The birth of a new elite: Transylvania (1945-1953) ABSTRACT Goals and objectives The present research has the

goal to investigate the foundation of the new class in Transylvania, choosing four counties which seemed representative to us. Our research focused primarely on the communist political elite at the local evel, on the party apparatus and the party elite. Thus we deliberately chose the term of communist political elite avoiding that of nomenklatura which most scholars consider to include all important positions in a communist regime (party, state, military, etc.) Various issues related to the sovietization process and the build-up of a new political elite in Transylvania have been aproached here. Related to the organisational process, this study is divided into two parts: the 1945-1947 period, defined by the urge to quickly build-up a party network in the territory and to enroll a large number of new party members, as RCP was quasiinexistent in the interwar era. During 1948-1953, the Party entered the so-called institutionalization phase, an attempt to increase the Party coherence and its ideological identity. What was characteristic for this interval was an increased attention for selection, the intensification of ideological instruction for the rank and file and especially the party elite. The most important events were the great purges form the 1948 and 1952-1953. Their impact was devastating within the communist party elite in Transylvania, as our research indicates, and we have tried to underline this particular aspect. Other topics approached by the current study are the criterias and selection methods employed in establishing a local party apparatus, the inter-ethnical tensions existent within the Transylvanian organizations of the Romanian Communist Party the first years after the war, the specific organizational issues the party met with in trying to build up a network of party organizations and, last but not least, we have tried to sketch the common features of the portrait of the local party apparatchik in an attempt to grasp the sociological ground and psychological profile of those who were the spearhead of the process of transforming Romania into a communist country of the Eastern Block

The concept of elite. The employment of the concept in the research Communist regimes pretended to have abolished the class oppression and to have founded the first society in which all individuals and society groups shared equality. Communist ideology and propaganda strongly opposed the idea of elite, especially when talking about their own regimes. The works of Lenin however, the founding father of real communism, include a genuine elitist approach, especially his famous article What is to be done? in which he presents his ideas about the party organization as the elite vanguard. The elite studies played an important role in understanding communist regimes. Elite studies and researches on the state-society relationship followed the first investigations on communist regimes. Once established that in the USSR and Eastern Europe communist regimes did not abolish hierarchy and differences of social status, scholars attention focused on the new elite. Who were these people? Which were the criteria for their selection? In which way those communist elites differed from the western political elites? In this field, the best contributors were people coming from East European countries, many of them former important communist officials: Milovan Djilas, Pavel Cmpeanu, Michael Voslensky. Their reserches present some similar conclusions: the class struggle has not disappeared in communist regimes; moreover in all of these states can be found a dominant class, whose power and dominance surpasses by far the influence of any power elite known in the history of humankind. This new class is formed by those who detain key-positions in the party and state apparatus at central and local level. The established term for the communist elite is nomenklatura, the original meaning being exactly that of list of important positions. Concerning our study, we have tried to identify wich part of the county and which regional party organization can be considered to be the elite. We have employed two main criterias in defining the elite: one was that of the political scientist Giovanni Sartori, who defined the elite as the decison-makers. The other is the Russian historian Michael Voslenski, author of a book on the nomenklatura, for which the elite of communist regimes was formed by those with access to a set of special privileges, forbbiden tot the rest of the population or even the other members of the party. Considering this, we decided to focus on the political bureaus of the regional and county party organizations, the sections of the county and regional commitees of the party, the political bureaus of the cities and of the countryside departments. Some of the sections of the county commitee were most important and those in charge benefited from a far more important power and

influence: the Organizational Section, the Section in charge with the leading staff in the party and state organization, the Propaganda Section, and especially the Cadre Section, which played the role of the party inner political police. The party apartchiks that worked within these strucures fulfill both of the criterias mentioned before: access to important decisions and to privileges. They no longer had to work and received a salary as political actives of the party, for the politicalideological tasks asigned to them. The salary was not so important in itself (altough it was considerably bigger than that of a hard-working proletarian), but was important for what it symbolised: the promotion into the select group of professional revolutionaries, to quote Lenin. Criterias and methods of selection The political elites of communist totalitarian regimes have some distinctive criterias and methods of selection, compared to liberal democracies. Perhaps the most specific are those that the candidate to a position in the party cannot influence anymore, but are nevertheless very important: his social origin and his political past. These are very important for the communist regimes and are the first signs that the new political elite is not a meritocracy. The candidate to a position inside the party had to prove first a healthy social origin and an uncompromising past. These were the very first aspects checked by the Cadre Section existent in every local branch of the party. One had to have a clean past, with no involvement in previous political activities or other political parties. All of his friends and relatives had to be politically trustworthy, as he could not belong to a family of exploiters or class-enemies. The healty social orgin was extremly important. If someones parents The activity one had inside the party was essential for ones promotion. The candidate had to prove active and conscientious in completing the party task. The notion of party work or party tasks changed their meaning in time. In the first years, when the party struggled to get organized, party work meant organizational work and recruiting as many new members as possible. After 1948, in the purge era, party work meant primarily vigilance towards class enemies steeled inside the party and unmasking the traitors. The ideological educational background was another important element for an aspirant to a party career. Ideally, every party aparatchik placed in a leadership position had to pass through a Party superior school The tefan Gheorghiu Party University, or a county party school of three or six months. The purpose was to enhance members loyalty towards the party by providing them with the Partys vision on political, economical and social life. Students were compelled to

