Romanian Village Halls in the Early 1950s: Between Cultural and Political Propaganda

Abstract

<p>Village halls [Romanian: cămine culturale] appeared in many European<br />countries and elsewhere as early as the nineteenth century and multiplied in the twentieth.<br />The presence of these institutions in the rural world, despite obvious differences in their<br />goals and activities, demonstrates a general interest in the cultural development of<br />villages, as well as the emergence and growth of leisure practices amongst peasants. This<br />essay is not a study of the history of village halls; rather, it focuses on the changes that this<br />institution underwent in the early years of the communist regime in Romania. It analyses<br />how communists transformed the village hall into a place of propaganda under the<br />guise of “cultural work”. The study starts from the premise that communist propaganda<br />deliberately did not distinguish between “political work” and “cultural work”. At the end<br />of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, the village hall became the communist regime’s<br />central venue for disseminating political and cultural propaganda.</p>