Monica Vasile

‘Romanian transformations in forest property and forestry institutions: a glimpse to the past?’
Talk for Conference “The end of transition”2009 Aarhus Denmark

It is probably common knowledge by now in anthropology that the concept of transition contains

many pitfalls, many implicit assumptions which in fact are not coherent with grassroots realities,

but rather exist in order to create a specific image of postsocialist societies. Anthropologists of

postsocialism were very productive in unpacking the freight of ‘transition’ processes, so as to

show what really changes at the level of the state (Verdery, Humphrey) and of rural communities

(Creed), how these changes bare the burden of socialist legacies or how they articulate with new

capitalist demands and initiatives. They also paid attention to the imaginings of transition, to

narratives about change, to fears and hopes (Creed).

Colorful images of the transition in public debates included: “shock therapy”, where Western

advisers are doctors who will administrate pills such as market economy, privatization, civil

society formation, to the ill socialist states; “Big-Bang”, where Western advisers take the

hyperbolized role of God; an image created by a Romanian prime minister is “the tunnel” and the

light which awaits at the end; “return to normality” (Rausing). All these images contain a certain

teleological reference to the “end”, to what this end of transition looks like: the medical metaphor

suggests the end as a healthy capitalist body, nevertheless the same body, which bears signs of its
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socialist preexistence; the big-bang suggests a complete rebirth with the erase of all preexistence;

the tunnel suggests the present as blind, but the recognition of the end when it is seen; the return

to normality suggests socialism as an deviation which takes us back to the same point.

In the whole construction of the transition concept temporalities appear as very important. What

temporalities are taken into account and how are they manipulated on this public agenda? The

future as the end of transition, as the goal of evolution, progress and development, is the most

‘visible’ and discussed. All these highlight not current developments but an

expectation, a telos. (Verdery 1996: 227). The present is somewhat volatile; present has to be

lived according to a plan which takes us to the future, and it has to be lived precisely for the sake

of the future. The socialist past is almost a black-hole which we don’t want to remember. Unlike

socialism, the more distant past, the period just before socialism has a role to play in the

transition process. Mostly, it has the role to form the object of ‘restoration’ and ‘restitution’; it is

used as to feed the symbols of undoing socialist wrongs through privatization or restituting

historical memories.

What about temporalities of transition in the anthropological works? How do anthropologists

make sense of the processes they describe in temporal terms? Is it an evolution? Is it stagnation or

return to an old order? Moreover, how do studied people themselves perceive the temporalities of

transition, as reflected in scholarly work?

To compose an image of what future will look like, meaning to predict, is not among

anthropologists’ favorite enterprise. Analyzing actual processes both in the East and in the West,

anthropologists account for uncertain transition ends, uncertain futures. They acknowledge the

inexistence of a unique capitalist pattern to be called the “end of transition” and furthermore, they

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acknowledge the legacies which make for expecting an unexpected outcome of the articulation of

postsocialist societies with capitalist forces. Particular hybrids are described, as a capitalism

domesticated with socialism, like in Gerald Creed’s book. In temporal terms, anthropology even

speaks of stagnation into socialist times, about actual change not even being at the horizon in

1999, or about a reversion to socialism (Burawoy and Verdery 1999: 2), or even a reversion to

the period before socialism. This reversion is often referred to as repeasantisation (Creed;

Mihaylova 2006 Emotions) or as a return to autarky and domestic production for large masses of

rural population.

People themselves, despite the public talks, seem not to embark on a developmentalist discourse,

but rather to be tired of living for the future in the perpetual transitions paradigm (Creed) and to

perceive return to a “primitive past” as in the case of Pomaks described by Mihaylova (2006).

Bringing into play the “primitive past” is appealing to me, so I will develop it a bit further

throughout the literature and then get to my own fieldwork.

Transition period was compared to returning to the prerevolutionary time in Russia (Burawoy and

Kratov 1993), because of the merchant capital that is developing to the disadvantage of

production; alliance of commercial-like new Russian managers and organs of political control is

seen as similar to the alliance between merchant capital and feudal dominant classes, which

drives transition even further in the past, right into feudalism.

The analogy with feudalism is only suggested by Humphrey in 1991 with reference to Russia and

taken further by Verdery in 1996. They reject completely the automatic presumption that what is

happening in the former socialist bloc is a transition to markets and capitalism, by pointing out to

the “parcellization of sovereignty”, or “privatization of power”, in the form of local suzerainties.

