La voz de los funcionarios públicos: entrevistas

Moieciu and Bran, as well as the Apuseni area, are located in the historical province of Transylvania, which became part of the Romanian Kingdom in 191816_{. For a significant}

period in its history, until the Great Union, Transylvania was under the administrative power of Austria, Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Gilberg 1979:87). Although the majority of the population is Romanian, Transylvania was, and still is, home to a significant Hungarian minority. Another notable minority of the region were the Germans, or Saxons, who, until their exodus during the socialist and post-socialist periods made up to 10% of the population. During the most part of TransylvaniaÕs foreign rule, rural areas were administrated by feudal landlords who focused on taxation and showed little concern for the needs of the autochthonous population. Gilberg argues that this long history of foreign rule and oppression has shaped particular outlooks and practices among the Romanian villagers. Most notably, they developed the linked skills of Ôaccommodation and transformationÕ allowing them to both handle the rulersÕ demands, while at the same time finding ways to transform and bend the rules in their

favour (Gilberg 1979:86). One way to do this was by developing a system of bribes and favours called ÔbaksheesÕ which, as Gilberg points out, was an important mechanism for avoiding or changing some of the rules (idem).

Through various means of evasion or reinterpretation, there was the possibility of living with foreign rule and exploitation while subtly changing it, carving out some autonomy for yourself and your family or perhaps the entire village. [É] Through this process, maturing over centuries, the peasant became a skilled practitioner of partial autonomy, of remaining an "island unto himself" and his village in the face of regime efforts to break him down into a psychological slave (Gilberg 1979:86).

Gilberg continues to explain that another reaction in the face of feudal and usually foreign domination was to establish strong internal cohesion, manifested through rituals, customs, and dress codes, something that helped peasants maintain their sense of nationhood (86). Trying to keep a sense of freedom from the ruling class also made villagers individualists, but this individualism had as its main units of reference the family and the village, not the unique individual (idem).

After 1918, as Romania emerged as an independent nation state, its political elites pursued a modernising programme inspired by Western models. However, the institutional and political changes were directed at a society with very different socio- economic realities (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:6). The population of the country was overwhelmingly rural, lacking in technology, with low levels of education and very little or no culture of political participation (idem). Following a number of more or less successful agrarian reforms, a peasant middle-class only emerged towards the 1940s- 1950s, but as the communist regime came to power, it was soon undermined and dissolved (6). In spite of the relative improvement in the condition of the peasants, the inter-war period was marked by political turmoil and corruption and the governing elite remained largely detached from the masses (Gilberg 1979:86). Villagers were still uninvolved in the political and administrative life of the country and they maintained their passive resistance to political authorities (114).

While this general outline captures well the historic context shared by Bran, Moieciu and Albac, it is important to note that Bran and Moieciu have a rather atypical history. While Albac is located deep in the territory of Transylvania, Bran and Moieciu find themselves right at the border with Wallachia. This position, coupled with their

mountainous geography and their pastoral economy, gave them a distinctive advantage over other rural settlements as it stimulated an opening of the area and encouraged locals to travel and trade across wider distances. Shepherds practiced transhumance, spanning wide geographic areas, reaching with their herds all the way south to the Danube planes and sometimes even crossing to what are now the territories of RomaniaÕs neighbouring states. These journeys allowed them to establish economic links with other regions as they started trading their dairy and meat products for cereals. Consequently, in the region of Bran and Moieciu, the labour intensive and relatively unproductive cultivation of cereals was gradually abandoned (Prahoveanu 1998: 44). Today, even if the climate allows for some cereals and vegetables to grow, there are not many villagers who still keep gardens. The pastoralistsÕ freedom of movement added to their sense of independence and self-reliance. Historic records from the 17th century offer some suggestive examples. At the time when Transylvania was part of the Austro- Hungarian Empire and Wallachia and Moldova were under Ottoman influence, villagers from Bran and Moieciu were said to be crossing the border and re-settling on one side or another in order to escape taxing (Moșoiu 1930:30). Shepherds were avoiding payment of the border tax by going around the customs points, through the mountains. They were also trying to avoid the prerequisite of selling their products to Turkish merchants for their fixed and inconvenient prices by secretly seeking alternative trade deals (45). Looked at through a Weberian lens, these shepherds might resemble budding capitalists, following money-saving and profit maximising strategies.

