The Socialist Republic of Romania was a Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989. From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian People's Republic. The country was an Eastern Bloc state and a member of the Warsaw Pact with a dominant role for the Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its constitutions. Geographically, RSR was bordered by the Black Sea to the east, the Soviet Union to the north and east, Hungary and Yugoslavia to the west, and Bulgaria to the south.
The Soviet Union introduced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into collectively-controlled and state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food needed to be produced to keep up with urban demand.
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist party in Romania. The successor to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave an ideological endorsement to a communist revolution that would replace the social system of the Kingdom of Romania. After being outlawed in 1924, the PCR remained a minor and illegal grouping for much of the interwar period and submitted to direct Comintern control. During the 1920s and the 1930s, most of its activists were imprisoned or took refuge in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation of competing factions that sometimes came into open conflict. That did not prevent the party from participating in the political life of the country through various front organizations, most notably the Peasant Workers' Bloc. During the mid-1930s, due to the purges against the Iron Guard, the party was on the road to achieving power, but the dictatorship of king Carol II crushed this. In 1934–1936, PCR reformed itself in the mainland of Romania properly, with foreign observers predicting a possible communist takeover in Romania. The party emerged as a powerful actor on the Romanian political scene in August 1944, when it became involved in the royal coup that toppled the pro-Nazi government of Ion Antonescu. With support from Soviet occupational forces, the PCR pressured King Michael I into abdicating, and it established the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947.
Ana Pauker was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ana Pauker became the world's first female foreign minister when entering office in December 1947. She was also the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party immediately after World War II.
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
Four major land reforms have taken place in Romania: in 1864, 1921, 1945 and 1991. The first sought to undo the feudal structure that had persisted after the unification of the Danubian Principalities in 1859; the second, more drastic reform, tried to resolve lingering peasant discontent and create social harmony after the upheaval of World War I and extensive territorial expansion; the third, imposed by a mainly Communist government, did away with the remaining influence of the landed aristocracy but was itself soon undone by collectivisation, which the fourth then unravelled, leading to almost universal private ownership of land today.
Collectivization in Ukraine, officially the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was part of the policy of collectivization in the USSR and dekulakization that was pursued between 1928 and 1933 with the purpose to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms called kolkhoz and to eliminate enemies of the working class. The idea of collective farms was seen by peasants as a revival of serfdom.
Vulturu is a commune located in the southeastern part of Vrancea County, Romania. It is composed of five villages: Boțârlău, Hângulești, Maluri, Vadu-Roșca and Vulturu.
Suraia is a commune located in Vrancea County, Romania. It is composed of a single village, Suraia. It included Biliești village until 2004, when this was split off to form a separate commune.
Răstoaca is a commune located in Vrancea County, Romania. It is composed of a single village, Răstoaca, and was part of Milcovul commune from 1968 until 2004, when it was split off.
The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933, resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people. The factors and causes of the famine are the subject of scholarly and political debate, which include the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians, Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which were designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Alexandru Moghioroș was a Romanian communist activist and politician.
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of, "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective, and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy.
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 8 acres of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak became a vague reference to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of pidkurkulnyk ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
Agrarian socialism is a political ideology that promotes social ownership of agrarian and agricultural production as opposed to private ownership. Agrarian socialism involves equally distributing agricultural land among collectivized peasant villages. Many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural, locally focused, and traditional. Governments and political parties seeking agrarian socialist policies have existed throughout the world, in regions including Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, and Africa.
In political contexts, a cadre consists of a person recognized as a capable militant within a political organization. In some socialist states, a cadre is a group of people trained to carry out the goals of the Party-State and disseminate and enforce the official pedagogy. These groups are meant to stimulate loyalty and obedience to party rules and regulations by mobilizing citizens and encouraging collectivization. Cadres can be deployed in the field or employed in the office by the ruling party, the state, or the secret police. They are often created to break apart existing class hierarchies among citizens of the Party-State. Cadres were present in a number of communist countries that enforced collectivization, including the Soviet Union and Romania. Additionally, the People's Republic of China still maintains a cadre system to this day.
Cadres decide everything!
The Periprava labor camp was a labor camp operated by the Romanian communist regime, part of the Brăila Pond labor camps. The camp, located near the village of Periprava in the Danube Delta, held up to 2,000 prisoners. According to a study done by the International Centre for Studies into Communism, 8.23% of political prisoners in Communist Romania did time at Periprava. In the literature on communist prisons and camps in Romania, the Periprava labor camp is described as one of the harshest places of imprisonment. In view of the extremely severe detention and work regime, sheer terror, and high mortality, the camp is known among former detainees as a true "death camp".
Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
The People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia enforced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1946 and 1952. The policy, as per directions issued in February 1946, aimed to consolidate individual landholdings and labour into collective farms. The Yugoslav government followed the pattern of the Soviet Union, with two types of farms, the state farms and collective farms. The peasants' holdings were operated under government supervision, the state farms owned by the governments were operated by hired labour. Of the European communist states, Yugoslavia ranked second, behind Bulgaria, in proportion of peasant households in collectives. In 1950, 21.9% of arable land and 18.1% of households were under collectivization. The Cazin rebellion of May 1950 was a peasant revolt against the state's collectivization efforts and was a factor in the abandonment of collectivization that occurred throughout the 1950s in Yugoslavia.
Events from the year 1949 in Romania. The year saw the introduction of collectivization and the first Romanian identity card.
