Land Reform in Romania – a Never-Ending Story

Wim van Meurs Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story Introduction In the past ten years, history has demonstrated its power in the question of peasants and the agrarian problem during the post-communist transformation process. History has seemed to repeat itself in more than one way: rather than learning from (negative) past experiences in solving the social and economic dilemmas of rural modernisation, political leaders have tended to repeat past mistakes, partly because they were under the same structural pressures as had existed after the First World War and after the communist takeover. Such mistakes are to focus on the question of land workers (chestiunea agrara – the social aspects of rural modernisation) and political tactics, while ignoring the agrarian problem (probleme agricola – the economic aspects, i.e. the need for a parallel modernisation of agricultural production in terms of equipment, infrastructure, and market orientation). In each instance, rulers have created the ideal peasant by decree: the smallholder of the inter-war period, the collective or state farm worker of the communist period, and again the restituted family farm of the 1990s. Yet, all three regimes have failed to address the problem of how to create the precon- ditions for a modernised and productive agricultural sector. A related mistake has been the general system-independent inclination to rely on state intervention and control when it comes to changing agriculture. For villages, the consequences of post-communist privatisation and the transition to a market economy are quite different from those for cities: in the city, privatisation and the liberalisation of the economy mean business opportunities for all and the promising of new patterns of ownership. By contrast, in rural communities privatisation generally means the restitution of property to former owners. Thereby, as the pri- mary means of production – arable land – is a fixed commodity, future patterns of ownership seem to be pre-ordained. In particular in south-east European states, land reform and modernisation of agriculture are pivotal to the post-communist transformation. Not only does an improve- ment of agricultural production contribute significantly to the well-being of the population but, for most south-east European countries, agricultural products also constitute one of the few realistic export options in a competitive world market. Do- mestically, past reforms of property rights, including expropriations and nationalisa- tion, have given the agrarian question an additional ethnic dimension. With its con- flicting claims and incompatible concepts of justice – ranging from historical property rights and concepts of social equality to arguments of economic profitability and com- petitiveness – land reform is central to the democratisation process and the consolida- tion of civil society in general. The history of land reform Like in most other central and east European countries, post-communist land reform in Romania constitutes the fourth phase of such reform in modern history. In the 2/ 99 South-East Europe Review S. 109 - 122 109 Wim van Meurs eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the gradual abolition of corvée1 and the liberation of peasants from the land marked the end of feudal relations in agriculture. Peasant unrest at the turn of this century and the spectre of the Russian Revolution led to a second reform of land ownership in most post-Versailles nation states. Fearing the revolutionary potential of the rural populations and their susceptibility to communist propaganda, most governments made the implementation of a more or less radical re- distribution of land ownership one of their central objectives after World War I. The latifundia2 of the large landowners were broken up following the setting of limits to the ownership of arable land: the remaining land was confiscated by the state (al- though compensation payments were the rule) and sold or redistributed to (landless) peasant families. Thereafter, the peasant not only became the mythical symbol of national renaissance in the nation-building process, but also gained some political weight. Peasants’ parties became a political force to be reckoned with all over central and eastern Europe. Regional differences in feudal agricultural relations One of the peculiarities of Romania in terms of the peasant question and agrarian reform is the large regional differences, for example in land ownership, natural condi- tions and legal regulation The relevance of these regional differences holds for the reform of feudal relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as for post- communist restitution policies in the 1990s. The main cause is the Ottoman occupation of two of the three Romanian Princi- palities: the Princes of Moldavia and Wallachia were vassals of the Sultan in Constan- tinople until 1878, but Transylvania became part of the Hapsburg Empire and shared the modernisation process of these lands. Moldavia and Wallachia remained autono- mous under Ottoman rule, so the land remained under the control of the native aristoc- racy (the boyars), who retained their estates and political power. As the boyars were exempted from tax, a heavy burden – payments and services to the landed nobility as well as most of the state taxes – rested on the peasants, who were usually serfs. The destruction wrought by the Russian-Turkish wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aggravated the encumbrance of this truly feudal system and, by the early eighteenth century, serfs began to flee to Transylvania and the Ukrainian lands beyond the Dniester river in large numbers. Therefore, the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia introduced tax reforms to limit the fiscal exploitation of the peasantry and they even interfered in the delicate question of the relations between boyar and serf with regard to the land. Between 1746 and 1749, the state enforced the end of per- sonal bondage. Free peasants and serfs now both worked land belonging to a boyar on an agreed basis, making payments for the use of the land. The struggle between state and noble landowners, over both the enforcement of these limits to boyar power and the peasant payments, continued for more than a century. For the boyars, however, 1 Obligatory non-paid work for the feudal lord, amounting to as much as four working days a week for the whole peasant family. 2 The system of the farming of large land areas by tied workers under absentee landlords. 110 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story ownership of the estates was primarily a status issue: land management practices were directed towards the maximum exploitation of the peasants rather than increasing profits via the modernisation of production. Unlike their Transylvanian colleagues, the Moldavian and Wallachian large landowners lacked the stimulus and the capital for such an undertaking. Meanwhile, the Romanian peasants in Transylvania, over 70% of them serfs, were bled dry by high payments to the state, the church and the (Hungarian) nobility too. In 1784, a rising against the detested corvée was crushed. In the next year, however, serf- dom was formally abolished, allowing peasants to move as they wished if they had fulfilled their obligations to their feudal lords. In general, the hilly Transylvanian area was more appropriate for smallholders than the fertile black-earth plains of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were dominated by large estates. Industrial development, trade and the transfer of land from conservative noblemen to more wealthy market-oriented owners stimulated a relative modernisation of production. In view of the emancipation of the serfs in the 1848 revolution in the Hapsburg Empire and the radical Russian legislation of the 1860s, which liberated the serfs and gave them land, in 1864 the united principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia decided to act. Parliament passed an act giving peasants – who were already no longer legally tied to the estate, but were owed labour dues – private ownership of a plot of land in order to create an independent and prosperous class of small proprietors. The peasant paid the state for the plot and the state indemnified the boyar who had lost labour dues and corvée labour. The law failed its main purpose, as most plots were too small to sustain a family: the peasants were forced to work for the boyars who still controlled the common lands and, in the end, the law was even counter-productive. The principalities became an independent Romanian state in 1878, but Romania remained a land of large estates (with a strong tradition of absentee landlords in Wallachia) and a depressed peasantry. Small family farms remained a minority in agricultural production. Consequently, in 1907 the next spontaneous and threatening rising of the peasantry occurred in these parts of the Romanian lands. The preposter- ously uneven distribution of land had turned the peasant question into a political powder keg without achieving anything for the economic modernisation of agricultural production which would help solve the agrarian problem. The 1907 peasant revolt and the 1920 land reforms Due to an increase in the rural population in the nineteenth century, family plots had become smaller and smaller: by the end of the century, 85% of peasants either had no land at all or too little to feed their family. Conversely, the 5,000 largest estates en- compassed more than half of arable land. Thus, most large landowners scarcely had a stake in modernising and raising agricultural productivity. The European agrarian cri- sis (due to the import of American grain) aggravated the situation of the rural population. In 1907, the discontent of the peasants turned to violence against the landowners. After the suppression of the rebellion, Parliament began to discuss the necessity of di- viding the large estates for the sake of the rural population and the national economy, thus preparing the ground for the practical measures taken after the First World War.

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