Gail Kligman & Katherine Verdery: Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962

       In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles.

    Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes.

Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

Gail Kligman is professor of sociology and director of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

    Endorsements:

    "Peasants under Siege is the most nuanced and multifaceted analysis of this topic to date. It will become an instant classic in East European studies. Kligman and Verdery never take the easy way out or smooth over complexity. Their empirical account of Romanian collectivization offers unparalleled detail about the lived realities of village life in early state socialism. This book was a pleasure to read."--Lynne Haney, New York University

    "This is the most comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and penetrating work on the collectivization of agriculture in Romania available in any language. The authors cover collectivization from every important angle and with much originality, and they provide a broad framework from which to judge the causes behind collectivization and the methods used to carry it out. I read this book with much profit and pleasure."--Keith Hitchins, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Abbreviations xxi
Introduction 1

Part I. Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 1. The Soviet Blueprint 49
Chapter 2. The Village Community and the Politics of Collectivization, 1945-62 88
Chapter 3. Creating Party Cadres 150

Part II. Pedagogies of Power: Technologies of Rural Transformation
Chapter 4. Pedagogies of Knowledge Production and Contestation 215
Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Persuasion 283
Chapter 6. Fomenting Class War 324

Part III. Outcomes
Chapter 7. The Collectives Are Formed 369
Chapter 8. The Restratification and Bureaucratization of Rural Life 408
Conclusion 444

Appendix I. Project and Participants 461
Appendix II. Methodology 464
Appendix III. List of Interviewers and Respondents 472
Bibliography 477
Index 499

Other Princeton books by Gail Kligman:

• The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay.
• Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism.

Another Princeton book by Katherine Verdery:

• What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?