Discours et pratiques de l'État vis-à-vis de la paysannerie à travers la presse officielle en Roumanie

Abstract

Romania : the State's attitudes and actions vis-à-vis the peasants, as reflected in the official press. Since 1945, the countryside has been the scene of radical, far-reaching and irreversible changes. These have been political, ideological and economic in nature, and their aim has been the fundamental transformation of the peasantry, who are traditionally mistrusted as a class by the Communists. With the coming of collectivization, itself the result of a political rather than an economic choice, the priority given to heavy industry, and the growing importance of state and party organs in the countryside, the peasants found themselves mobilized in a programme of nationwide modernization. In the course of the industrialization and urbanization of the countryside, the rural way of life was transformed. However, the theoretical model, drawn from the Russian experience and applied in Romania as in other East-European countries, met with more or less universal opposition from the peasants. In addition, the persistent failures of the Party's agricultural policy necessitated numerous modifications. The official Romanian press and various specialist journals provide a particularly fruitful and illuminating source of information on the Romanian government's policy with regard to the peasants, on its contradictions and its limitations, and also on the communist State's attempt to seek the basis of its national legitimacy in a reformulated version of its « peasant heritage ».