As nation states emerged on the European map and new state borders became more restrictive, the movement of shepherds was limited. With fewer grazing areas available, they had to reduce the size of their flocks (Moșoiu 1930:56) and some turned to alternative activities such as logging. Because Bran and Moieciu were located near an important trade route between the Principalities of Transylvania and Wallachia, locals still had good opportunities for selling the surplus from their farms (Moșoiu 1930:61- 62). At the beginning of the 20th century, Moșoiu writes about merchants from Bran and Moieciu who made their living by wide scale trade, commercialising dairy products in the nearest towns of C‰mpulung, Făgăraș and Brașov (Moșoiu 1930:63). Moșoiu also gives interesting details about a nascent tourism economy in the first decades of the last century, noting that apart from the registered merchants, most locals were selling products to tourists visiting in the summer (Moșoiu 1930:63). He writes that before the war, there were some families who used to come to Bran regularly and take refuge from the Bucharest heat. After WWI, following the queenÕs choice of living temporary in the

Bran Castle, interest for Bran grew and in 1927 a total of 400 tourists were officially registered with the local authorities (93). At that time, stays were much longer and the fact that Moșoiu lists the monthly, not the daily rates for accommodation, is telling (94). With the onset of the communist regime, further development was restricted, although on a small scale, informal hosting arrangements still carried on between locals and a few families of urbanites who were fond of the area and wanted to spend their holidays in the mountains.

Turning to Apuseni, the local population is portrayed by historians as originating from the mixture between the Dacian tribes and the Roman colonists, having a history that overlaps with the formation of the Romanian people. According to Abrudeanu, the link with the Dacian tribes was still obvious in the localsÕ clothing and in their distinctive haircut. Because of their hair-style, they later received the nickname ÔmoţÕ and ÔmoţiÕ which would translate as ÔtuftÕ, or ÔtuftsÕ (Abrudeanu 1928). The name remained until today, although the distinctive hair-style disappeared during the 18th century (idem). Villagers of Apuseni are known for their role in the peasant uprisings against the Austro-Hungarian domination in 1784 and 1848. The three leaders of the 1784 mutiny, Horea, Cloşca and Crişan were born in Albac and in the neighbouring villages. The revolution was not successful and the three were executed, but nevertheless they became local and national heroes, symbols for RomaniansÕ fight for independence. Today their image is part of the local identity-building rhetoric. A recent monograph commissioned by AlbacÕs village hall and written by two of the communeÕs school teachers illustrates well some of the representations commonly associated to the local population of Albac, in particular, but also more general, to the moţi. The inhabitants of Albac are said to have strength of character, courage, patriotism, determination, pride and integrity (Berindei and Todea 2010:46).

2.2. Communism

Given that their hilly and mountainous geography made them unsuitable for agriculture and industrial farming, villages in areas like Bran-Moieciu and Albac were among the 7% localities of Romania to escape collectivisation (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:20). In contrast to rural regions in the plains, here people kept their animals, they retained more control over the land and the links with their traditional livelihood survived better. In spite of this, the political and economic transformations of the communist system were so far-reaching that they were bound to have a sizable impact even over villagers that remained uncollectivised. In what follows, apart from stories

collected through my own fieldwork, I rely on research by Gilberg (1979) and Mungiu- Pippidi and Althabe (2002), as I give a picture of what was life like in rural Romania during the socialist period. While Gilberg looked at official documents of the Communist Party and studied texts written by the stateÕs historians and economists (1979:115), Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe draw from fieldwork carried out in 2001 in two Romanian communes: Nucșoara and Scornicești. The first, located in the mountains, escaped collectivisation and was emblematic for being the home of the strongest communist resistance movements, led by a group of partisans who hid in the mountains for almost ten years until they were eventually caught, jailed or executed. Scornicești, on the other hand, was the birthplace of Ceaușescu and became the target of the most ambitious policies of collectivisation, systematisation and industrialisation (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:7-8). In spite of these marked differences, the study revealed many similarities between the villagers of the two communes.

Even if in mountain villages locals did not lose their lands and animals, the state enforced strict control over what people were supposed to do with their resources and their labour. In 1946 a system of quotas was introduced requiring villagers to hand in part of their production to the state. These quotas were formalised as contracts between people and the state, legally binding them to hand in every year a part of their products17

and some of their animals. In a constant drive to increase national production, the law forbade villagers from slaughtering young cattle and using the meat for household consumption. Instead, cows had to be kept for dairy, while male calves were supposed to be reared for beef and they were collected by the state as a part of the mandatory quota. Industrial products were distributed to the villages only if they had met their designated rations (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:36). According to a law passed in 1949, those who were found destroying, hiding or damaging the produce, were liable of 15 years of forced labour (37). The quotas system was completely insensible to the ecology of farming, ignoring the fact that the number of animals a household could keep depended on the surface of land it had. Extra cattle could turn into a burden and people struggled to find alternative strategies for feeding them. To escape this problem, one solution was to suffocate calves immediately after birth by placing a bag over their head. Then, with the tacit cooperation of the veterinarian, they were declared stillborn. Another way of evading the quota system was to keep some of the animals undeclared. This, again, was possible because many of the local authorities that were supposed to

