Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 - Softcover

Kligman, Gail; Verdery, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691149739 ISBN 13: 9780691149738

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2011

Synopsis

In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles. Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

About this title

About the Author

Gail Kligman is professor of sociology and director of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

From the Back Cover

"Peasants under Siege is the most nuanced and multifaceted analysis of this topic to date. It will become an instant classic in East European studies. Kligman and Verdery never take the easy way out or smooth over complexity. Their empirical account of Romanian collectivization offers unparalleled detail about the lived realities of village life in early state socialism. This book was a pleasure to read."--Lynne Haney, New York University

"This is the most comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and penetrating work on the collectivization of agriculture in Romania available in any language. The authors cover collectivization from every important angle and with much originality, and they provide a broad framework from which to judge the causes behind collectivization and the methods used to carry it out. I read this book with much profit and pleasure."--Keith Hitchins, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PEASANTS UNDER SIEGE

THE COLLECTIVIZATION OF ROMANIAN AGRICULTURE, 1949–1962By Gail Kligman Katherine Verdery

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14973-8

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................ixList of Tables...........................................................................................xiPreface..................................................................................................xiiiAcknowledgments..........................................................................................xviiAbbreviations............................................................................................xxiIntroduction.............................................................................................1Chapter 1. The soviet Blueprint..........................................................................49Chapter 2. The village Community and the politics of Collectivization, 1945–62.....................88Chapter 3. Creating party Cadres.........................................................................150Chapter 4. pedagogies of Knowledge production and Contestation...........................................215Chapter 5. pedagogies of persuasion......................................................................283Chapter 6. fomenting Class War...........................................................................324Chapter 7. The Collectives are formed....................................................................369Chapter 8. The Restratification and Bureaucratization of Rural Life......................................408Conclusion...............................................................................................444Appendix I. project and participants.....................................................................461Appendix II. methodology.................................................................................464Appendix III. list of interviewers and Respondents.......................................................472Bibliography.............................................................................................477Index....................................................................................................499

Chapter One

The Soviet Blueprint

The successes of our collective-farm policy are due, among other things, to the fact that it rests on the voluntary character of the collective-farm movement and on taking into account the diversity of conditions in the various regions of the USSR. Collective farms must not be established by force. That would be foolish and reactionary.

—Stalin, "Dizzy with Success" speech, 1930

Information about mass disturbances of peasants ... coming into the CC in February [1930] cannot be anything but threatening. If we had not immediately taken measures against the violations of the party line, we would have had a vast wave of insurrectionary peasant uprisings, a good part of our lower-level officials would have been slaughtered by the peasantry, ... and our internal and external situation would have been threatened.

—Closed letter of C.C. of C.P.S.U., April 2, 1930, concerning the situation in the countryside

We asked Moscow two or three times how we should proceed. We were told to proceed bearing in mind our situation, that our Party is young, that the level of training is insufficient, that we still have a small commodity-producing sector, that we have the remnants of the former exploiting classes who have not died and physically exist. —Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania's First Party Secretary, 1958

We have the good fortune of the Soviet experience.

—Leonte Rautu, Romania's Minister of Propaganda, 1950

As the first country in the world to be founded on Marxist-Leninist principles, the Soviet Union had myriad problems to solve. They included establishing control over vast areas and diverse populations, developing a new political form (the "Party-state"), creating sufficient numbers of cadres who would promote the Party's goals, verifying the loyalty of those cadres, securing a police force to ensure internal and external security, and finding sources of accumulation that would enable the country to industrialize; collectivization would be the principal means. In addition, the leaders' ambitious program of social engineering required developing a variety of techniques for carrying out specific tasks, such as obtaining food requisitions, collectivizing agriculture, and so on. These techniques formed the basis for creating "replica" regimes (Jowitt 1992: 176) in Eastern Europe following World War II, in a process of technology transfer of almost unparalleled scope. We might call that technological package "the Soviet blueprint," of which collectivization was a major part. Although the results varied considerably, each East European country was pressed into adopting more or less the same package. Nowhere, however, did the blueprint fully succeed against recalcitrant local realities—not even in the Soviet Union itself. Although our overarching narrative structure in this book parallels Soviet efforts to organize Romanian communism, the details of the story show the fragmenting and reactive effects of those efforts.

