ABSTRACT
The campaigns of collectivization started in 1948 took about a decade to be completed countrywide and another two decades for collectives to be irreversibly integrated into the country's economic and social system. Despite the power the State could bring to bear upon them, the peasants could exert some indirect influence upon the course of agrarian programmes – for example by delaying and hampering collective production directing their labour into certain sectors and withholding from others. Collectivization began in Hungary in the very unfavourable period of political transition in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Agriculture was subjected to State intervention and centralized control through three main means: control over production and marketing; liquidation of the wealthy peasant stratum; and collectivization. Close control over agricultural production and marketing was exerted through heavy taxation, a system of compulsory delivery quotas to the State at nominal prices, and a system of compulsory production of a specified range of products.
