Martori tăcuţi ai colectivizării forţate. Studiu de caz: regiunea Suceava
Silent witnesses of forced collectivization. Case study: Suceava region

Summary/Abstract: In the first years after the Second World War, the North of Moldova and Bucovina were among the most troubled areas of the country, as far as a Soviet-like collectivization was concerned, especially taking into account the fact that all the measures that had been taken by the new regime led in that direction. The inevitable happened on 3-5 of March, 1949, when the Plenary Session of the Romanian Labor Party’s Central Committee announced the beginning of collectivization. The idea of taking properties away from peasants raised anxiety in the rural world. Considering the harsh conditions left behind by the 4 years of war, doubled by the effects of the drought of 1946, the peasants’ sentiment towards their property had grown acute. Nevertheless, the majority of the peasants chose to obey the measures taken by the regime. As a consequence, the main objective we set forth is to observe the attitude of the majority of the rural population in the region on the background of revolts against the regime. Our goal is to discover the reasons which accounted for a part of the rural world’s passivity concerning a principle they didn’t believe in themselves: the collectivization of agriculture. At the same time, we will focus on the strategies of the communist regime in reaching its objective to carry collectivization through, more exactly on the way the authorities managed to convince peasants to accept such a change in their lives. Basically, was it the peasants’ resistance during the first wave of collectivization in the region that changed so radically the strategy adopted by the authorities? Another aspect we would like to address refers to the way in which the collectivization changed the social status and the people’s self-image following the authorities’ desire to attract as many families as possible into the collective form.

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