar land reform in Yugoslavia.

[45] Civil unrest during 1919, and a Hungarian uprising in the city of Subotica on 21 April 1920,[46] prompted the Yugoslav authorities to deploy 20,000 troops to pacify the area.

[47] There were proposals to make it possible for Vojvodina's German population to receive land through the reform, but only in areas south of the Sava and Danube rivers.

In 1930, state secretary Slavko Šećerov claimed that the main objective of the reform in Vojvodina was to ruin the wealthy non-Slavic landowners, while other aspects were of secondary importance.

In 1912–1914, until the outbreak of the World War I, Serbian authorities repressed the non-Serb majority and embarked upon a campaign of Serbianisation that caused thousands of Macedonians to flee to Bulgaria.

As a consequence, the province was garrisoned by about 50,000 Royal Yugoslav Army troops, gendarmes, military police, and armed members of the state-sponsored Association against Bulgarian Bandits.

[61] The reform meant expropriation of agricultural land granted by the former Austro-Hungarian authorities in perpetuity to churches, schools, hospitals, and libraries in Croatia, depriving such institutions of independent income.

[63] Approximately one half of the land was distributed to the local population, while the remainder was given to colonists arriving from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Lika and Kordun regions of Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Montenegro.

[66] Following the royal manifesto of January 1919 and the Interim Decree, peasants largely stopped paying rent for the land, in breach of their contracts, believing they would become the owners.

The reason for the suspension was the unresolved status of Dalmatia regarding the award promised to Italy under the Treaty of London, as an incentive to join the Allies.

[69] The difficult economic situation in Dalmatia caused more than 15,000 people to emigrate to the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and New Zealand between 1920 and 1928.

[73] Through the treaty, Italy and Yugoslavia reached an interim agreement on the method of expropriation of Italian-owned land in Dalmatia encompassing approximately 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres).

Dalmatia-specific legislation enacted in 1930 and 1931 determined that the owners of large estates would be compensated in government bonds nominally worth 400 million dinars.

[37] The reform distributed the land previously managed as Muslim properties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, present-day Kosovo and North Macedonia, and in the region of Sandžak.