Anihilarea unei sărbători, ”făurirea” unei festivități. Sărbătorile de iarnă reflectate în presa vremii (1945-1989)

• Main Author: Ozana Cucu-Oancea
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Expert Projects 2005-11-01
• Series: Sociologie Românească
• Online Access: https://arsociologie.ro/revistasociologieromaneasca/sr/article/view/813

As any totalitarian regime which aims at manipulating the people it leads, the Romanian communist regime, despite its denomination, has engaged itself in a continuous battle focused upon destroying the Romanian people's social and spiritual communion. Between 1947 and 1989, in Romania, the totalitarian regime tried to gradually eliminate at least from the public life the traditional customs and religious symbols and to create a new and completely desacralised type of custom with a more or less evident political connotation. The holiday as a festivity, more often than not nominated celebration, was used as a turning point in changing the focus from the maximum spiritual enjoyment of the traditional holiday to the spiritual vacuum of the celebration. It led the transformation from communion to the simplistic gathering of individuals, from the sacred ritual to the profane show. The mass-media represented at that time mainly by the press, and especially by the party-devoted press, was one of the main vehicles for the propaganda of the new symbols of Socialism which had to be assimilated by the population as fast and as thorougly as possible. The study undertaken on the Scânteia newspaper collection (1945-1989), which had become the voice of the Romanian Labour Party and subsequently of the Romanian Communist Party, proved to be particularly eloquent from this viewpoint. It actually illustrates step by step  all the methods used by the regime in order to manipulate the people's spiritual life.