Union of Communist Youth

The Union of Communist Youth (Romanian: ; UTC) was the Romanian Communist Party's youth organisation. Like many Young Communist organisations, it was modelled after the Soviet Komsomol. It aimed to cultivate young cadres into the party, as well as to help create the "new man" envisioned by communist ideologues. History Founded in 1922, the UTC went underground along with the rest of the party when it was banned in 1924. A marginal group under strict control of the Comintern's Young Communist International, it began to emerge as a mass movement in 1944, after the Red Army had entered Romania and the party became legal once again. Nicolae Ceaușescu was the First Secretary of the UTC from August 23, 1944, to June 1945. Beginning in 1948, the Romanian Workers' Party (PMR, as it was then called) began to contemplate merging and purging the country's youth organisations – political, professional, religious, cultural, etc. At the same time, young people were faced with several waves of arrests. Starting in 1945, participants at anti-communist demonstrations were arrested, while category-based arrests began in 1948. Members of youth liberal, peasant, and Iron Guard organisations were targeted, and political and religious youth organisations were shut down. The educational reform of 3 August 1948 initiated the ideological re-education of youth and Sovietization of the educational system by restructuring it along Marxist-Leninist principles. That year, the Komsomol recommended the formation of a single youth group, and at a congress on March 19–21, 1949, hitherto separate youth organisations were merged to create a Union of Working Youth (Uniunea Tineretului Muncitoresc; UTM). Its name was changed back to UTC in 1965. Right after the single organisation was formed, the party asked for a purge, which in its first phase involved the "re-signing up" of UTM members (equivalent to PMR "verification" campaigns). After this process, 34,000 UTM members and activists were purged as "dangerous elements" (kulaks (chiaburi), former Iron Guard or National Christian Party members, former members of democratic parties, religious activists (especially non-Orthodox ones), UTM leaders who did not heed PRM decisions, etc.). The UTM now numbered 650,000 members; purges would continue, under the pretext of "improving its class composition", especially after the turbulent years of 1952, 1956, and 1968.