Romania proved a more successful replica than most, emerging in the 1960s as the prime instance of "Stalinism after Stalin." In this chapter we will briefly describe the two main mechanisms for ensuring conformity to the Soviet blue-print—the Soviet councilors and the Romanian secret police (henceforth, Securitate)—and the main political form that was imitated under the Soviets' watchful eye: that signature of Soviet socialism, the dual Party-state organization. Through the operation of these structures and mechanisms were realized a number of other policies that followed Soviet practice closely, including rapid industrialization on the backs of the peasantry together with the full collectivization of agriculture, which we discuss for the Soviet Union later in this chapter and for Romania in chapter 2.

Ensuring Compliance: Soviet Councilors and the Secret Police

Between 1945 and 1948, the Romanian Communist Party (or RCP)—the name we will use in this book, although from 1948 to 1965 it was technically the Romanian Workers' Party (RWP)—gradually gained a political toehold and then secured full control over all major political institutions, eliminating other centers of power. The path was cleared by Soviet policy that cut the Romanian army to one-third of its former size between 1944 and 1947, substituting Soviet troops as guarantors of order (Deletant 1998: 50–51). Among the steps taken to consolidate communist power were gaining full control of the government (March 1946); falsifying elections to achieve a greater communist political presence (November 1946); banning the largest opposition party, the National Peasant Party (July 1947); forcing the abdication of Romania's king (December 1947); compelling the Social Democratic Party into union with the Communist Party to form the Romanian Workers' Party (February 1948); and adopting a new constitution based on the Soviet one (April 1948).

From this point on, although formally it was possible for some other political formations to exist, in practice Romania was a one-party state. Its leadership enacted further fundamental transformations, such as nationalizing and centralizing the economy, expropriating landholdings over twenty hectares, overhauling the country's administrative organization, transforming the military and the system of justice, subordinating both the judiciary and the legislature to the executive power, and reorganizing relations between government and religion. In a word, the Party reconfigured the entire field of social, cultural, political, and economic relations. At every step it received the "fraternal assistance" of the Red Army and other Soviet personnel.

Following World War II, Soviet leaders faced a significant problem in bringing Romania into their orbit, for Romania's Communist Party was weak. Internal support for it was low prior to World War II: partly because of its illegal status during the interwar years and its deeply unpopular stance on the national question, in 1944 it had only one thousand members, the smallest per-capita membership of any country in the region (Tismaneanu 2003: 279n37). In addition, the urban proletariat was minuscule and had been heavily recruited by the interwar fascist party, the Iron Guard. This indigenous movement, preaching a message antithetical to that of the Communists, attracted both workers and peasants (the latter mostly sympathizers of the center-right National Peasant Party) to a radical alternative more successfully than the Communists were able to do. Although recruitment efforts brought the Communist Party's numbers in 1948 up to one million, the vertiginous increase indicates primarily that many of these people were "communists" in name only. Thus, Romania's top political elite was highly dependent on the Soviet Union, without whose presence they would never have achieved power. Effectively vassals of the Soviet Communist Party (Tanase 1998: 34), their servility to the Soviet leadership further reduced popular support for them and thus aggravated their dependency, in an ongoing negative spiral.

A result of this dependency was that for almost two decades, Romania's Party leaders offered minimal resistance to adopting central features of the Soviet blueprint. Ritual references to it permeate their speeches and discussions, both public and secret. For several of myriad examples: when a "verification" of Party members was completed in 1950 (see below), Politburo member Iosif Chisinevski observed, "To bring this great action to a successful end, almost all possible Soviet documents were studied," adding that "in all its activity, our party was inspired by Lenin's and Stalin's teachings about the party and by the great experience of the Bolshevik Party" (cited in Ionescu-Gura 2005: 207). As Ana Pauker said in 1952, "We know what advice from the Soviet comrades means; I won't even talk about advice from comrade Stalin. We know that these people are basing themselves on science and on the experience of the Bolshevik Party of the USSR, and we take their advice—as well we should." Specifically concerning collectivization, Soviet documents were translated into Romanian so they could be read and followed.15 In closed discussions, the leaders repeatedly compared their progress with the Soviet model—and found themselves wanting. (See figure 1.1.)