thoroughly appropriate the official interpretation of facts, any deviation being promptly punished. Ideology was present everywhere, in every subject, a Stalinist, primitive interpretation of Marxism. While during 1945-1947 the party ideological education undergoes a phase of improvisation, as does the entire RCP organizational work, after 1948 things tend to settle down and to present a more systematic aspect. At the local level efforts to organise a cadre school are visible starting with the year 1945. Considering the content, the prestige conferred to the student and the possible position within the party hierarchy one could occupy after graduation, the local party schools can be divided into inferior and superior. In the first category we find the disscusion clubs of political events, the night schools, the study clubs concerned with the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the biographies (or better said, hagiographies) of Lenin and Stalin. Their lives were seen as the ideal model which had to be emulated. To put it into the words of party document: Studying his biography, they can learn from the wonderful life of comrade Stalin to be devoted until the end to the cause of the working class, to sacrifice everything for its victory, to hate and to be merciless with the class enemy, to be vigilent, to be a model in their work and private life. The purpose of this type of courses was not so much to produce a new rulling elite, but to consolidate the level of indoctrination. Their content was made of general ideological issues with courses such as: Capitalism, Imperialism, The new democracy, The class struggle, etc The nursery of the future politcal elite in the counties were the party schools of three and six months. Here were trained department chiefs, instructors and activists of the regional and county commitees and bureaux of the party. They went through a very severe verification of their past and social origin, they had to be very experienced in party internal problems, to have proved an absolute loyalty and dedication to the party. All the important departments of the county organization had to collaborate in elaborating the list of candidates: the Organizational Section, the Cadre Section and the Propaganda Section. Their proposal and the subsequent raports on the candidates were submitted to the County Party Commitee, and were discussed in the Political Bureau sessions. Because the above mentioned institutions were supposed to form the local political elite, the candidates had to be taught basic economy and administrative management concepts beside the usual ideological material. Most of them had no previous managerial experience, and some were semi-illiterate. Because of these reasons, in these party schools were taught courses such as:

Economic problems in Romania. The economic development of the country, Current economical problems. The monetary reform, or The Government, Parliament, and administrative structure of our country, the interim commissions. That does not mean ideological indoctrination was absent here. On the contrary, every subject of the curriculum was saturated with marxismleninism, the latter being seen as the foundation of any kind of knowledge and the guiding line for every particular problem. (1945-1947) Improvisation and organizational dificulties The Romanian Communist Party (RCP) never had any experience in legal politics until 1944, not to speak about governing experience. RCP became the main governing force on 6th March 1945 due to Moscow pressures, but it had practically no support from the population, compared to the National Peasant Party, liberals or even social-democrats. As the Romanian historian Victor Frunz put it, RCP was at that time a head in search of a body, that being its greatest paradox: it was in power but it didnt exist! So, in this first phase a rapid increase of members number and the establishment of party organizations everywhere in the country were stressed, to the detriment of the rigorous selection-process. One of the main concerns of the party was to wash off its interwar image as a party of foreigners alined to the national interest. During the interwar era the RCP was dominated by the etnical minorities, while Romanians, the majority of the population, were a minority within the party ranks. In Transylvania, and thus in our study area, communists were confronted with an additional problem: the dificulty to buildup a majority of workers which had to be also representative of the ethnical majority, the Romanians. Inter-ethnical conflicts were also a sensitive problem those years. RCP wanted to change its interwar image of a party of strangers, where national minorities prevailed over the Romanians. A right national composition as well as a social one (a majority of workers) was demanded by the local party branches. But in Transylvania, especially in the big cities, this proved to be a difficult task. The majority of qualified workers were Hungarian. To have a majority of workers and simultaneously a Romanian majority in the main Transylvanian cities was almost an unsolvable dilemma. In counties like Cluj or Bihor, this problem wasnt solved until 1947 or even later, as the Romanians continued to represent a minority. Meanwhile, inter-ethnical conflicts aroused, as the Vienna dictate was still fresh in the memory of many Transylvanians. Those conflicts were presented in the communist press as taking

