Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

Contrasting/Conflicting Identitiesson, many considered communism an anomaly from the first encounter withthe Soviet regime, in 1940, when they saw that the poorest peasants wereappointed in the local soviets.62 The same view as that expressed by my informants was recorded by B.N.Chicherin, who served in a zemstvo in the province of Tambov. “We treat thepeasant deputies as equals, ... but for the most part they remained silent spectators.We ... asked their opinions on matters which they knew intimately andwhich closely concerned their vital interests; but it was rare that one of themwould get up by himself to speak. The main significance was that they were witnessesto what went on in the meeting and could vote for those whom theytrusted. They could report to the population that affairs in the zemstvo wereconducted with complete justice, not only without prejudice to the peasants,but with careful attention to their needs and interests.” This fragment wastranslated and published in Martin McCauley and Peter Waldron, The Emergenceof the Modern Russian State, 1855-81 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press,1988), p. 70.63 In this respect, Anton Golopenþia’s study of a Bessarabian village from Orheicounty, Cornova, is very relevant. In the late 1930s, the traditional hierarchy,although abolished by the Romanian state, was still respected by the older villagers.From the medieval times there were three estates: dvorenii, mazilii, andthe peasants. The system was preserved under the Russian administration,which put each estate under a different authority, and also added some additionalestates. Golopenþia’s essay was first published in 1988 in Agora, a Romanianreview for alternative culture published in the United States, long afterthe author’s death in a communist prison. See Anton Golopenþia, “Un satBasarabean” (A Bessarabian village), Agora 2 (1988), pp. 255-271. It wasreprinted in Golopenþia and Georgescu, 60 de sate româneºti, pp. I-X.64 The zemstvo-system was abolished in December 1918, but the Romanian institutionstook over its attributions only gradually. For the administrative integrationof Bessarabia into Greater Romania, see Svetlana Suveicã, “Integrareaadministrativã a Basarabiei în România, 1918-1925” (The administrative integrationof Bessarabia into Romania, 1918-1925), in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie“A. D. Xenopol” 36 (1999), pp. 125-145.65 It is also interesting to add that these people, most of whom were coming fromthe Old Kingdom, were seen as an alien anthropological type, since they weremostly dark-haired, while the locals were fair-haired.66 In villages, the only state representatives were the teacher and the priest. Thetax-collector and the policeman, as well as the notary, were appointed only atthe level of communes, which, usually, comprised several villages.67 The tactic of some tax-collectors was to take the money without giving anyreceipt, claiming that anyway the peasants were not able to read it, or to givea receipt for less money than they were receiving. In this way, they could comeand ask the peasants to pay the same tax again. For instance, in Alexãndreni,the case of the tax collector Novac was notorious. A peasant who got angrybecause Novac asked for the same tax a third time, and threw him out violently,was denounced by the corrupted clerk and had to go to court for more thana decade to clear himself. The policeman asked from the allegedly guilty peasanta sum equivalent to the price of three cows only for not using the chains175