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“Here in Reviga, There Was Nobody to Wage the Class Struggle”: Collectivization in Reviga, Bărăgan Plain (Bucharest Region) LIVIU CHELCEA This paper undertakes a case study of collectivization in the commune of Reviga, located in Ialomiţa county, and in the larger Bărăgan region. First, I will describe several characteristics situating the Bărăgan region historically and culturally, since that context played an important role in Reviga’s emergence and transformation . In the 19th century, the Bărăgan region was an internal colony and a sparsely inhabited borderland with many large estates, which experienced successive waves of colonization during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Compared with neighboring villages or other regions of Romania, Reviga was collectivized relatively late (1958–1959). This raises the question: to what extent collectivization was influenced by the longevity of its settlement, e.g., thirty years before collectivization, or much earlier. A similar question arises about the ancestry of the peasants: did it matter that some villagers were first-generation settlers in Reviga at the moment of collectivization, whereas others had roots in the village going back two or three generations? Did it matter that, in some cases, until the time of collectivization, some villagers had two households, one in Bărăgan and one in the area they were originally from? My argument is that the above-mentioned factors had only a minor role in collectivization . Instead, what mattered most was the weak institutional infrastructure of the state, which was insufficiently strong to exercise coercion over the rural populace. According to several of the villagers interviewed, Reviga was relatively isolated—it was situated 15 km away from the nearest railway—which may have hindered higher ranking officials from traveling there frequently to “persuade” the villagers of the benefits of collectivization. Another observation that buttresses my argument is that Reviga was not highly dependent on the state prior to collectivization . For instance, the number of state employees was much lower than in neighboring villages benefiting from different state facilities, such as state-owned farms (GAS, or Gospodărie Agricolă de Stat), or railway tracks. In short, the power relations between the state and populace were initially in favor of the latter . Nonetheless, it is somewhat surprising that the state had difficulty intervening in this part of the Bărăgan.The Bărăgan region in general, and villages like Reviga Collectivization and the Transformation of Social Relations 400 were fairly “legible,” in James Scott’s terms, to the state’s gaze.1 None were hard to reach geographically, and they did not display random settlement patterns. These two factors are usually hypothesized when the state’s efforts to centralize, control and homogenize were thwarted. The present study is structured in five parts. In the first part I will introduce prewar Reviga and the history of the Bărăgan region. Then I will present data on postwar transformations, the fate of the chiaburi, the requisition system, enrollment in the collective farm (GAC) and the restructuring of labor and time. The sources of this study consists mostly of 43 interviews the author conducted in 2002 with elders from Reviga.2 The people interviewed differed in terms of how much they recollected from those times, or how much they were willing to recollect. Some who had come from poor families in Reviga skipped rapidly over the collectivization period, whereas rich peasants talked longer and in greater detail about it. The former group also had scant recollections about the postwar period. For instance, they broadly referred to the period in which requisitions had been imposed as “the time when Ceauşescu came to power.” (In fact, Ceauşescu’s ascent happened a decade later.) Those who had experienced greater suffering as a result of collectivization had a more accurate sense of when the GAC had been created, and when they had signed up for it. They recalled these significant events with only a one or two year margin of error. 1. REVIGA BEFORE THE WAR: REGIONAL GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY AND LAND SCARCITY At the time of collectivization, Reviga included three villages: Reviga, Rovine, and Mircea cel Bătrân (see Map 1, page 496). Each of these will be described in some detail. Reviga, the largest of them, was created in the first half of the 19th century by shepherds who settled in the Bărăgan region. Two of my oldest subjects , aged 80 and 89, recalled that their great-grandparents...

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