The Forced Collectivization of Agriculture in Hungary in the years 1948 – 1961

One of the most comprehensive social operations in the process of Sovietisation was the liquidation of the traditional peasant society. The individual peasant farmers, the organisations and church communities of rural society represented a political counter-base in the path of the communist programme. The land and the people could only be collectivised through the use of terror. The "collective farms" created in the first wave of collectivization were a failure for the programme of Sovietisation. Contrary to the results of many other historical researchers, in his extensive research in all county archives, this author found that the sweeping campaign for full collectivization carried out between 1958 and 1961 used mass violence. The effects of the traumatisation that occurred in those days, the emptying of rural social spaces, are still felt today.