Description
Book SynopsisSubverting Communism in Romania explores the role of law in everyday life and as a mechanism for social change during early communism in Romania. Mihaela Serban focuses on the regime's attempts to extinguish private property in housing through housing nationalization and expropriation. This study of early communist law illustrates that law is never just an instrument of state power, particularly over the long term and from a ground up perspective. Even during its most totalitarian phase, communist law enjoyed a certain level of autonomy at the most granular level and consequently was simultaneously a space of state power and resistance to power. The book draws from archives recently made available in Romania, which have opened up new perspectives for understanding a mundane yet crucial part of the modern human experience: one's home and the institution of private property that often sustains it.
Trade ReviewIn Subverting Communism in Romania: Law and Private Property 1945-1965 Mihaela Şerban makes a compelling argument that communist legality in socialist East and Central Europe should be equally understood as an instrument of state repression and a space for continuity, accommodation, and subversion. This argument is sustained by a rich documentation of historical and archival sources and interviews relating to the nationalization and expropriation of housing in the Banat region of Romania during the first two decades of the communist regime between 1945- 1965. By emphasizing significant continuities between the interwar civil law tradition and socialist law the author goes well beyond a specific case study. The monograph has broader implications for the complex relationships between any legal system and its subjects in a non-democratic society. Its sophisticated conceptual approach makes it an important source for a large academic audience including scholars of socialism and post-socialism, of law and society and of transitional justice. -- Monica Ciobanu, Plattsburgh State University of New York
In this six-chapter book, Mihaela Serban offers a nuanced perspective of the manifold ways in which legal continuity and change affected the takings of homes during early communist rule in Romania. With the help of newly discovered archival documents she studied in the city of Timisoara, Serban shows that during the 1945-1965 period law was more than an instrument of violence and repression blindly used by a dictatorial regime to effect social change and unmake the pre-communist hegemony of private property. A wealth of petitions, some of them reflecting close familiarity with legal terms, shows resistance to home takings on the part of dispossessed owners who remained attached to their homes and upheld pre-communist conceptions of private property. A carefully researched and elegantly written analysis showing profound understanding of Romanian realities, this book is a necessary reading for all those interested to know more about the property regime, the legal culture, and the interplay between power and law in an understudied country of the former communist bloc. -- Lavinia Stan, St. Francis Xavier University
Serban tells an unexpected and previously unknown story of resistance to the nationalization of their homes by ordinary Romanians in the 1950s. She weaves her meticulous archival research into an engaging and theoretically compelling narrative of the ups and downs of the campaign to reshape legal consciousness in the image of Marxism-Leninism. The endless petitions by displaced Romanians to have their rights reinstated demonstrate not only that law mattered, but also their continued belief in private property. Serban’s book fills a nagging gap in the literature and deserves to be widely read. -- Kathryn Hendley, University of Wisconsin
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Law, Power, and Resistance in Early Communist Romania Chapter One: The Many Faces of Communist Legality Chapter Two: Law, Subjectivity, and Legal Consciousness Chapter Three: Property in Extremis: The Taking of Homes Chapter Four: Resistance to Takings and the Construction of Socialist Subjectivities Chapter Five: Legality, Ideology, and the Politics of Takings Chapter Six: Surviving Property: Private Property in Early Communism Conclusion
