REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

PREPARATION OF THE PARLIAMENTARY
ELECTIONS HELD IN 1946
1. Political climate before the elections
Cristina ROMAN 1
The communist press and the repressive bodies (Police, Gendarmerie, Intelligent
Service) controlled by Groza’s government have played a significant role in creating a
strained mood amid political opposition and public opinion before the elections in 1946.
The electoral strategy of the communist government expressed through the Election
Law and the electoral program of the Block of the Democratic Parties has mainly aimed
to annihilate democracy in Romania. The propaganda initiated by the Central Section of
Political Education of the Communist Party had to bring, as Iosif Chişinevschi said, „90-
94% of the votes”. 2 .
The communist campaign to violently eliminate the democratic parties from the
political scene started in 1945 and intensified in early 1946. Terrorist actions began in the
first months of the year to intimidate the `historic` parties’ members and sympathisers for
the upcoming elections. In February, there was an unsuccessful conspiracy to murder
Dinu Brătianu during his travel to Câmpulung Muscel where he intended to participate in
a meeting. On April 22, the prominent member of the National Peasants’ Party Emil
HaŃieganu was stopped and aggressed by a group of violent communists on the way from
Cluj. The next one was Ion Mihalache, the leader of the Nation Peasants’ Party, whose
right to participate in such elections was cancelled because he had taken part in the anti-
Soviet war as a volunteer.
Despite the agreement reached during the Moscow Conference in December 1945,
whereby free elections were imposed to be organized in Romania in the shortest possible
time, Western diplomats kept on being reserved in their correspondence as regards the
good intentions declared by the communist government from Bucharest. In a report on his
mission to Bucharest, the British Ambassador to Moscow Clark Kerr has sorrowfully
declared that he left Petru Groza with the feeling that `the latter is an unshakably
experienced impostor`: `I think that Dr. Groza is full of hidden thoughts and will make
everything possible to put as many obstacles against our policy as the Russians will tell
him to put. It is melancholic but I cannot see what more can be done 3 `.
1
Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile,
Bucureşti, Romania.
2
Arhivele NaŃionale Istorice Centrale (ANIC), fond CC al PCR-Cancelarie, Dosar 52/1946, f. 22.
3
Ioan Chiper, Florin Constantiniu, Sovietizarea României. PercepŃii anglo-americane (1944-1947),
Bucureşti, 1993, p. 163.