Forms of Communist Propaganda during Election campaigns in 1946-1948. Cluj County Case Study

Abstract

Since its first days of existence in the Soviet Union, one of the top priorities of the new communist regime was to create a new man, as part of a larger process of reevaluation of all values, necessary in order to create a brand new world. To accomplish this task, the Communist Party used on a massive scale, for the first time in world history, the instrument of the propaganda. In Romania, a country in which the process of stalinisation started on the 6th of March 1945, the first post-war elections offered a good opportunity for the communist propaganda machine to test its effectiveness, taking into consideration the consequences of the results of these elections for the Romanian Communist Party. This article explores the problems, results and ways of action and manifestation of the then-borning communist propaganda, with the occasion of the first two general elections in Romania after the Second World War.