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Collectivization Policies in the Cluj Region: The Aiud and Turda Districts VIRGILIU ŢÂRĂU Do chiaburi have the right to drink in restaurants or pubs? Are they allowed to go to balls and theater performances alongside middle and poor peasants ? Or, for instance, a chiabur’s daughter who married a poor peasant, can she go to celebrations in the village? If one of them doesn’t want to execute directives from the village People’s Council, what measures can the Council take against them? Can they sue them? Or just shake them up a bit? DJAN Alba, Fond “Primăria Rimetea,” file 10/1953, 182. To paraphrase Voltaire, we should judge people’s intelligence by the questions they ask. The quotation above, excerpted from an official query sent by the President of the People’s Council of the village of Rimetea to the authorities of the Turda district, is illustrative of how communist authorities thought they should interact with their fellow citizens who, for ideological reasons, had become undesirable in the new socio-political order. Moreover, beyond their content and language , the questions posed suggest the amplitude of class warfare waged in Romania’s villages, as well as the degree to which local authorities were accountable to those higher up the power structure. Issued in the midst of the campaign to persuade villagers to join the collective farm, the excerpt also illustrates the repressive dimension of the collectivization process. The socioeconomic changes that affected the world of Romania’s villages between 1949 and 1962 are difficult to analyze in the absence of interdisciplinary studies focused on different areas of the country, which examine the specific stages through which the communist project to radically transform Romanian agricultural practices were implemented locally (at regional, district and village levels). Moreover, this study focuses on two districts—Rimetea and Măgina— from the administrative region of Cluj. It traces the structural development of the collectivization process, examining the strategies designed and deployed by administrative and political authorities at regional, district and village levels. The first part of the study evaluates the collectivization process through an assessment of the projects and actions initiated by the regional and district authorities. The second part discusses the stages of collectivization in Rimetea and Măgina. Despite their geographical proximity, at the time, these two villages belonged to Center and Periphery in the Collectivization Campaign 204 different administrative units and differed structurally in terms of ethnic, social and religious composition, as well as property forms, thus making them well suited for comparison: 1) With respect to ethnic composition, Rimetea was inhabited almost exclusively by Hungarians, whereas Măgina was inhabited mostly by Romanians ; 2) As to social composition and forms of property, in Rimetea, mid-sized property owners predominated with a significant number of villagers working not in agriculture but as craftsmen and brick masons; in Măgina, small property owners formed the majority who practiced subsistence agriculture; and 3) In Rimetea most villagers were Unitarians, while in Măgina there was an Eastern Orthodox majority and a Greek Catholic minority. Studying these two villages allows us to reconstitute the particularities and tendencies that shaped the construction of new rural identities in their local context. Analyzing the process of collectivization at the regional, district and local levels also makes it possible to tease out the impact of the central and local authorities’ respective actions, or, in other words, it enables us to assess who was responsible when and to what extent for collectivization’s successes and failures. Situated in the center of Transylvania, the administrative region of Cluj1 was, in 1950, initially divided into eight districts (Aiud, Câmpeni, Cluj, Dej, Gherla, Huedin, Jibou and Turda).2 In 1952 the administrative boundaries of the regions of Cluj, Rodna and Mureş were redrawn (see Maps 1 and 2, pages 496–7), and Cluj gained six additional districts (Bistriţa, Beclean, Luduş, Năsăud, Sărmaş and Zalău). In 1949, as this administrative and political restructuring was taking place, collectivization was also launched in the region. Despite the methods of intimidation employed, the initial results were modest. Only two collective farms were inaugurated that first year, both on September 11th: the GAC “Bobâlna” in the village of Mintiul Gherlei (in the district of Gherla), and the GAC “Horia” in Şuţu (in the district of Turda). The forced organization of collective farms continued through 1950, with 63 GACs founded between February and September.3 The process slowed down...

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