ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

102Cezar AvramThis abusive initiative was considered inadequate for the border region.Under the pressure of the internal resistance actions and the events from Hungaryand Poland, at the end of the 1955 and the beginning of 1956, a series of law – theHCM 29/ September 1 1955, the HCM 2694/December 7 1955 and the HCM623/1956 – made possible the retrocession of the houses and land surfaces seizedthrough the HCM 326/1951. The reparatory action lasted until 1959 but washowever insufficient. The collectivization process annulled the results: 987 houses(some of them were nearly destroyed, others were the residences of publicinstitutions) were given back to their owners and 463 hectares of arable land wasgiven back to its owners, but only for a short period of time 33 .In March 1949 and June 1951, in several villages there were fightsbetween the landowners and the evacuation teams, while the peasants tended tofraternize with the victims. The forces were not equal. The landowners had beentaken by surprise, while the party activists had arms, means of transportation andcommunication. The decree 83/1949 and the HCM 326/1951 and the “nights”that fallowed represent a sort of history of the collectivization, and such eventsrepeated throughout 13 years of collectivization that followed. The violent actsremained the same: arrests, deportation in work colonies, imprisonment,beatings, even murder. The representatives of the regime were the same: thepersons appointed by the party to cleanse the rural communities of hostileelements – the popular council presidents, the GAC presidents, the organizationsecretaries and so on. “Infected by the disease of class struggle”, the militia andthe Security members became very violent.The aggression of the nights 2-3 March 1949 and 17-18 June 1951 weresimilar in intensity with thee Bolshevik behavior and especially with Stalin’sbehavior regarding the fight against the kulaks and the Mensheviks.The party propaganda gave credit to the idea that the decree 83/1949 hadbeen directed against the exploiters or what was left of this category after theagrarian reform, with the HCM 326/1951 was directed against the non-Romanian population from the border regions. Actually, the act of March 2 1949affected the wealthy, stable class of people from the rural areas, and the familiesthat, for more than two decades, had invested in the development of Romaniaagriculture, while the act of June 16 1951 affected the people that cared aboutthe village community and were interested its prosperity, being immune to theCommunist creeds and slogans.33 Idem, f. 164; dos. 97/1960; Through the decision no. 34/5066 of 1952 all the housesthat were left deserted after the dislocations were given to the state and the I. L. L.Administrations.