How Peasant Uprisings Never Go Out of Fashion: Pungești 1907/ 2013

Pungești is a rural commune in eastern Romania and, but for Chevron's particular interest in the region, would never have attracted media attention. The Romanian government has allowed the giant energy corporation to buy land there and prospect for shale gas. Afraid that their land, water, livestock and families will be negatively affected by the fracking, the local population, supported by various green activists, has been putting up fierce resistance. Brute force was used against the protesters and for the time being Chevron has agreed to postpone its fracking operations. This scenario has probably happened in many other places, where a corrupt government agreed to do business with international corporations over the heads, and at the expense, of their population.

Now, from the point of view of my project, this topical anti-fracking protest in Pungești is relevant in more than one way. While working on documents relating to the 1907 peasant uprising in Romania, I came across several telegrams about Pungești as one of the hotbeds of rural unrest in Moldavia at the time:

Telegram from local landowner to the Minister of the Interior: 'The market town of Pungești, my mansion and farm under threat by peasant gangs; went there on hearing about the devastation of Negrești and other places; please give orders to send in the army to prevent devastations and killings'

Prosecutor's telegram to the Minister of Justice: 'The latest news from the market town of Pungești: only 2 dead and 7 wounded; the mansion courtyard and part of the town - untouched; peasants starting to disperse, having heard of the coming of the cavalry. Nothing serious elsewhere. A company of soldiers, who were sent to the Moara Domnească estate, arrested some of the peasants who were looting, carting cereals from the barns to their homes in Vaslui; we arrested today one of ringleaders of the band of devastators who hit Major Colori during the meeting yesterday.'

Vaslui Prefect's Telegram to the Minister of the Interior and War Minister: 'Peace and quiet in the whole county. Yesterday the fire at Mr Lascanu's property in Drăgușeni was accidental. On 22 march troops crossed over, without notifying us, into the commune of Poplana, of Tutova County, into the hamlet of Rahova, of the commune of Pungești, which belongs to our county, in order to arrest peasants suspected of devastation; the troop shot at some fugitives and killed a gypsy peasant; the local law court is investigating the case.'

It would be wildly unscientific to posit a continuity of peasant feistiness and rebelliousness across more than a century. The people that rebelled in 1907 in Pungești may not even have descendants (or do they?) among the 2013 protesters, they had a different agenda and lived in a completely different world from our own. There are however a number of striking structural commonalities: although the 1907 peasants were reacting against an oppressive system of land tenure and the 2013 peasants are reacting against an existential environmental threat posed to their livelihood by a multinational company, in both cases the source of the oppression are capitalist outsiders backed up by the State (the arendași, or estate administrators, in 1907; the Chevron multinationals in 2013). In both cases, the State is too blindly corrupt to realize or to act upon the realization that this way of governing a country is in the long run untenable, that it builds up social tensions which are bound to blow up one day. The State sent in the army (1907)/the gendarmes (2013) to 'pacify' the local population in the name of a legal framework which the same State has hollowed out of all meaning and all true authority.