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Persuasion Techniques and Community Reactions in Corund (the Hungarian Autonomous Region) JULIANNA BODÓ No, there was no resistance here… We heard that in other villages people fled in droves, that they hid for a while. In some other places they resisted and the police were brought in to calm things down… but none of that happened here. We heard that some people were threatened… People talked about all this but only in private, because some had been arrested and beaten up, but that was earlier, before the collectives were set up… Nobody knows exactly what happened; anyway, such cases were rare. Here they used fear to persuade people, so that when the time to set up the GAC came and we had to sign up for it, everybody signed up. By that time everybody had been persuaded… B.A., 59 years old, male, craftsman, son of a middle-income farmer. August 19, 2001. Was the change in property regime as straightforward and uneventful as this 59 year-old man claimed? Did everything really go so smoothly? It is true that there were no bitter conflicts, nor were there public trials or atrocities. The planners of collectivization did not refer to Corund (Korond in Hungarian) as a “problem case.” In retrospect, one can argue that nothing special happened in Corund. Nonetheless, upon closer scrutiny, several cues alert the researcher to processes that require further examination. For instance, the voices of people interviewed still trembled when they referred to collectivization, forty years later. In the same vein, there was overwhelming agreement that the practices and ideology on which the GAC (collective farm) was predicated had been disastrous and a grievous error. Moreover, during interviews people tended to repress certain memories ; they could not or did not want to answer certain questions. Consequently, we can legitimately ask if we can label “unimportant” events that, four decades later, cannot be narrated with a calm voice but instead seem to stir up so much feeling. How did “persuasion” take place? How is it possible that those “significant ” events triggered such a profound reaction? Were there other events that merit further scrutiny? The village of Corund is part of the commune of Corund. Situated in the western part of Harghita county, the commune is composed of five villages, of which Collectivization and the Transformation of Social Relations 356 Corund village is the largest and serves as the commune center.The other four villages —Atia (Atyha), Fântâna Brazilor (Fenyőkút), Valea lui Pavel (Pálpataka), and Calonda (Kalonda)—are smaller, and lie on the outskirts of the commune. The 2002 census recorded a total of 6,180 inhabitants in the commune. Of this total, the village represented 75 percent of households and 80 percent of the population (4,944). Corund has always been among the largest villages in that area. Together, Corund, Fântâna Brazilor and Valea lui Pavel numbered 2,202 inhabitants in 1850; during collectivization their number increased to 3,600, most of them ethnic Hungarians. The Roma population has increased since the late 1960s—although the 2002 census recorded only 260 Roma, the real figure is much higher. In terms of religious affiliation, 75 percent of the population is Roman Catholic and 25 percent Unitarian. Currently, most people work in pottery or trade, and only very rarely in agriculture. In the 1950s, the opposite was true, with most of the population working in agriculture. The village is located in a mountainous region where it is hard to find a flat area large enough for a football field, as locals put it. Arable land is of such bad quality that it is not worth growing corn on it, and grapes never ripen there either. In 1962 only a handful of people owned more than 10 ha of land in Corund. Most families owned 3–4 ha of land, divided into 10–15 smaller parcels in different locations. Agriculture was practiced for household needs, not for the market. Almost a third of the families worked in pottery, especially during the winter, producing kitchen pots and decorative objects. Those who owned little land worked in pottery during the winter and in agriculture during the summer. Secretly, they hoped that their village would be spared by collectivization. In the mid 1950s, the neighboring villages saw the establishment of GACs, but Corund came late to the game while the change in property form proceeded fullspeed around it.The small pottery concerns were nationalized, and Party...

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