Planning Labour

Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania

Alina-Sandra Cucu

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789201864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Lavoro e relazioni industriali

Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of "primitive socialist accumulation" whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers' consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics.

I

PRIMITIVE SOCIALIST ACCUMULATION IN CLUJ

CHAPTER 1

PRODUCTIVE STATE APPARATUSES

Taking Over the Factories, 1944–1948

Whose City, Whose Factories? Rethinking the Communist Takeover of Industry

In the autumn of 1944, the Hungarian majority in Kolozsvár (Cluj) could still remember the joy experienced only four years earlier, when the soldiers of their motherland had been marching on the streets. The image of the soldiers waving at the people who gathered to celebrate the decision of the Axis to return Northern Transylvania to Hungary was still fresh in their memory.¹ During the war, the Hungarian population could hear the cadenza of their steps as a renewed promise that Kolozsvár would again be part of the Hungarian state, this time forever. At the same time, the Hungarian soldiers had been stepping over the Romanians’ hopes that the city would remain part of Greater Romania, as decided by the victorious Allied powers in 1918–20. But the days when the Hungarian officers joined the Transylvanians at the tables of the elegant restaurants in the city centre, and smiled at the young girls passing by, were soon to be over. In October 1944, the Red Army entered the city, with the Romanian Army on its trail. Seen by some as ‘liberation’ and by others as ‘occupation’, the marching of Soviet soldiers on the streets was the sign that the old Transylvanian city was changing its masters for the third time in less than thirty years.

The Red Army soldiers descended the Feleac hill through the apple and plum orchards. Small two-room houses painted in blue and dark green guarded their passage through the Romanian, Hungarian and mixed villages that surrounded the city and supplied it with meat, vegetables, cereal, stone, wood and hay. At that time of the year, peasants’ pantries were already full with jars of pickles and jam, pigs were being fattened for Christmas, hay was gathered inside the horses’ stables, and corn was piled in the storage rooms. But the bountiful autumn was not peaceful. Firearms were heard everywhere on the trail of the Hungarian and German soldiers who were still fighting in the forest that separated the village of Feleac from the city. They were soon to be pushed northwards, and forced to retreat towards the train station, in search for an escape.²

The Soviet soldiers followed them into the city, entering from the South. They passed the Orthodox cathedral and the 1906 Secession building of the main theatre in the city,³ and arrived into an empty city centre, where people were running away from the windows of their two-storey Habsburg-style houses. Women and children of all ages were trying to avoid the chaos unleashed by the Soviet troops in their victorious passage. The young servants of the Hungarian merchants had been long gone to their parents in the countryside, leaving their small rooms empty. Teachers opened the school basements for their pupils, while the Catholic and Protestant priests gathered their parishioners within the walls of the medieval and baroque churches that quartered the old city centre. Men were hiding, frightened by the rumours that the civilians taken by the Red Army never returned home. Shopkeepers locked the doors of their stores in the main street of the city, only to see them smashed hours later by hungry soldiers.

The entry of the Soviet soldiers into the imposing halls of the university building triggered new fears for the fate of the intellectual elites. Built in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the process of expanding higher education in the peripheral provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the institution had been recast by the post-1918 Greater Romanian government as the University of Dacia Superior, becoming a crucial space for the production and assertion of Romanianness in the interwar period. During the Second World War, after Northern Transylvania had been ceded to Hungary at the Vienna Arbitration, the Romanian professors and students had fled as refugees to Sibiu, and the university had been renamed ‘Franz Joseph’ by the Hungarian war administration of the city. Thus, in October 1944, only the Hungarian professors greeted the representatives of the Soviet Army. In only a few months, the Romanian professorial body was going to come back and re-centre the cultural life of the Romanian elites around the university once again.

In order to stop the retreating Hungarian and German troops, the Soviet soldiers split. Some of them fought their way towards the western part of the city. They passed the central library of the university, and ran along the corridors of the clinics where the soldiers’ wounds were being tended. They headed West to check the Beer Factory for enemies and, according to oral accounts, depleted it of alcohol. Some of the soldiers crossed the river Someş/Számos into a marginal area inhabited by the Romanians around Donáth Street – a picturesque combination of poor hovels and affluent merchant houses.

