(De)formation of Rural Areas in the Collectivization Process

At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, all the countries under Soviet influence set about transforming their countryside and agriculture in a Soviet style. Its forcible application in Czechoslovakia went hand in hand with mass persecution of peasants and their families. The representatives of the ruling regime argued for their arrogant action by a ‘higher law'; however, its main aim was an effort to subordinate the whole society, in which there was no space for independently farming peasants. Collective organizations of production, in Czechoslovakia called agricultural cooperatives, became the vehicle of such ‘reconstruction'. The aim of the recent issue of Forum Historiae is to focus on political, economic as well as social dimension of collectivization as a phenomenon of economic history, which impacted and changed Slovak society among others.