It is not, of course, surprising to see the Soviet Union so often invoked, since its representatives were present at most high-level meetings. These included the so-called Soviet councilors or advisors, who over the course of twenty years were deployed to Bucharest (and other East European capitals) in large numbers, joining the Soviet troops already present by the terms of the armistice. The presence of these councilors was Moscow's response to the fact that it did not have a sufficiently powerful partner in Romania (or the other East European states) to whom it could entrust governance, owing to the Party's weakness and the divisions within its leadership. Most of the councilors were in the army, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Securitate, but they were to be found in all central administrative bodies as well as in the cultural bureaucracy. Their task was to see that the Soviet Union was more than just a model but actually exercised power in Romania in its own right (Dobrincu 2000–01: 211–12). Romanian political analyst Tanase states, "Here more than anywhere else and in a less camouflaged way, the Soviets were present in the army, the police, the administration, and economic life, of which they directly controlled an important part. As early as 1947 in communist circles of the other People's Democracies, Romania was regarded as the seventeenth Soviet Republic" (1998: 36).

There is very little documentary evidence available on the activities of these councilors in the countries to which they were sent. Nevertheless, scholars working in the Soviet archives have been finding new information (see Tismaneanu et al. 2007: 155–65), and there is still much more to learn about this crucial institution. At least some of the councilors came at the explicit request of Romania's Party leaders. In 1949 Gheorghiu-Dej asked for the assistance of "one or two specialists" to help with the verification of cadres, and in 1950 a convention between the two countries regularized their presence (155–56). There are records of further requests, such as by Defense Minister Bodnaras. (for forty-nine councilors in 1951) and by Dej (for seventy-nine more in 1952)—both serving only the army19—and by various agricultural bodies asking to extend their councilor's stay for another year. It is likely that the Soviets sent many more without being asked. In 1957 they proposed reducing the number and Gheorghiu-Dej agreed, though he continued to request new advisors for the next few years. In 1964, however, when he asked that all the councilors leave and tried to remove the Securitate from KGB control, Soviet leaders protested vigorously.

The Soviet councilors wielded enormous and sometimes decisive influence over Romania's leaders, even though their advice was not always unanimous: there were power struggles among them, paralleling those in the Soviet Union, which meant that factions in Romanian politics would each have their Soviet backers. Here is a small sampling of their activities. They assisted with (perhaps even precipitated) the purge of Gheorghiu-Dej's chief rivals, helping to write the resolution that would bring them down as well as the questions for the interrogations; they directed reorganizations of the Party toward closer conformity with the Soviet model; they controlled the instruction of cadres, approved all measures taken in the Interior Ministry, drew up the first Five-Year Plan (to Soviet advantage), and advised on the Danube Canal, Romania's gulag, which was central to the Soviet industrial program. It was they who insisted on forced industrialization for Romania, as well as on high levels of food requisitions (despite extensive rural opposition) to facilitate the currency reform they were instrumental in creating (Levy 2001: 121, 127). They were active in planning and executing the collectivization of agriculture, insisting that it be tried first in Constanta region, where the Soviet army was stationed, and they prevailed in excluding wealthy peasants from the collectives, as in the Soviet Union, until late in the process.

Above all, they oversaw the creation of Romania's repressive apparatus—particularly its espionage division and the Securitate, a direct offshoot of the KGB. The Securitate was formed in 1948 to replace the Siguranta (Security Police) and Special Information Service of the bourgeois era. Among its declared missions were to defend the gains of the Romanian working class and to "cleanse society of the 'impure'" (Anisescu 2002: 12)—such as members of earlier bourgeois political parties and other "antidemocratic" organizations, holders of wealth, persons resisting policies like collectivization, and so on. Soviet design of the repressive institutions helped to ensure, however, that the interests of Moscow were the main ones served (Dobrincu 2000–1: 223). In 1949 a new police force (militie) and a force of Securitate troops (supplied with weapons from the USSR) were also set up (Neagoe 2002: 138–39). A former Securitate general observed in 1998 that under the early directors of the Securitate "there were hundreds of other NKVD-ists, who occupied all the decision-making posts and many of the implementation functions of the repressive organs of that time." The ubiquity and critical placement of Soviet councilors, then, gives an incontrovertible foundation to the idea of a Soviet blueprint imposed on Romania.

