ABSTRACT
The opposing ideological “camps” of the Cold War shaped scholarship on collectivization in Southeastern Europe before 1990. Owing to political restrictions imposed on academic research, the great majority of works published on the topic in the Southeast European countries praised collectivization as a major step toward the creation of the envisaged utopian communist society. By contrast, many Western scholars conceived the forced merger of farmers and peasants as one of the consequences of oppressive “Sovietization.” Interpretations of collectivization as a type of Soviet-style “modernization” remained on the margins of scholarship, even in the late 1960s and early 1970s when this view had become more widely accepted by scholars. Altogether, research on collectivization generally suffered from ideological constraints, especially in the Communist regimes.
