The “Red” Land: How Collectivization Was Prepared in Communist Romania (1944–1948)

The establishment of communism in Romania was, paradoxically, closely connected to the rural world. Although the ideology had originally championed the common cause of the working class—the “vanguard” of socialist and, later, communist society—most Eastern Bloc countries were confronted with the issue of the peasantry. In the USSR, the problem had been “solved” through Stalin’s brutal collectivization campaign of the 1920s and 1930s, whose disastrous implementation resulted in millions of deaths.

For Romania, a predominantly agrarian country in which the peasant question had remained a contentious and intensely debated issue since the foundation of the modern state in the nineteenth century, the Soviet-inspired “solution” ultimately had devastating consequences, including the continued underdevelopment of the rural world.

Woe to the Vanquished: The Romanian Peasant and the End of the Second World War

The Second World War was a tragedy of immense proportions for urban Romania—and even more so for the countryside. Between 1941 and 1945, Romania suffered more than 500,000 civilian and military casualties, the overwhelming majority of whom came from rural communities.

The military disasters on the Eastern Front, as well as the fighting that accompanied Romania’s change of allegiance on 23 August 1944, brought the peasantry to a critical point. The devastation caused by large-scale military operations, the loss of young men who worked the land, and the Soviet occupation that began in 1944 placed an enormous burden on a social class that had secured land ownership only with great difficulty during the interwar period.

Romania’s Transition to Bolshevism: The Deteriorating Condition of the Peasantry

Although Romania’s change of allegiance on 23 August 1944 placed it alongside the Soviet Union against its former ally, Nazi Germany, the country was treated as a defeated state at the end of the war—a status confirmed by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty. Romania was consequently required to pay the Soviet Union 300 million dollars in war reparations.

These reparations were not paid in currency, but in goods: oil, natural resources, and a considerable share of the country’s agricultural production.

Under the terms of the relevant agreements, the Soviet High Command oversaw Romania’s postwar transition. This gave the Soviets free rein to exploit every social class materially—once again, especially the peasantry. The actual cost of the war reparations has been estimated at two billion dollars, to which the expenses of the occupation must also be added.

The Poisoned Apple of Agrarian Reform: The Systematic Impoverishment of the Peasantry

Under these circumstances, the Romanian Communist Party, then in the process of seizing power, realized that it needed to win over at least part of the peasantry to the Bolshevik cause.

In March 1945, an agrarian reform was introduced through which estates of 50 hectares or more were expropriated from their former landowners. The measures also explicitly targeted the German community, whose wartime collaboration with Nazi forces was invoked as justification. According to research conducted by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, each peasant received an average of 1.3 hectares of land. The reform was heavily exploited for propaganda purposes ahead of the 1946 elections, which were ultimately falsified and won by the communists.

The same research shows that the land distributed to the peasants was not merely an electoral “bribe”; it also laid the groundwork for the subsequent collectivization campaign. Approximately 27% of the 1,440,000 hectares expropriated remained under state ownership. The remaining 73%, allocated to the peasants, was divided into small plots, leaving more than two-thirds of households with no more than five hectares of land.

The communist measures also included the confiscation of agricultural tools and machinery. The outcome benefited the new leadership: the peasants had theoretically been “granted land,” but they were deeply divided, while the new smallholders became dependent on the communist authorities, which controlled the resources required for efficient farming.

Resistance and Famine: How the Romanian Peasant Faced the Proclamation of the Republic

Following the agrarian reform, the condition of the peasantry continued to deteriorate. Under the pressure of occupation costs and the measures introduced by the communist leadership, the years 1946–1947 were marked by severe food shortages and famine, particularly in northern and north-eastern Romania.

Against the backdrop of this disastrous food-supply situation, a system of compulsory agricultural quotas was enacted in 1946. Farmers were required to surrender these quotas to the state, and the system continued to be regulated and enforced throughout the 1950s.

Peasant resistance took various forms. Because the consequences of repression could be severe, peasants did not necessarily refuse outright to surrender their quotas; instead, they sought ways to circumvent the imposed requirements. Agricultural produce was hidden, crops owed to the state were partially substituted with other goods, and the full number of animals owned by a household was not always declared. The disorganization of the communization process was evident, and even local authorities succumbed to corruption, failing to meet the quota levels imposed by the state.

By 1948, when the Republic was proclaimed, the Romanian peasant had been reduced to a vulnerable and remarkably impoverished position. While the interwar period had represented—at least initially—a time of stabilization for rural life, the beginning of the country’s communization brought about the profound dismantling of the peasantry’s newly acquired and hard-won property rights, forcing Romanian peasants back into a state of abusive servitude.

Suggested Reading

KLIGMAN, Gail; VERDERY, Katherine, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011.

DOBRINCU, Dorin (coord.); AIOANEI, Alexandru-Dumitru; LISNIC, Dumitru; LĂCĂTUȘU, Dumitru (eds.), The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania: Social Engineering, Political Violence, and the Peasantry’s Response. Documents. Vol. I: 1949–1950, Iași, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press, 2017.

ROMANIA, Law No. 68 of 16 February 1946 on the Organization of the Collection of Plant and Animal Agricultural Products and the Distribution of Industrial and Food Products in Rural Communes, in The Official Gazette of Romania, no. 40, 16 February 1946.