Zveno

Zveno (Bulgarian: Звено, "link") was a Bulgarian military and political organization, founded in 1927 by Bulgarian Army officers. It was associated with a newspaper of that name.

The Zveno members were not Fascists but still advocated a statist and corporative economy and were against political parties and the terror of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), the Macedonian liberation movement. Zveno was also closely linked to the so-called Military League, the organization behind a coup in 1923, responsible for killing Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski.

In 1934 pro-Zveno officers like Colonel Damyan Velchev and Colonel Kimon Georgiev seized power and established an authoritarian regime. Georgiev became Prime Minister. They dissolved all parties and trade unions and openly attacked the IMRO. Their government introduced a corporatist economy, similar to that of in Benito Mussolini's Italy. King Boris III, an opponent of Zveno, orchestrated a coup through a monarchist Zveno member, General Pencho Zlatev, who became Prime Minister (January 1935). In April 1935, he was replaced by a civilian, Andrei Toshev, also a monarchist. After participating in the Bulgarian coup d'état of 1934, Zveno supporters declared their intention to immediately form an alliance with France and to seek the unification of Bulgaria into an Integral Yugoslavia. Zveno supported an Integral Yugoslavia that included Bulgaria as well as Albania within it.

Zveno (Soviet collective farming)

The zveno (Russian: звено́; IPA: [zʲvʲɪˈno], link; plural: zvenya) was a small grassroots work-group within Soviet collective farms. It was, or became, a subunit within the collective-farm brigade.

Evolution during the 1930s

From the earliest times, brigades had been subdivided into groups for carrying out some or all of their tasks. These subgroups were originally known by a variety of names, but by 1933 the label zveno had become standard in field-work brigades. Like the early brigades themselves, the zvenya could be temporary, specializing in one particular job (ploughing, harrowing, sowing, harvesting etc.), or fixed for some period of time. The latter would embrace a number of related tasks, and probably have land plots fixed for the period of their work. They could also specialize in a single crop or handle a number of cultures.

The mass methods of work favoured at the beginning of collectivization were rapidly found to be inefficient. A huge column of ploughs simultaneously tilling a field might appear a glamorous example of large-scale socialist agriculture. But if just one plough broke down, the work-pattern of the whole column was disrupted. Also, in large brigades, accounting was complicated and supervision difficult. The favoured size of the primary working unit progressively shrank. As early as March 1930 columns of 15-20 ploughs were acknowledged to be more efficient than those with 70. By the beginning of 1933 even this scale of work was a rarity. By this time "mass work" came in the shape of zvenya of 3-5 horse-drawn "machines". In the 1932 harvest, in large collective farms the typical zveno was composed of just one reaping machine, with 6-8 people binding the grain behind it.

Zveno (disambiguation)

Zveno may refer to: