The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet bloc caused millions of peasants to sign away their rights to land and join collective farms. How did Party cadres accomplish this extraordinary change? In this article, drawn from a large collaborative project, the authors present examples from Romania to describe one of the central techniques used: “persuasion work.” The authors focus on how the persuaders sought to create their authority with villagers, peasants’ and cadres’ reciprocal manipulations of kinship and gender, cadres’ disruptions of the accustomed spatial and temporal organization of village life and peasant responses to them, bargaining and negotiations between cadres and villagers, and more overt forms of “persuasive” coercion. Although persuasion was ostensibly about creating an inner state of belief—convincing peasants of the superiority of collective agriculture—the authors argue that it is more appropriately seen as a performative matter, in which peasants learned to perform the consent that was required of them, whether they believed in the virtues of collectivizing or not. Among the reasons was that Romania’s cadres were largely ill prepared for the job and were unable to be very persuasive. Thus, they both relied on force (thereby heightening peasants’ resistance to joining the collectives) and settled for villagers’ pro forma adherence rather than their active conviction.
Peasant Susana Ciortea, describing persuasion work to Party leaders Ana Pauker and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, 1951, in Camelia Moraru, Constantin Moraru, and Veronica Vasilov, eds., Stenogramele şedinţelor Biroului Politic şi ale Secretariatului Comitetului Central al PMR, vol. 3, 1950-1951 (Bucharest, Romania: Arhivele Naţionale ale României, 2004), 542.
2.
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986); R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930 (London: Macmillian, 1980); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (New York, NY: Norton, 1968); Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, NY: New Press, 1985); Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Further information about the collectivization of Romania’s peasants can be found in Dorin Dobrincu and Constantin Iordachi, eds., Ţărănimea şi puterea: Procesul de colectivizare a agriculturii în România (1949-1962) (Iaşi, Romania: Polirom, 2005); Constantin Iordachi and Dorin Dobrincu, eds., Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949-1962 (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2009); David A. Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, A Tale of Two Villages: Effects of Coerced Modernization on the East European Countryside (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2010). For Bulgaria, see Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). For Hungary, see C. M. Hann, Tázlár: A Village in Hungary (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Nigel Swain, Collective Farms Which Work? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For East Germany, see Corey Ross, Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots: The Transformation of East Germany, 1945-1965 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 2000); and Andrew I. Port, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). And in general, see Irwin T. Sanders and Enno E. Kraehe, eds., Collectivization of Agriculture in Eastern Europe (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1958); and Joan Sokolovsky, Peasants and Power: State Autonomy and the Collectivization of Agriculture in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990). None of these publications takes the approach we take here or in our larger history of Romanian collectivization, Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
3.
Besides the two of us, our team included fourteen Romanian scholars, two more from the United States, and one from the United Kingdom. They are Julianna Bodó (working in Corund and Armăşeni in Harghita County); Liviu Chelcea (Reviga/Ialomiţa County); Dorin Dobrincu (Darabani/Botoşani); Călin Goina (Sântana/Arad); Constantin Iordachi (Jurilovca/Tulcea); Gail Kligman (Ieud/Maramureş), Daniel Puiu Lăţea (Dobrosloveni/Olt); Robert Levy; Linda Miller; Eugen Negrici; Sándor Oláh (Lueta and Sanpaul/Harghita); Marius Oprea; Octavian Roske; Dumitru Şandru (Pechea/Galaţi); Michael Stewart (Poiana Sibiului/Sibiu); Cătălin Stoica (Vadu Roşca and Năneşti/Vrancea); Virgiliu Ţârău (Măgina and Rimetea/Alba); Katherine Verdery (Aurel Vlaicu/Hunedoara); and Smaranda Vultur (Domaşnea/Caraş-Severin and Tomnatic/Timiş). Those for whom no settlements are given worked primarily in the Romanian National Archives in Bucharest. For individual studies by our team members, see Dobrincu and Iordachi, Ţărănimea şi puterea; and Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants.
4.
In our text, we quote from interviews conducted by our teammates, indicating the code used for the interviewees. To avoid adding to the bulk of this article, we refer readers to the Appendices of Kligman and Verdery, 2011 for descriptions of the interviewees (age, sex, occupation, class origin).
5.
We use the terms socialism and communism interchangeably.
6.
See Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege, chaps. 4 and 6.
7.
Viola, personal communication.
8.
Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 44.
9.
See also Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
10.
That is, in emphasizing the performative, we are motivated not primarily by the fashionableness of this notion in contemporary theory but by its suitability to our specific case.
11.
Robert R. King, History of the Romanian Communist Party (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1980), 64. 11. See Direcţia Judeţeană a Arhivelor Naţionale (DJAN) Maramureş (MM), Fond Comitetul Raional PCR-Vişeu, file 33/1952, p. 31.
12.
DJAN MM, Fond Comitetul Judeţean PMR, file 89/1950, p. 77.
13.
197, Verdery interview.
14.
V. Z., Iordachi interview.
15.
We owe a debt to Puiu Lăţea, who first raised this question and provided many of the ideas and examples in this section.
16.
Cătălin Augustin Stoica, "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Institutionalizing the Party-State and Collective Property in Two Romanian Villages (Galaţi Region)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants , 432-54, at 438, 439.
