page_title: Collective farming
section_title: Romania
hierarchical_section_title: Collective farming / Communist collectivization / Romania
caption_attribution_description: English: Completion of Agricultural Collectivisation Project
context_page_description: Collective farming and communal farming are various types of "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: Agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective, and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy.
context_section_description: In Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual eradication in 1962.
  In Romania, force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. Unfortunately, these attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contributions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges, then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable." 
  On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."
caption: 1962 stamp commemorating the "completion" of land collectivization.
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