place between democratic forces and fascist, reactionary gangs, but in fact they were clashes between Romanians and Hungarians, and had an ethnical substratum. The incidents occurring in Cluj during the spring of 1946 were presented as disorders caused by reactionary forces, but they turned out to be street fights between Romanian students of the King Ferdinand University and Hungarian workers from the Dermata factory. The first two years (1945-1946) were the most representative of the early period of the RCP in power. Organizational issues were specific for this interval, especially at the local level. Because RCP never had any experience as a legal party, many difficulties arose, and local party branches were constantly criticized by the center for their lack of organizational efficiency. The situation of the local party elite can be labelled as very unstable during this period, as county party activists were very frequently changed, in an endeavor to improve the party power structures. An area in which the party particularly lacked control and authority was the countryside. The party organizations were very weak there and escaped the county center control many times. But all in all, these years were a golden opportunity for career-hunters in the party and for promotion in important posts, as the RCP desperately needed to quickly build a local party elite. The year 1947 is somewhat different, as a more rigorous selection-process started now. Although the admission rate remained high, there were efforts to improve the selection of party members and especially the party aparatchiks. In March 1947 the party regionals were abolished in an attempt to strengthen the Central Committee control over the county party branches. As the party domination over the Romanian politics became unmatched, RCP attempted to increase the level of discipline in its ranks. (1948-1953) Monolitic phase and institutionalization process Starting with the second part of 1947 Romania enters what Hugh-Seton-Watson called the monolithic phase of the Sovietization process. The RCP becomes the sole occupant of the Romanian political scene in 1948. As there were no further threats to the partys absolute power, the program of massive recruitments of 1945-1947 is stopped. Instead, the party goes through a process of organizational consolidation and institutionalization. Several purges occur, the center control is enhanced and strict norms are elaborated in an attempt to enhance the party cohesion. At the same time the party starts a purifying process of the old society, the party elite playing the major part. Kenneth Jowitt, another scholar concerned with Romanian communism, defined this

interval as the institutionalization period, employing a concept used by Nelson Polsby: As an organization institutionalizes, it stabilizes its membership, entry is more difficult and turnover is less frequent. The marked absence of elite coherence was matched by a high degree of incoherence in the Party membership. At the end of 1947 the RCP was a highly eterogenous organism, whose members had an infinity of reasons and motivations to join the party. Some of them were merely opportunists who wanted to be with the strongest; others were ex-members of the fascist organizations like the Iron Guard and thought they would be safe in the Party; others sought for material and career advantages. After 1948 the party tried to homogenize this multipuzzled body by the classical Stalinist method: the purge. The Romanian society suffers now radical changes. The soviet model is imposed everywhere: in education, justice, economical development and in the state-church relationship. The documents we found in the county party archives prove the decisive role of the local party elite in this process. It is a proof that the transformation of the Romanian society into a communist one was not the result of the laws of history or of the oppressed masses class struggle, but of the actions of a small elite with enormous power who didnt consult the people or even the rank and file party members. Thus, the 11th June 1948 nationalization was completed in our four counties by the party aparatchiks, the secret of the action being kept until the last moment. The main task of the local party cadre was to identify and act against any kind of resistance the old society managed to put up to fight the partys transformation project. At the same time, a purging campaign started in the party ranks. Between 1948-1950 a great verification process occurred, a fifth of the party members (192.000) being purged. The campaign intended to make the party more credible as an institution, to get rid of those who entered the party seeking for a shelter, or to pursue their own interests. Finally, the remaining members had to feel that they belonged to an elite, to a well disciplined and organized power structure. The verification campaign had a strong impact upon the local party elite. Many aparatchiks were removed from their posts, some of them even expelled from the party, as a compromising past was discovered. For example, in June 1949, 50% of the Cluj county party officials were removed, most of them distributed in posts of less importance, and only some of them expelled. But the 1948-1950 verification meant also a wonderful career opportunity for many members and small activists who replaced the purged ones. At the end of the verification campaign, the local power structures (party, state apparatus, etc.) became even more extended, thus enhancing their

bureaucratic character. The purges continued throughout the entire period (1948-1953), with a new climax during the year 1952. At that moment the power struggle reached the top of the party hierarchy. The Moscow group of Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu was defeated in this conflict by Gheorghiu-Dej and its henchmen. They were accused of being right deviationists who tried to divert the party from the Marxist-Leninist way. They were stripped of their party positions, Vasile Luca was even incarcerated and died in prison. This power struggle had important consequences at the local level, as a new purging campaign started. Right deviationists had to be found everywhere, in every county, and presented as traitors in front of the party organizations. In Transylvania significant purges occurred inside the party elite, especially in the county of Arad where several district-secretaries were expelled, and a very severe purge was unleashed. After Stalins death a certain relaxation could be noticed inside the party. The accent wasnt put anymore on vigilance towards the class enemy but on collective decisions and democracy inside the party. The party elite became now more stable and less vulnerable to radical events. Conclusions The specificity of the communist political elite in Romania was greatly influenced by the Communist Party history and its lack of democratic traditions. The Romanian Communist Party never went through any kind of reformist/revisionist experience as the communist parties from Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary did. As the majority of its members belonged to the national minorities during the interwar era, the party strove hard to prove itself national when in power. When the Moscow control became less strict, the nationalist path was chosen to the detriment of the reformist one, in order to provide the RCP legitimacy. Thus, the Romanian Communist Party remained purely Stalinist, until the collapse of communism.