Bărăgan deportations
Forced internal relocation in communist Romania, 1951–1956
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The Bărăgan deportations (Romanian: Deportările în Bărăgan) were a forced internal relocation of civilians carried out by the Communist regime of Romania between 1951 and 1956. On the night of 17–18 June 1951, between 40,320 and 44,000 residents of a 25 km (15 mi) strip along the Yugoslav border, corresponding to present-day Timiș, Caraș-Severin and Mehedinți counties, were removed from their homes and resettled in eighteen newly built villages on the Bărăgan Plain in the Romanian Plain.[1][2] The operation followed the Tito–Stalin split of 1948 and was designed to clear the frontier zone of populations the regime classified as politically unreliable. Restrictions on the deportees were lifted in stages from December 1955; most returned home in 1956, though some property and civic rights were never recovered.[1][3]
The action was the third-largest mass deportation in twentieth-century Romanian history, after the wartime deportation of Romanian Jews to Transnistria and the January 1945 deportation of approximately 70,000 ethnic Germans to the Soviet Union.[4] The deportation targeted a politically heterogeneous group of Banat and southwestern Oltenia residents that included Romanians, Banat Swabian Germans, Serbs, Banat Bulgarians, Krashovan Croats, Aromanians, refugees from Bessarabia and Bukovina, and a range of socio-economic categories such as wealthy peasants (chiaburi), former officers, and individuals suspected of sympathy with Tito.[3][5]
Background
The Tito–Stalin split and the border zone
On 28 June 1948 the Cominform resolution expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, opening the so-called Informbiro period of confrontation between Stalin-aligned states and Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. The Romanian–Yugoslav frontier, which ran through ethnically mixed Banat, became a securitized zone, and the population living adjacent to it came to be regarded by Bucharest as a reservoir of potential cross-border sympathy.[3][6] An initial military evacuation plan covering a 25 km strip along the border was drafted on 14 November 1950; the Bărăgan as a destination was selected only later.[3]
Earlier mass deportations
The June 1951 action was the second mass deportation imposed on Romania's German minority after the overthrow of Ion Antonescu. In January 1945, on Soviet orders, approximately 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania (men aged 17–45 and women aged 18–30) had been deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour; about 3,000 died before the surviving deportees were gradually released between 1948 and 1950.[4]
Legal framework
The legal basis for the 1951 action was laid down by Council of Ministers decision H.C.M. no. 344 of 15 March 1951, which authorised the Ministry of Internal Affairs to impose obligatory residence on any person whose presence in their place of residence was deemed "unjustified" or whose conduct was considered to "endanger the construction of socialism".[1][3] A separate decision, H.C.M. no. 326/1951, authorised the ministry to issue the operational order, M.A.I. Decision no. 200/1951, which remained classified and listed by name the categories to be relocated.[1][7]
The decision-200 text directed that:
The Ministry of Internal Affairs may, by decision, order the removal from population centres of any persons whose presence in those centres is unjustified, and the removal from any locality of those who, through their actions against the working people, endanger the construction of socialism in the Romanian People's Republic. Obligatory residence may be established for the persons concerned in any locality.[1]
The operation was modelled on Soviet practices of internal exile and category-based deportation.[3][6]
Targeted categories
The categories listed in the operational order combined ethnic, political and socio-economic criteria. Internal Securitate statistics later compiled by historians give the following breakdown of the principal categories of household heads removed under Decision 200/1951:[3]
| Category | Persons |
|---|---|
| Wealthy peasants (chiaburi) and innkeepers | 19,034 |
| Refugees from Bessarabia | 8,477 |
| Refugees from the Macedonia region (mainly Aromanians) | 3,557 |
| Former members of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht | 2,344 |
| Foreign nationals | 1,330 |
| Relatives of persons who had fled across the border | 1,218 |
| Persons classified as "Titoist sympathisers" | 1,054 |
| "Purged" elements from the frontier zone | 731 |
| Smugglers | 657 |
