agriculture

One of the most comprehensive social operations in the process of Sovietisation was the liquidation of the traditional peasant society. The individual peasant farmers, the organisations and church communities of rural society represented a political counter-base in the path of the communist programme. The land and the people could only be collectivised through the use of terror. The "collective farms" created in the first wave of collectivization were a failure for the programme of Sovietisation.

In the 20th century, Slovak peasants underwent radical changes in their lifestyles, as they were forced to cope, during a historically short period, not only with the residues of feudalism in the Slovak countryside while seeking some perspectives for their life strategies, but also with the problems of modernisation, including in the European Union context at the end of the 20th century.

The most numerous section of the Slovak society in the interwar period of 1918-1938 was formed by farmer families. Although agriculture was the most important branch of the national economy, it lagged behind the developed European countries. At the end of the 1930s, modern technologies found way also to the Slovak farmer families. This new phenomenon was clearly visible in the most fertile regions in the south and west of Slovakia. However, the Vienna Arbitration deprived the Slovak agriculture of its best land.