It is argued that personalism and patronage was reinforced as forms of localized resource

protection (Verdery 1996: 206) by local ‘lords’, together with returning to a demonetized, natural

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economy which gave way for barter to reach “epic proportions”. In folk formulations from

Romania, this privatization of power was named mafia, as Verdery gives an evocative quotation

from her informants “We’re in transition from socialism to constitutional mafia” (idem: 217).

Hence, we can see how the presupposed end of transition, both in anthropologists’ works and in

folk interpretations, has multiple possible faces. The very teleological sense of the concept allows

for endless allegations about what transition is not and about how postsocialist societies look like

anything but capitalism.

A playful way to underline this difference is to draw similarities with other historical stages, in

the way I have tried to summarize above.

Humphrey suggests that these historical analogies do not actually improve our understanding of

what is in fact a very erratic change (1999: 20), but they are important as long as people

themselves use them in their representations about the transition; thus, these images might

inform social and economic action. – and this is the key to my argument.

What I will do next is to untangle the ways in which the past plays an important role in the

privatized forests of Romania. I will show how present practices resemble those of the past and

how people perceive themselves this resemblance – which further informs their claims and in the

end, their actions. In this way I attempt to explain how the outcome of this transformation is far

from its envisaged form because the past plays its parts in many guises.

Land privatization in Romania and Bulgaria was very much phrased in terms like restitution and

restoration and utilized as a symbol for undoing the wrongs of communism, for doing historical

justice. This image also corresponded with the real process of privatization, as land was

privatized within historical boundaries and not through an allocation /distribution process (as in

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Albania, Hungary or Chehoslovakia cf. Swain 2000). This meant that where possible and

convenient, people were supposed to receive land in the amount and boundaries of former plots,

as they appear on documents from 1945.

While privatization of arable land and decollectivization received a high amount of attention from

anthropologists of postsocialism, this is not the case with forests, which entangle a rather

different discussion.

Forest privatization meant devolvement into the hands of collective actors, such as communities,

60% of the total restitution resulted in collectively owned forests, in diverse forms. 24 % of the

Romanian forests, which are in associative forms, are nowadays owned and managed in a way

that resembles medieval Europe’s commons, forms of property widely acknowledged as

belonging to the past, to a sort of precapitalist order, or, where they still exist, as survivals, as

markers of underdevelopment and ‘primitivism’. So privatization meant changing hands from the

almighty state to smaller collective units. And, just on top of all these anti liberal reforms, the

state does not allow any kind of trade with these woodlands.

My fieldwork was in a region (Vrancea, in the Oriental SubCarpathians) where these collective

units overlap with the unit of the village.

Forests in the background

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Here we find the obstea, an institution who symbolically confounds itself with the whole village

gathered to administer its common property. The obstea is a juridical entity, different from the

municipality, who holds the property title and an administrative elected structure to run the

allocation of wood shares and the business of timber commodification from which the

community infrastructure will be improved. Theoretically, everything must be decided in the

obstea with the approval of the village assembly, meaning a genuine participative democracy.

Members have equal shares and rights are mainly acquired by virtue of residence.

Just to give you an image of the region, it is not very developed in terms of infrastructure, no

public utilities like running water. Communities are dependent upon jobs in forestry; there is no

space and soil for agriculture, thus autarky is not feasible. On the long historical run, they seem to

be quite an opportunistic population, trying to improvise in order to make their living in harsh

environmental conditions. Before communism the region was inhabited by free peasants who

paid a tribute to the ruler and enjoyed several privileges which made it look like an

semiautonomous region, like a peasant republic (Cantemir, 1998 [1716]: 184). It was quite

particular in the medieval social landscape of Romania. They were raising cattle in the forest and

going to the plains in summer with their oxen to work on large landholdings as free laborers.

After 1840, when markets developed around the country, they were trading wood for grains in a

local market.

The villages were not collectivized during

socialism, but in two villages there were brigades

for animal husbandry and in other four forestry

enterprises, which concentrated a lot of waged

activities.

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So, one way or the other, forest was the mainly source of livelihood during all historical stages.

