Collectivization in Romania

According to some authors, such as US anthropologist David Kideckel, agricultural collectivization was a "response to the objective circumstances" in postwar Romania, rather than an ideologically motivated enterprise.

[1] Unlike the Stalinist model applied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the collectivization was not achieved by mass liquidation of wealthy peasants, starvation, or agricultural sabotage, but was accomplished gradually.

[2] The program was launched at the plenary of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party of 3–5 March 1949, where a resolution regarding socialist transformation of agriculture was adopted along the lines of the Soviet kolkhoz.

[4] Although peasants had received land through the March 1945 reform instituted by the Petru Groza government, they felt increasingly economically constrained with the introduction of compulsory quotas in February 1946.

"Persuasion work" (muncă de lămurire) was initially a major force for collectivizing the countryside, but those efforts were hapless because of the small size of the agitation workers cadre and its lack of knowledge on agricultural issues.

[6] In Romania, where anti-Russian and anti-collectivization sentiments were widespread among the peasantry, it was the persuasion work of cadres that was supposed to "inform" peasants on the reality of the collective farms, in this way disseminating the class line on collectivization throughout the countryside.

[7] When they went into the peasant villages to do this, however, many party workers could not even explain adequately what the terms "collective farm" and "stratification" meant, [8] which further raised skepticism among large numbers of farmers.

Much attention was devoted to involving members of the rural elite (teachers, priests, well-off peasants), who often had to choose between GAC and prison under an accusation of sabotage.

Collectivization was accompanied by peasant revolts that broke out when brutal "arguments" were employed as a means of persuasion by the party and by the abusive measures such as obligatory quotas taking away part of the production of individual plots; GAC that had already been set up were excused from such requirements.

)[15] At an extraordinary session of the Great National Assembly held between 27 and 30 April 1962, First Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej announced the end of the collectivization programme; 96% of the country's arable surface and 93.4% of its agricultural land had been included in collective structures.