Other Red Army soldiers left the city centre and followed the road towards Mănăştur on the outskirts of the city, and inhabited by the Romanians. Integrated in the city at the end of the nineteenth century, the former village of Mănăştur had quickly become one of the strongholds of Romanian nationalism. The suburbs had preserved their rural image, with two-room houses and huge gardens, well known for the smell of their roses in the summer, and with small pubs scattered everywhere in the neighbourhood, offering cheap homemade food and local wine to the Romanian students.

Another group of Soviet soldiers headed north, quickly advancing towards the train station, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing in June. They would have searched the enemies on the corridors of the beautiful Marianum Collegium, the best Catholic confessional school in Cluj, which was preparing girls from all over Transylvania for teaching and administrative jobs. They probably searched under the red velvet chairs of Urania Palace, the most luxurious cinema in the city, before climbing the Fortress hill, where the Habsburgs had erected a garrison in the eighteenth century. They spread over the neighbourhood where the richest Hungarian merchants had built their houses in the nineteenth century, only to soon be mirrored by the local Romanian elites across the city. On the other side of the Fortress hill, the Soviet soldiers descended the winding roads between the railway workers’ houses, with their low roofs and narrow yards.

As the Red Army approached the train station, the old synagogues in the area formerly dominated by Jewish population laid empty, silent witnesses to the deportation of almost twenty thousand Jews in the previous three years. The Jewish schools were now closed, some of them by the Romanian authorities in the late 1920s, some of them by the Horthyst administration during the war. Further to the north, the grounds of the Brick Factory had served as a ghetto for sixteen thousand Jews in 1944. The Soviet troops were going to find no more than eighty members of the Jewish community hidden by the local population in Cluj. Only fifteen hundred were going to come back from Auschwitz in the following years.

The soldiers left the central part of the city and rushed towards the north-east, beyond the railways, to get to the locally famous gardens of the hoştezeni, who were trying in vain to hide their food stuff.⁴ For the time being, the hoştezeni had to forget their rivalry with the mănăştureni for supplying the city with the best products, and postpone their pub fistfights with the Romanian boys who had the courage to court their sisters. Many of the Soviet soldiers who remained in Cluj after their comrades followed the road to Berlin were accommodated by the hoştezeni, whose families had better houses and ‘a lot of food and drinks to spare’. People would resent their presence, quickly labelling them as ‘barbarians’ in contrast with the ‘civilized’ and ‘polite’ Hungarian or German soldiers sheltered during the war.

During the war, the most important factories in the city had been organized for ‘passive defence’, with military and civil guards, and plans for the evacuation of the industrial equipment, which had accompanied a severe legislation regarding sabotage and stealing. Thus, in October 1944, many male workers were not at home, protecting the virtue of their wives and daughters from the Soviet soldiers, but in the factories. They were not fighting against the Red Army, but trying to prevent the dismantling of their industrial units by the Axis armies in retreat. As reported later by the newspapers, many workers resisted the Horthyst directives, which required the industrial equipment from the factories to be broken into pieces, and evacuated to Hungary.

This image of the workers defending their factories in front of the retreating Nazi armies was by no means unique. As shown by other scholars of Eastern and Central Europe, refusing to accept the dismantling of economic infrastructure was a powerful act of resistance of the workers from Zala County in Hungary or from Łódź in Poland. But in every case, this act was motivated by different forms of historical consciousness, and produced different effects. While the peasant-workers working in oil extraction in Zala acted from ‘a desire to protect the local community’⁵ and to return to the prewar ‘normality’ of American management and conservative politics, the workers in the industrial centre of Łódź explicitly articulated their resistance in terms of class struggle, but with a strong ethnic component. Like in Cluj (and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe), the factories in Łódź were ‘a world of hierarchy and deference’,⁶ which was articulated both in class terms and in ethnic ones. The anti-German and anti-Jewish feelings in Łódź were rooted in historically established hierarchies of work and property. With the spectacular decline in the number of German and Jewish workers in the city due to pogroms, population exchanges and expulsions, the Polish labourers experienced a new sense of entitlement and empowerment in the immediate postwar configuration. They claimed factories as theirs both as workers and as Poles, and engaged on a road that was supposed to lead to workers’ total control over their workplaces. The passionate relationship with materiality encapsulated in these stories of resistance in front of the Nazi soldiers was foundational for the postwar factory life in East Central Europe, but was directed towards different (indeed, opposed) goals: restoration of the prewar life and work for the people in Zala country, revolutionary trajectories and a new sense of entitlement for the workers in Łódź.