17

enforce regulations agreed to turn a blind eye. VillagersÕ interactions with state authorities were often negotiations, rather than acts of compliance18_{. A woman from}

Moieciu recalled how she managed to avoid paying a fine by having the terms of her contract changed and at the same time by resorting to some of her undeclared animals:

If you didnÕt give the milk quota, you were in trouble, they were fining you. I go and they tell me: Ôyou must give one extra sheepÕ Ð we had to give sheep, too, on the contract. I said: I donÕt give a sheep because I have beautiful sheep and for the contract you give what is badÕ. Because you give it, but get nothing in return. And I had another cow that was not registered. So they told me: Ôthen, you make another milk contractÕ. ÔBetter I do that, I donÕt eat milk anymoreÕ Ð but I had [that extra undeclared cow], I had hope. Where should you get the milk if during the winter [a cow] had no milk and during the summer you took it to the [cattle-pen on the] mountains, where they milked it for four months and gave you cheese [in return]? And then, you were getting fined for not giving [milk for the quota] (Dorica Pop, pensiune owner, Moieciu).

Still, members of the communist administration always kept an upper hand. Since local authorities received from their superiors the value of the quotas for the entire commune, it was up to them to calculate the contribution of individual families. This created opportunities for arbitrary decisions, abuse and oppression (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:41) and in the end the scope for negotiation was limited by oneÕs personal relations to local Party representatives. The communist period permanently altered the customary hierarchies of rural communities. Traditional authority figures in mountain villages were priests, teachers and small entrepreneurs, owners of shops or logging businesses, who in time, managed to buy more land and who had comparatively larger properties (78-79). As Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe point out, these people were behaving like patrons without having monopoly over resources: they offered jobs to other villagers, granted loans, arranged marriages and baptisms (79). Their authority was legitimised by their prestige and good reputation (79). These elites became the first targets of the new political regime and were gradually replaced by the new Party authorities. The strategy of the communist state was to replace local intellectual and political elites by assigning roles of authority to individuals recruited from the marginal ranks of dispossessed peasants, usually with low levels of education (75). Often such

people were brought from other parts of the country. Their alien status added to peopleÕs distrust towards them and the new group never managed to achieve the same type of legitimacy as the old elite.

Another major change brought by the communist regime to the economy of rural areas resulted from the intensive industrialisation programme. Since Bran and Moieciu were located close to one of the largest industrial centres of the country, many of their inhabitants, men as well as women, became commuting factory workers. These jobs offered them a stable, albeit small source of income. Many villagers describe the socialist past as a period when, in spite of the hardship and scarcity, life was more predictable and people had a stronger sense of material security.

[In a married couple], having one of the two in employed work, it was different... with the household (gospodărie) and it was enough, you didnÕt need anything else (Veronica Moga, Moieciu).

For many villagers, the socialist period was a time when they had secure jobs and when it was much easier to find buyers for their farm products. The demand was high among factory workers and villagers seized this opportunity and developed a successful trade system:

When they were exiting the factory, it was thousands of them Ð when they were receiving their paychecks, we used to go, twice a month. We had a big burduf19

of cheese and if it was good, in half an hour, it was gone. Or, if you had caș20_,

maybe you had twenty pieces, and there would be a queue forming, and whoever managed to grabÉ and it wasnÕt just me [selling], there were plenty (Dorica Pop, pensiune owner, Moieciu).

Echoes of a nostalgic discourse still exist in Bran and Moieciu and similar stories where documented by Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe in Nucșoara, where villagers remembered communism as a period of affluence, when middlemen were coming straight to their gate in search for cheese and milk.

19

As for Albac, prior to 1989 the region was more isolated and characterised by a history of poverty21_{, scarcity and difficult working conditions (Văetişi 2006, Vasile}

2010b). Locals were mainly raising cattle and had no large herds of sheep entailing transhumance. They were also rather far from any trade routes, so the area did not achieve the same opening as Bran. Wood was an important resource in the region and during the communist period many people worked in the state-owned forestry enterprises. Mining also developed in the area and some of the locals were commuting to work in the quarries. At the same time, there was a significant underground economy. Although private trade was officially forbidden, by having the right connections and by bribing state officials, people generally managed to trade or sell timber on their own (Vasile 2010a:6). All across Romania the authorities were aware of villagersÕ economic hardship and they turned a blind eye against small scale theft from collective farms, forests, or factories (Mungiu-Pippidi and Althabe 2002:104). Tolerating the informal economy and allowing people to ÔtakeÕ from the state prevented them from voicing their discontent and organising protests and actually helped the regime to survive (idem).