Peasants under Siege describes in great detail the collectivization of agriculture in socialist Romania. Starting in 1949, the Romanian communists tried to implement the “Soviet blue print” for agriculture, but, as the authors describe, they faced several serious problems. In contrast to Russia, Romanian peasants had no tradition of communal landownership and peoples' social status was defined by their private property. The party lacked well-trained and educated Marxist-Leninist cadres to enforce collectivization from above. The campaigns faced the dilemma that the government had to rely on village insiders, who, though they had social ties within their communities, were also hard to control. The central leadership advised local cadres to avoid coercing peasants, but at the same time set targets for them that they could only achieve by coercion. The collectivization process was less violent than in the Soviet Union, and in the end the chiabur—the Romanian counterpart of the Soviet kuláks—though discriminated against, were integrated into the collectives. Kligman and Verdery argue that although collectivization brought the socialist state to the villages, the state failed to establish a modern impersonal bureaucracy because cadres and peasants continued to interact through personal relations. The resulting overlap of power and personal relations corrupted friendship and kin ties.

The book is based on field studies carried out across the country and archival research. The authors describe how, as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, Romanian peasants developed everyday strategies of resistance such as stealing and underreporting of land and production. Parts of the book seem to be influenced by the populist narrative of “the peasants versus the incompetent state,” which has been popular in Western studies of socialist countries since James Scott's path-breaking book Weapons of the Weak. Today, most villagers remember collectivization as a struggle of “us” against “them” (the regime), and present themselves as passive victims of circumstance. However, Kligman and Verdery show that the new collective order eventually increased social mobility for Roma, young people, and women, both in and outside of the villages.

The book's introduction and appendices present helpful discussions of the challenges of grounding research in both oral and written sources. All studies of socialist countries face the difficulty that archival sources, petitions, and memories of eyewitnesses are all heavily influenced by the official language of the regime, or, in the case of oral history, contemporary discourses. It should be said that many developments described in the book also occurred in the Chinese collectivization of the mid-1950s. However, the Soviet Union was the only socialist country to enforce collectivization with the deportation and elimination of millions of kuláks, and the so-called “Soviet blue print” displayed other exceptional elements. It is clear that we need more studies that compare different forms of socialist agriculture. I recommend Peasants under Siege to everyone who is interested in peasants-state relations under socialism or in modern Romanian history.