Systematization

Systematization was Ceausescu's policy to do away with up to half the country's villages and move the rural population into larger centres. The concept was first developed by Nikita Krushchev in the Soviet Union in 1951, to combat the movement of younger people to the towns by amalgamating villages to raise the standard of rural life. Similar plans were put forward in Hungary, and in 1967 Ceausescu reorganized Romania's local government system and announced a scheme to do away with up to 6300 villages and replace them with 120 new towns and 558 agro-industrial centres.

His declared aim (based on an original idea in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto ) was "to wipe out radically the major differences between towns and villages; to bring the working and living conditions of the working people in the countryside closer to those in the towns", by herding people together into apartment buildings so that "the community fully dominates and controls the individual", and thus produce Romania's "new socialist man". Thankfully the project was forgotten while Ceausescu was preoccupied by other prestige projects such as the Danube-Black Sea Canal and Bucharest's Centru Civic, but he relaunched it in March 1988, when he was becoming obsessed with increasing exports and paying off the national debt.

Since collectivization Romania's agricultural output had declined steadily, and this on fertile land with one of the longest growing seasons in Europe. In 1985 the minuscule private sector produced 29 percent of the country's fruit, 14 percent of its meat and almost 20 percent of its milk. Ceausescu was determined to revolutionize agriculture by increasing the growing area, while also further increasing centralization and reducing the scope and incentive for individual initiative. While the peasants had previously been able to support themselves with their own livestock, there was to be no accommodation for animals in the new block s . To add insult to injury the peasants were to receive derisory compensation for their demolished homes and then be charged rent.

The model development was to be the Ilfov Agricultural Sector , immediately north of Bucharest, where the first evictions and demolitions took place in August 1988; only two or three days' notice was given before shops were closed down and bus services stopped, forcing the people out of the designated villages. Entire villages were removed to blocks in Otopeni and Ghermanesti, where up to ten families had to share one kitchen and the sewage system had not been completed. At the same time the villagers of Buda and Ordoreanu, just south of Bucharest on the Arges River, were removed to Bragadiru to make way for a reservoir for the proposed Bucharest-Danube Canal. In other villages across the nation, ugly concrete Civic Centre buildings began to appear in the centres of the planned New Towns.

Repairs were banned in all the doomed villages and on all single-storey buildings, but these regulations were interpreted differently by the various counties ( judets ). In Maramures, the authorities, aware that greater distances to the agricultural land would be a disadvantage, allowed repair work on outlying farms and also permitted attics to count as a second storey. In the Banat, efforts were made to attract migrants to houses left by emigrating Schwabs, although these should have been demolished.

There was widespread condemnation of this scheme which was set to uproot half of the rural populace; in August 1988 the Cluj academic Doina Cornea , one of the country's few open dissidents, wrote an open letter (published in the West) in protest, pointing out that the villages, with their unbroken folk culture, are the spiritual centre of Romanian life, and that to demolish them would be to "strike at the very soul of the people". She was soon placed under house arrest, but the campaign abroad gathered pace.

Although the Hungarian view that the plan was an attack on their community was widely accepted, it does seem clear that Ceausescu's aim was indeed a wholesale attack on the rural way of life.

Approximately eighteen villages had suffered major demolitions by the end of 1989, when the scheme was at once cancelled by the FSN; new buildings are going up all over the country, and those people uprooted by Ceausescu's scheme are returning to the sites of their villages and starting all over again

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