Colectivizarea agriculturii Represiunea totală 1957-1962, I
The Collectivization of Agriculture. The Full-Scale Repression, 1957-1962, I

Summary/Abstract: The intensification of peasants’ repression after 1957 was the brutal answer of the communist ideology which was thus trying to impose in Romania the model of the kolkhoz taken over from the Soviet Union. In private conversations or in ad-hoc reunions, landowning peasants, with small and medium-sized property, and even non-landowners, would criticize the corruption of the bureaucratic apparatus in the Collective Agricultural Cooperatives, the abuse of the functionaries, the misery and insecurity, the failure of the collectivist system. In numerous instances, the peasants would either demand that their applications to join the Collective Agricultural Cooperatives be returned or send their complaints to the party leadership in Bucharest, showing their dissatisfaction with the collectivization of agriculture. To put an end to this mass phenomenon, after 1957. the Party launched a new wave of repression, sending to long-term imprisonment thousands of peasants hostile to collectivization. As a legal argument, art. 209 of the Penal Code was applied: the article would identify the intention to withdraw from the Collective Agricultural Cooperatives as "collusion against the established social order". Starting with the present number, a series of lists from the archives of the former Securitate will be published; the lists include the names of the sentenced peasants and the legal arguments used against them.

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