A key Securitate activity was issuing periodic reports on the population's state of mind (starea de spirit) or "mood." This practice, variants of which in Europe can be traced back at least to the Napoleonic state, had also been followed by the tsarist secret police with its mood (nastroenie) reports and was central to the Soviet KGB in its various incarnations. According to an Instruction issued in 1922 concerning intelligence gathering, "the most important task of state information is casting light on the mood of every population group and the factors surrounding changes in that mood" (Martin n.d.: chapter 1). It was especially important to monitor "bad" moods, owing to the key policing concept that a negative mood in a major population category could open that category to counterrevolutionary influence. To forestall further organization, the political police must signal any such bad moods so the leadership could take appropriate action—propaganda, repression, or changes in policy (Martin n.d.: chapter 2). The categories around which Securitate mood reports were organized were identical to those Martin reports for the Soviet ones (n.d.: chapter 1), reflecting Soviet influence and perhaps a common French source for both systems.

In its first year, the Securitate was assigned the huge task of verifying all Party members, so as to ensure a corps of Party cadres who were reliable. Soviet advice was useful here, for the Soviet Communist Party had carried out precisely this kind of verification and "purification" in 1929. Such purification was essential, owing to the manner of the Romanian Party's growth after 1944: a one thousandfold increase in just four years. People had joined it in four waves, beginning in 1945 with the incorporation—at the government's express invitation—of many from the fascist Iron Guard. A second wave came in 1946-47 from units of the army and administrative personnel who had been working with the Soviet administration; the forced merger of the Social Democrats with the Communist Party in 1948 produced a third wave; and a fourth came from people brought into the new bureaucracy (Deletant 1998: 80). In conducting a verification of Party members, the Securitate's job was to remove those "enemy elements" who might have been swept in during the early years—in other words, to scrutinize the Party itself in great detail. From a membership of 1,060,000 in February 1948, almost a third were purged by May 1950; from 1948 to 1952 no new Party members were accepted; by 1955 the membership was 595,363 (Tanase 1998: 50). Tanase observes that the very process of carrying out the verification campaign was what consolidated the Securitate as an organization (54; see also Oprea 2002).

The Securitate's precise status in the government is somewhat anomalous, as some uncertainty surrounds its top chain of command and reporting status. Although it was created within the Interior Ministry, its generals seem not to have reported there; thus, the Prime Minister—supposedly the superior of all ministers of state—never controlled this ministry or its component Securitate. Furthering the Securitate's relative autonomy from the government was that its top leaders were all agents of the KGB—and were directly supervised by councilors from the Soviet Ministry of State Security. Soviet advisors were also attached to each directorate to oversee the training of recruits (Deletant 1998: 88–92). Of all the structures in Romania's political apparatus, the repressive forces were the ones most closely tied to the Soviet Union (Tanase 1998: 60). They spied on Party members without constraint until, in 1954 and 1957, the Romanian Politburo began limiting what the Securitate could do with respect to Party members. (As Dej put it, "[Securitate] agents don't have the right to question the actions of people holding high positions in the life of the state and members of the Party leadership" [Anisescu 2002: 45]). The limitations increased the Party's control over the Securitate, further reinforced when Soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania in 1958 (Oprea 2002: 19).

The significance of the Securitate—and thus of Soviet shaping of it—both for transforming Romania's political institutions and for implementing collectivization cannot be overstated. Its repressive apparatus was the principal weapon of political change during the early period, when the Party-state had not yet been fully institutionalized and did not control economic life. The exercise of coercion would prove essential to forming the collective farms: whenever coercion was relaxed, the collectivization drive stagnated until repression reappeared. Precisely because of the Securitate's role at the most localized level of the political hierarchy, its archive, when suitably read, provides particularly valuable evidence about Party strategy and the responses of villagers to it.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691149739
• ISBN 13: 9780691149738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 520