Institutional mud: self-made buildings in the communist countryside

This article examines interactions between people living in the countryside and representatives of institutions in the Eastern European communist context. Collectivisation in the 1950s has been the most frequently studied subject in this regard. Here another issue will be considered — the construction of buildings carried out by rural people themselves, outside of what was planned, during the four decades of communism. This was a contentious matter, but it did not provoke massive repression, rather a set of negotiations, which will be examined here, notably around legality, spatial planning, and the assistance offered by institutions. The article is based mainly on local institutional archives and local case studies. These invite us to reflect on the strange autonomy of peasants in the communist context, who were neither left alone nor capable of dealing with their problems on their own.