How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land
How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land

Summary/Abstract: The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet bloc caused millions of peasants to sign away their rights to land and join collective farms. How did Party cadres accomplish this extraordinary change? In this article, drawn from a large collaborative project, the authors present examples from Romania to describe one of the central techniques used: “persuasion work.” The authors focus on how the persuaders sought to create their authority with villagers, peasants’ and cadres’ reciprocal manipulations of kinship and gender, cadres’ disruptions of the accustomed spatial and temporal organization of village life and peasant responses to them, bargaining and negotiations between cadres and villagers, and more overt forms of “persuasive” coercion. Although persuasion was ostensibly about creating an inner state of belief—convincing peasants of the superiority of collective agriculture—the authors argue that it is more appropriately seen as a performative matter, in which peasants learned to perform the consent that was required of them, whether they believed in the virtues of collectivizing or not. Among the reasons was that Romania’s cadres were largely ill prepared for the job and were unable to be very persuasive. Thus, they both relied on force (thereby heightening peasants’ resistance to joining the collectives) and settled for villagers’ pro forma adherence rather than their active conviction.

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