17.
Călin Goina, "Final Report, Collectivization Project" (authors’ files, 2003), 18.
18.
Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege, chap. 2.
19.
For example, Arhivele Naţionale Istorice Centrale (ANIC), Fond 1, file 55/1951, pp. 9-11.
20.
Report by the Orăştie district Agrarian Section, DJAN Hunedoara (HD), Fond Comitetul Regional Partidul Muncitoresc Român (CR PMR), file 20/1952, pp. 82, 84.
21.
ANIC, Fond Comitetul Central (C.C.) al Partidul Comunist Român (P.C.R.)-Cancelarie, file 14/1954, pp. 2, 4.
22.
Comparisons with the Soviet experience show the same thing: the great majority of the activists invading Soviet villages had no knowledge of agriculture and sought to persuade the peasants on the basis of theory, making rash promises. Their inability to answer the peasants’ practical questions about how the work would be organized increased peasant suspicions (Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 418, 431).
23.
217, Verdery interview.
24.
M. T., Lăţea interview.
25.
P. N., Budrală interview for M. Stewart.
26.
186, Verdery interview. This respondent was at the time a candidate member for the Party and might have had a better idea than most as to what the activists were saying.
Stoica, "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward," 431-2.
32.
See Marius Oprea, "The Final Offensive: ‘<aut@>The Socialist Transformation of Agriculture’ from Slogans to Reality (1953-1962)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 49-80.
33.
Călin Goina, "‘Never Leave ’til Tomorrow What You Can Do Today!’: A Case Study of a Model Collective Farm: ‘New Life’ Sântana (Arad Region)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 369-98, at 382.
See Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
40.
M. D., Lăţea interview.
41.
P. V., Kligman interview.
42.
Vultur, "Final Report," 70.
43.
M. H., Verdery interview.
44.
Sándor Oláh, "Collectivization in the Odorhei District (The Autonomous Hungarian Region)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 229-50, at 242.
45.
DJAN HD, Fond CR PMR, file 2426/1957, p. 46.
46.
Moraru, Stenogramele şedinţelor Biroului Politic şi ale Secretariatului Comitetului Central al PMR, 543-4.
47.
Robert Levy, "The First Wave of the Collectivization Campaign: Central Policies and their Regional Implementation, 1949-1953," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 27-48, at 29.
48.
See DJAN HD, Fond A672, file 93/1951, p. 177.
49.
Levy, "The First Wave of the Collectivization Campaign," 30-1.
50.
Goina, "Final Report," 43.
51.
Vultur, "Final Report," 60; Levy, "The First Wave of the Collectivization Campaign," 29-31.
52.
C. G., Kligman interview.
53.
DJAN HD, Fond Chestura de Poliţie Deva, file 72/1937, p. 19.
54.
Oláh, "Collectivization in the Odorhei District," 235, emphasis added.
55.
Bodó, "Final Report," 10-1.
56.
72, Verdery interview.
57.
Chelcea, "Final Report," 30.
58.
Daniel Lăţea , "Final Report, Collectivization Project" ( authors’ files, 2003), 36.
59.
These kinds of temporal violations are a classic tactic, found in many authoritarian regimes.
60.
Dobrincu, "Final Report," 30.
61.
Arhiva Primăriei Şibot (jud. Alba), file I/11/1953, p. 33.
See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
65.
See the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual of 1983, p. L-17. Thanks to Cristina Vatulescu for this reference.
66.
194, Verdery interview.
67.
We are indebted to Puiu Lăţea ("Final Report"), whose work has shaped much of this section.
68.
Daniel Lăţea , "Revolution in Bits and Pieces: Collectivization in Southern Romania (Craiova Region)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 329-54, at 340.
69.
Ibid., 42-3.
70.
It is likely that this area was not seen as strategically important or, we suspect, more force would have been used to get people to join.
71.
Julianna Bodó, "Persuasion Techniques and Community Reactions in the Village of Corund (the Autonomous Hungarian Region)," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 355-68, at 361. 72. V. B., Goina interview.
72.
Item (1) is from DJAN MM, Fond CAP Iza, Sighet, file 1/1962, pp. 32, 34. Items (2) through (4) are from Dobrosloveni (see Lăţea, "Revolution in Bits and Pieces," 344, for source).
73.
Lăţea, "Final Report," 49-50.
74.
Stoica, "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward," 431.
75.
Chelcea, "Final Report," 32. A coin with the image of the king was a problem because the king was considered an archetypical enemy of the people.
Virgiliu Ţârău , "Collectivization Policies in the Cluj Region: The Aiud and Turda Districts," in Iordachi and Dobrincu, Transforming Peasants, 203-28, at 215.
79.
Dumitru Şandru , "Final Report, Collectivization Project" ( authors’ files, 2003), 21.
80.
Goina, "Final Report," 40.
81.
see Goina, "Final Report"; Goina, "‘Never Leave ’til Tomorrow What You Can Do Today!’: A Case Study of a Model Collective Farm"; and Şandru, "Final Report."
82.
Stoica, "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward," 432, 439.
83.
Dobrincu, "Final Report," 46.
84.
Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More. See also Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, for more on this point.
85.
See Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege, chap. 7.
