ABSTRACT
Building socialism and building communism – the terms employed by the communists to refer to the process of constructing and developing a new society – entailed programs and policies. It is a simple matter to identify some of the programs and policies adopted in at least some of the countries of the region. In agriculture, the communists herded peasants onto collective farms and made them surrender their private farms and livestock to these collectives – to the detriment of agricultural productivity. The communist desire for control extended inevitably to the arts, where the doctrine of socialist realism – hegemonic in the region from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, and in Romania even longer – was perfectly attuned to utopianism of the communists. Functionalism has sometimes been declared to be passe. But no one could doubt the utility of examining the effects, both manifest and latent, both intended and unintended, of policies or the short-term and long-term ramifications of policies.
