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Law and Propaganda: Rural Land Ownership, Collectivization and Socialist Property in Romania LINDA MILLER “As is well known, in both law and propaganda, collective farms were based on the idea that the peasants had freely pooled their land and other agricultural resources. Peasants retained legal title to their land and, through the General Assembly, exerted democratic control over the farm’s activities.” Andrew Cartwright, “Reconstructing the Past in the Village: Land Reforms in Transylvania 1990–1991,” in George Cipăianu and Virgiliu Ţârău, eds. Romanian and British Historians on the Contemporary History of Romania (Cluj Napoca: University Press, 2000), 168. The other studies in this book, as well as in post-communist academic literature, amply illustrate the realities of collectivization of agriculture in Romania in the period from 1949–1962: confiscatory taxation of private peasants; mandatory agricultural quotas; prosecution and destruction of those designated as “rich peasants ”; violence and coerced membership in collective farms.1 In the face of this apparent state-sponsored lawlessness, any analysis of peasant property rights and the legal mechanism for the transfer of land to the collectives seems almost irrelevant . Nevertheless, the question of ownership of the land farmed by the collectives , and how such ownership was acquired, has continuing implications for the post-1989 period and has been the subject of some confusion. Much of the confusion has its roots in the utilization of a range of cooperative forms over the time period discussed in this book (1949–1962), all generally designated as “agricultural production cooperatives” (Cooperative Agricole de Producţie, or CAP’s), with different legal provisions allowing peasant participation either with or without the transfer of land title to the collective.2 This technique was used to maximize the apparent success of the collectivization effort. It is only after the official “closing” of the collectivization effort in 1962 that this range of permissible forms was reduced to a single form, also called a CAP, in which transfer of the member’s land was a requirement of membership in the collective. Additionally, and not unexpectedly, some of the confusion derives from the divergence of the propaganda idea of the “free consent of the peasants” (as it was reflected in the legal form of cooperatives) from reality. Finally, some of the confusion results from the incorporation of the ideas of socialist propaganda into the The Collectivization of Agriculture: General Aspects 82 heart of Romania’s civil law system, while at the same time pre-communist forms of juridical persons and their property ownership were retained, reflecting the influence within law of the “idea” presented by propaganda. In addition, the studies in this book address certain themes pertaining to the “making of property” and the question of how new property forms and property relations were made. In this respect, this study looks at three primary issues: 1. The property rights of peasants during the pre-collectivization period, and the degree to which the laws governing their ownership of land was affected by national policies protecting higher social interests to the detriment of full private property rights; 2. The law during this period (and the short period thereafter necessary to describe the completion of the legal framework for collectives) with respect to the transfer of land to the collectives by the mechanism of peasant membership , as well as the degree to which elements of pre-Communist law and practices were utilized in the collectivization process; 3. The propagandization of law through the idea of socialist property applied to legal structures which retained attributes of past private property forms. For the most part, the source material for this work is laws, decrees, regulations, ministerial orders and other sources of law within the Romanian legal system (hereafter the “Law”), and the legal treatises and other academic writings that, in Romania as a civil law country, have a great influence on legal thinking. In this case, among other sources, the journal of the Union of Jurists in Romania, Justiţia Nouă [New Justice], for the years 1949–1962 has provided ongoing contemporaneous analysis of the issues of collectivization addressed by Romanian legal scholars of the period. The limited number of court cases discussed here is based on a review of the “Judicial Practice” section of each issue, containing cases considered worthy of note by the journal’s staff. They are used only for illustrative purposes. As noted, this study does not end in 1962 (as is the case with the other studies in this volume) but in 1966...

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