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Romania SOCIAL STRUCTURE
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Transylvania men relaxing on Sunday after church
Courtesy Sam and Sarah Stulberg
The End of the Ancien Régime
Before World War II, Romania was overwhelmingly
agrarian. In
the late 1940s, roughly 75 percent of the population was
engaged in
agriculture. It was a poor and backward peasant
agriculture;
inferior yields were eked from plots of land that grew
ever smaller
as the rural population increased. Although a fair amount
of
industrial activity was nurtured by state contracts and
foreign
investments, industrial development was slow and failed to
create
alternative employment opportunities for the overpopulated
and
impoverished countryside. The bourgeoisie was weakly
developed.
Atop the low social pyramid stood a disproportionately
powerful
social elite, a remnant of the nobility that had once
owned most of
the land in the Old Kingdom. Although reforms between 1917
and 1921
had stripped them of all but 15 percent of the arable
land, this
aristocracy remained a puissant voice in political
affairs.
After World War II, Romania's social structure was
drastically
altered by the imposition of a political system that
envisioned a
classless, egalitarian society. Marxist-Leninist doctrine
holds
that the establishment of a socialist state, in which the
working
class possesses the means of production and distribution
of goods
and political power, will ensure the eventual development
of
communism. In this utopia there will be no class conflict
and no
exploitation of man by fellow man. There will be an
abundance of
wealth to be shared equally by all. The path to communism
requires
the ascendancy of the working class and the elimination of
the
ruling classes and the bourgeoisie. In Romania the latter
was
accomplished relatively easily, but the former was more
problematic, as most of the population were peasants and
not
workers.
Following the Soviet imposition of a communist
government in
1945, the first order of business was to eliminate
opposition to
the consolidation of power in the name of the working
class. The
dislocation from the war assisted the new government in
this
objective, as many of the ruling elite, whether from the
landowning nobility or the bourgeoisie, had either emigrated
or been
killed in the war. Many of the survivors left with the
retreating
German forces as the Red Army approached. Most Jews, who
before the
war had constituted a large segment of the communal and
financial
elite, either died in fascist Romania or fled the country
in the
next few years.
Consequently, a few measures taken in the early days of
communist rule easily eradicated the upper crust from the
ancien
régime. Land reforms in 1945 eliminated all large
properties and
thus deprived the aristocracy of their economic base and
their
final vestiges of power. The currency reform of 1947,
which
essentially confiscated all money for the state, was
particularly
ruinous for members of the commercial and industrial
bourgeoisie
who had not fled with their fortunes. In addition, the
state
gradually expropriated commercial and industrial
properties, so
that by 1950, 90 percent of all industrial output was
directly
controlled by the state and by 1953 only 14 percent of the
shops
remained privately owned.
Although potential opposition from the more
economically and
socially advanced members of society was all but
eliminated almost
immediately, the task of creating an industrial working
class in
whose name the communists claimed power had hardly begun.
In 1950
less than 25 percent of the population lived in urban
areas or
worked in industry. But conditions in the countryside were
ripe for
social change in the very direction the regime required.
The
ravages of war and subsequent Soviet occupation had left
the
peasantry on the brink of famine. Much of their livestock
and
capital had been destroyed. Their misery was further
compounded by
a severe drought in 1945 and 1946, followed by a famine
that killed
thousands. More important for the goals of the regime,
many of the
peasants were becoming detached from the land and were
willing to
take the factory jobs that would result from the party's
ambitious
industrialization program.
Data as of July 1989
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