Other groups subject to deportation included former landlords and industrialists, dispossessed members of the pre-communist political and economic elite, leaders of the ethnic German community, and persons related to anti-communist opponents of the regime.[3][5] Across the eighteen new villages, the ethnic composition of household heads was approximately 33% Banat Romanians, 26% Banat Swabians and other Germans, 23% Bessarabians and Bukovinians, 8% South Slavs (recorded as iugoslavi, a category that grouped Banat Serbs, Krashovan Croats and Banat Bulgarians from villages such as Dudeștii Vechi and Vinga), 6% Aromanians and Macedo-Romanians, and approximately 4% other groups.[3][5]
Operation
The operation was launched in the night of 17 to 18 June 1951, which fell on the eve of Pentecost in the Eastern Christian calendar, an association that gave the action its colloquial name, Rusaliile Negre ("Black Pentecost").[1][2] The frontier zone, stretching from Beba Veche in Timiș County to Gruia in Mehedinți County, was divided into twelve administrative raioane (districts), seven in Banat and five in Oltenia.[3]
Approximately 10,000 troops of the Interior Ministry, the Securitate and the border guards sealed the frontier, while a further 12,000 soldiers and officers, supported by militia and firefighters, carried out the round-up in 258 settlements.[3][1] Affected families were given between two and four hours to gather portable possessions before being transported to railheads.[5][6] Sixty-six trains comprising 3,670 freight wagons moved the deportees east across the country to disembarkation points on the Bărăgan Plain.[1] The operation was directed by Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Gheorghe Pintilie.[3]
Settlements in Bărăgan
Eighteen new villages were laid out on previously uncultivated steppe land in the Ialomița and Galați regions. The deportees, supervised by armed escorts, were ordered to build their own houses of adobe and earth on plots marked out for them: Brateș, Bumbăcari, Dâlga, Dropia, Ezerul, Fundata, Lătești, Măzăreni, Movila Gâldăului, Olaru, Pelican, Răchitoasa, Rubla, Salcâmi, Schei, Valea Viilor, Viișoara and Zagna.[1][3][5]
Movement was restricted to a radius of 15 km around each village and required prior authorisation by the local militia; deportees were assigned to work on neighbouring state farms and collective farms.[1][6] Living conditions in the first winters were severe: shelter was improvised, drinking water scarce, and medical care minimal. A nominal register compiled at the Sighet Memorial documents the deaths of approximately 1,700 deportees during the period of forced residence, including 175 children, of whom about 150 died before reaching one year of age.[7][5] A narrower count of 629 deaths in the Banat-origin cohort has been used in some studies of counterinsurgency administration.[8]
Return and rehabilitation
The death of Stalin in 1953 and the post-1955 easing of internal repression in the Eastern Bloc led to the gradual lifting of restrictions. Beginning in December 1955 and continuing through 1956, residence orders were rescinded for the majority of deportees, who were authorised to leave the Bărăgan settlements; a minority remained on the plain, in many cases because their original homes had been requisitioned, occupied or destroyed.[1][3] Confiscated property, livestock and land were rarely returned, and the official designation of "deported" or "domiciliu obligatoriu" continued to appear in personal files maintained by the Securitate until 1989.[7]
After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Decree-Law no. 118 of 30 March 1990 recognised the survivors of the Bărăgan deportations as victims of communist persecution and granted them a monthly indemnity for each year of forced residence, together with healthcare and pension entitlements; the law was repeatedly amended in subsequent decades.[9]
Commemoration and memory
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The eighteen sites of forced residence have largely been depopulated since the 1956 return, and several have been formally dissolved as administrative units. The Sighet Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance dedicates Room 47 of its permanent exhibition to the deportation, and 18 June is observed in Romania as the National Day for the Commemoration of the Victims of Communist Deportations.[2] A monument to the deportees was erected in 1996 in Justice Park in Timișoara to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the operation, and a roadside cross (troiță) has been raised in Cărășana Park in Reșița. The Association of Former Bărăgan Deportees has maintained an archive of survivor testimony in Timișoara since 1990.[2]
The deportation has been the subject of sustained scholarship in Romania and in the diaspora communities most affected. Documentary work in Banat Swabian memory has been led by the Haus des Deutschen Ostens in Munich, whose anniversary volume gathered survivor testimony, photographs and archival material from the federal German collection.[10] In Romania, recent geographical scholarship has examined how the memory of the deportations has been mobilised in claims for environmental and social justice in former Bărăgan sites.[11]