LIMITELE CADRELOR ÎN IMPLEMENTAREA DICTATURII PARTIDULUI. STUDIU DE CAZ: COLECTIVIZAREA AGRICULTURII
THE LIMITS OF CADRES IN IMPLEMENTING PARTY RULE IN ROMANIA. CASE STUDY: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE

Summary/Abstract: Building upon our research on the process of collectivization in communist Romania, we discuss the limitations imposed by the shortage and shortcomings of party activists, state officials and security personnel on the capacity of the regime to thoroughly control and impose its policy upon the Romanian society. We focus especially on the deficient education of these cadres, aggravated by the political bias favoring people from humble origins, as well as on the logistical problems faced when the party-state needed to concentrate political and/or repressive manpower in more remote areas of the country. In spite of its efforts, the party leadership often lost control over its local activists and had to condone their misconduct and/or wrongdoings, which often determined the peasants to resist and increased thus the costs of political control in the countryside. The violence of collectivization is therefore not the outcome of implementing a totalitarian order originating from the center of power, but a complex by-product of the structural limitations which accompanied the implementation of the Soviet pattern in Romania.

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