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Exploiters Old and New: Making and Unmaking “Rich Peasants” in Aurel Vlaicu (Hunedoara Region) KATHERINE VERDERY The relationship between peasants and the state has long been a central topic in analyzing agrarian societies, such as Romania’s in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Important elements in this relationship include the balance of political forces in the state (understood as a collection of groupings having potentially different agendas); the state’s capacity for surveillance, the degree to which it could penetrate rural areas, and its technologies of rule (such as taxation, subsidies or denunciations); the intermediate groups that affect how peasants connect with the state; the state’s dependence on peasant production of food; and the resources available to peasants to fend off or evade the state’s initiatives toward them. In the history of modern Romania’s relations with its peasants, these elements have changed decisively several times—with the end of serfdom, the creation of Greater Romania after 1918, the communist take-over in 1945–47 and the end of communist rule in 1989. This paper concerns the third of these: changes in peasant -state relations after the communist take-over, through the collectivization of agriculture. Following World War II, the new government that emerged under the Sovietbacked Romanian Workers Party (RWP) aimed to establish a relationship with the peasantry that was more intrusive and more intimate than any prior regime. It would not stop at the techniques of taxation, increased dependence on markets, and occasional subsidies to agriculture—typical of the interwar period. Instead, the Party-State would seek to insinuate itself directly into rural communities and even into families, breaking down existing social relationships and creating wholly new alliances and enmities between newly formed groups while completely refashioning villagers’ sense of who they were. The prevailing kinship relations through which village social life had been organized (including fictive kinship) were to be replaced by “class struggle,” intended to usher in a new social order based in collective ownership and group labor. The means for accomplishing this was to be collectivization. That policy would be essential to forming the “new socialist man” by eliminating “traditionalism” in the rural sector and subjecting the peasantry to intensive surveillance.2 In addition, it would enable the regime to establish greater control over the food supply, so as to promote industrial devel- Collectivization and the Transformation of Social Relations 308 opment by holding down food prices and forcing surpluses out of agriculture toward industry, as well as to ensure a proletarianized labor force from villages as industry developed. Collectivization was therefore crucial to several aspects of the Party’s plans, and it was an enormous task that would radically disrupt the way of life of the 75 percent of Romania’s population who lived in villages. The apparatus of communist rule in Romania, however, was still in the process of consolidating itself and forming the cadres upon whose actions it would depend . Given the resources available to it at that time, collectivization would depend entirely on the actions of local cadres, as the center could not effectively oversee such a far-reaching a policy.3 There were approximately 1,000 Party members in 1944, and a speedy increase to 710,000 members a mere three years later indicates primarily that many of those people were “communists” in name only.4 Despite the presence of Soviet advisors, the new regime was not sufficiently well entrenched to control the behavior of thousands of new activists. Most were little schooled in the ideas and practices of Soviet-style communism, yet it would be their job to turn life upside-down for some 12 million villagers. Thus, collectivization , so crucial to successfully creating a Communist Romania, would be based on the interaction between a barely controllable mass of activists and the Party center , itself riven with factional conflicts and subject to orders from the Soviet Union. Simply from a structural point of view, collectivization was implemented against great odds. What can we learn from collectivization about the peasant-state relationship the communists hoped to introduce? Through what techniques did local cadres attempt the tremendous task of reordering the countryside, and to what extent were they bound by central directives? How did peasants react to the new criteria of social conformity handed down from above? My paper offers preliminary conclusions to these kinds of questions, paying special attention to the Party’s use of the notion of “class struggle”—particularly, the practice of making...

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