Land Reform in Romania, 1945 – Motives and Consequences

This paper is dealing with the issue of the land reform adopted in 1945 in Romania under certain specific circumstances, generated by the post-war turmoil, the need of rural population for land property, and the political ambitions of the coalition government. In the mirror of press sources and unpublished archival documents, we analyze the political background of the land reform process, its social environment and through relevant case-studies, its consequences on a local level. The role of this current article is to present through a large variety of representative case-studies a general, yet comprehensive image of the reform, and its immediate consequences on local, regional and national level. Most of the sources are unpublished materials from the Archives, which were consulted for the first time by the author of this article. The paper proves that the most important winner of the whole reform process, adopted in a moment of turmoil, based on social considerations rather than economic ones, was the Romanian Communist Party, which through the work of its allies obtained a certain level of popularity. Even so, this conjuncture gain was not enough to assure majority in elections for the parties of the political left, which led to electoral fraud in 1946.

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