In Cluj, the (mostly Hungarian) workers resisted the dismantling of the factories by the Hungarian and German armies in retreat, in spite of their national and political loyalties. It is no wonder that the postwar temporary local administration repeatedly hailed workers’ political consciousness in front of war adversities. Nevertheless, their resistance can hardly be read as a sign of acceptance of the presence of the Red Army in the city, or as a sign of allegiance to whatever the new times would have brought forward. While the Soviet and the Romanian armies were approaching the city, the workers’ attempt to protect the industrial equipment embodied both the hope of a return to the prewar ‘normality’, and the hope that this normality would (re)produce the factories’ uncontested Hungarianness as experienced during the war. As this chapter will make transparent, it was impossible to disentangle control of the largest factories in the city – like János Herbák and the Railways Workshops – from the broader field of relationships in which the right to the city was negotiated.

The honour of protecting the factories with one’s life was reserved for only a few male Hungarian urban workers, who lived in the industrial neighbourhoods. During the following few years, their commitment was to be recognized in various instances, especially when housing, employment or wage categories were being negotiated in the dire postwar conditions. It would deepen the fractures between this layer of core workers and other social categories – especially rural unskilled workers – who were going to enter the factory gates in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While the workers in Cluj protected their workplaces, they never claimed the factories as theirs, and never explicitly questioned the owners’ property rights. Immediately after the front had moved westwards, workers’ councils were founded in every factory. They had a provisional character and the explicit function of maintaining production until the industrial units had been handed over to their owners, to their managers, or to the Office for the Management and Supervision of Enemy Assets [Casa de administrare şi supraveghere a bunurilor inamice – CASBI]. The workers did not see themselves as leaders of the factories but as their keepers until someone else – someone who was ‘entitled’ to govern them – came forward. Interviews, archives, and local memory are equally and tellingly silent about this moment, which has never been perceived by workers as an easily missed historical opportunity.

Fast forward almost four years, the fact that the workers in Cluj did not see themselves as entitled to claim property rights over the factories, the fleeing of the former owners abroad, and the culture of deference in the workplace were going to ensure a calm nationalization of industry. The nationalization of the means of production and of the financial system was officially announced on 11 June 1948 as an epochal fracture between the ‘dark times’ of capitalism and a bright future, which could be brought into the now through an act of political will. This incident-free, almost silent character of the nationalization gave it a momentary appearance, marked by the party propaganda as the materialization of the fundamental socialist promise: workers’ ownership of the means of production.

The eventful character of the nationalization has been unproblematically treated by the Romanian historiography as a change in property relations that essentially transformed the entire economic system in the second half of the twentieth century.⁷ Nonetheless, the takeover of the factories was going to involve more than a legal act, and it affected a much broader field of social relations. This chapter will show why the nationalization cannot be understood simply as dispossession but as a complicated battle for the transformation of the factories into productive state apparatuses. It was this battle that was going to set the parameters for the long-term evolution of industrial socialism.

My perspective on this historical moment can be summarized in several points. First, the nationalization of industry needs to be seen against the background of a broader field of local relations in which the factories were embedded. In Cluj, this relational field was crucially shaped by the entanglement between class and ethnicity, against which the right to the city was negotiated. Second, nationalization cannot be understood as a radical fracture, but as a necessary step in a broader process of assuming control of the factories, which started immediately after the arrival of the Red Army and lasted for many years after 1948. Third, creating the factories as political spaces and simultaneously keeping them under control as productive spaces proved to be a difficult game to play for the new economic executives. And fourth, in the process, life itself – workers’ bodies and their possibilities of survival – was firmly established as the political terrain on which the productive core of socialist industrialization was going to be negotiated for decades.

This chapter explores the nationalization of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword. What Was the Plan? And What Was It Meant to Do?
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. PRIMITIVE SOCIALIST ACCUMULATION IN CLUJ
• II. TIME AND ACCUMULATION ON THE SHOP FLOOR
• Epilogue. Really Existing Socialism as Nonsynchronicity
• Bibliography
• Index