The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) is a non-profit organization created in 1978 to develop and sustain long-term, high-quality programs for post-doctoral research on the social, political, economic, environmental, and historical development of Eurasia and Central and Eastern Europe.   More

Latest NCEEER Working Papers Released

Abusive Cadres in a Voracious Party-State: Romanian Collectivization in the 1950s

Katherine Verdery, Graduate Center, CUNY

The first phase of Romania's communization—the ascent of the Communist Party to power—took place between 1944 (when it gained a toehold in government coalitions) and 1948, by which time it had fully consolidated its position over other political formations, thanks to the Soviet Army, and could begin implementing its agenda. Near the top of the list was collectivization of agriculture—a mammoth task, given that over 75% of the entire population was employed in that sector. To accomplish this, Party leaders developed a number of technologies, including propaganda, food requisitions, various methods of "persuasion," fomenting class warfare, and outright brutality. All of them were highly labor-intensive, requiring Party cadres to interact closely with individuals and households in Romania's many rural settlements. They required, in brief, a sizable and well-trained apparatus of cadres.

The 70th Anniversary of the Moscow Canal

Cynthia A. Ruder, University of Kentucky

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the Moscow Canal and the Stalin Waterworks. Together they supply between sixty and eighty percent of all potable water to metropolitan Moscow. Critical to this new direction was the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Moscow Canal, an event that revealed the tensions that still exist vis-a-vis the very meaning of the Canal itself: the continuing struggle between those who would rather ignore the past for the sake of the future and those who believe that forgetting the past will doom Russia to repeat it. This, then, is an account of how Russia feted the Moscow Canal and how that celebration attempted to reconcile these opposing tendencies.