Concerning the present…

Not only the property form reconstitutes an ancient order, but also many other aspects are likely

to send us back into the past, either the medieval past or the most recent beginning of 20th

century:

It is said that the statutory rules of today are just a translation of the old rules in more modern

terms. This is actually only partly true, because the old statutes were slightly different in each

village; nevertheless, one of these constitute the model of what we have today.

The village assemblies resemble perfectly the description of gatherings in village communities

from medieval Europe or Russia for solving conflicts: an example from northern Russia, from

1870s, offers an image of what was normally going on: “Anyone could attend and speak. there

was much small-group discussion; people spoke at the same time, freely interrupted one another,

and engaged in heated arguments accompanied by the usual insults and epithets, […] so that the

meeting was often reduced to a confused, unintelligible din.” (Blum 1971: 555) Similarly, reports

from 18th century France told about violent outbreaks, and of tumultuous sessions at which the

loudest and most belligerent persons often won the day.

There is also another striking analogy which troubles the minds of my villagers: in the second

half of the 19th century, when capitalism begun to show in this part of the world, these forests

were devastated by foreign timber companies, ruled by several Austrian and Hungarian nobles

(barons and counts) in coalition with corrupt local elites. On this model, local entrepreneurs

begun to set up sawmills or to intermediate small-scale trade. Guess what is happening now?

Well, forests are again devastated, not by foreign, but by local companies and entrepreneurs

which qualify for the etiquette of “local barons”, recreating the fiefdoms or suzerainties that

Humphrey was talking about. In this case, because Vrancea was a region of free villages, which

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did not fully look like ‘feudalism’, these suzerainties were put in place only by capitalism, then

and now.

Local „Barons“

Not only an ethnographic approach can dig these similarities out, but people themselves deploy

and use them in different ways.

There is not a uniform way in which the past is brought to the present to make claims. Some of

the villagers use the socialist past in a nostalgic way, in order to perceive that the transition is

worse in the sense that is leading to disorganizing waged labor, arguments probably well known

from other ethnographies of postsocialism.

There is one very interesting category of people who show a very good recollection of the past

before communism and who usually take this past as a reference point in their comparisons with

the present. Who are these people? They are the better off category, but in a traditional sense,

meaning owners of land and cattle, inherited from their parents, not to be confounded with newer

entrepreneurs. These people also show to be the most involved in the participation process,

although usually on the opposition side; so they have a heavy word in the process. And I will

show that what keeps them involved is not the economic reason, but precisely an influence of

their sensitivity for the past.

They show a particular sympathy for privatization of forests as an act of justice, of reestablishing

a rightful order which is characteristic and vital for the area for centuries. For them the past is a

golden age, socialism is a catastrophe and the present is positive on the symbolic side, but

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negative on the economic side; they express this paradox like “our forest does not belong to us”,

in the sense that they feel attached to it ‘it is ours’, but the corrupts deplete it.

They somehow expect from the transformation to lead them back to where they were before

communism. Of course this expectation entails a certain idealization of the past, they sublimate

the evils and come up with an image of absolute freedom – freedom of trade, freedom of

withdrawal, freedom of speech. These conditions are no longer met, rules of withdrawal are more

strict, small-scale trade is no longer allowed and also not profitable anymore. On top of these

they see how the new local entrepereurchiks get richer from their forest. When I challenged them

by saying ‘well, in the past you had these bad guys too’ they responded that back then there was

also more freedom to use the force, and force was with the people. And this is actually true, there

are several cases where the corrupt elites were beaten up and the abuses stopped.

I will try now to draw from this briefly presented ethnography the mechanisms through which the

past influences the course of action and thus, the outcome of the transformation process: First, the

privatization in itself is seen as a good thing because it brings back the just historical order of

forest property being attached to these communities as a sign of freedom. This and other

perceived similarities create an expectation of things to resemble the past in all dimensions. But

this is not happening. Expectations were soon to crash. Thus, people develop claims based on

their images and precisely in the name of history and justice. And, by taking action they have the

power to influence the rules-making process and the management. There are some striking cases

where they do not succeed in the battle with well connected local barons, who in the meantime

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got incredibly rich. However, it is important that battles, opposition and debate occur just because

a handful of people have this image of the past that does not live them alone.

For them, the end of transition is probably a lost battle, because elements from capitalism and

socialism do not allow traveling back in time.

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