Gail Kligman

Collectivization was the first mass action through which Romania's young communist regime initiated its radical agenda of transformation, promoting class warfare to achieve its goals. Its implementation dramatically altered everyday life for the majority rural population. Collectivization as process created new property relations, new organizations of village life, and new categories of self, and simultaneously served to construct the Communist Party's authority and the mechanisms through which it was exercised. Based on a collaborative project combining ethnographic and archival research, the proposed analysis examines collectivization and its effects on the transformation of polity, property relations, and self, and explores the relationship between oral and "official" histories.