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.

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.

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).

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.

The beginning of collectivisation in 1949 demanded a large presence of communist organisations in the villages, but by the end of the 1950s, only about 28.5% of the eligible rural population was in the UTM, which numbered 30-35% peasants.

Starting in the 1950s, UTM activists were mobilised to help with collectivisation, participating in propaganda actions and unmasking class enemies at the party's behest.

In 1952, as Ana Pauker fell from grace for her "right-wing deviationism" that involved massive membership sign-ups, which, without proper vetting, had introduced numerous Iron Guardists and other "enemy elements" into the party, the ensuing purge hit the UTM as well.

The crisis was accompanied by several leadership changes until 1956, when the party found in Virgil Trofin, who had worked as an officer in the Superior Political Directorate of the Army, the iron hand it was searching for to control the UTM; he held the post for eight years before being promoted into the party, surviving the successive intra-party crises of the late 1950s.

At the same time, ideological criteria were applied for university admission, on the basis of social origin and pre-communist political allegiance (either of the students themselves or of their parents).

[1] After Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in 1965, he pursued the goal of expanding mass organisations, trying to include as many people as possible in communist structures.

The UTC organised political and patriotic courses in schools, among peasant groups, and among workers and members of the armed forces.

By the 1980s, the organization functioned on the national level with an eight-member Secretariat, including the first secretary, who was also the UTC chairman, and a bureau of twenty-one full and ten candidate members.

This showed the importance of youth organisations for the regime, as Nicu was virtually the heir to power, and was also a clear indication of its dynastic and clientelistic nature.

Nicu's poor reputation contributed to cynicism and corruption in the youth organisations, whose members had become blasé, bureaucratic and ritualised in nature, a far cry from their predecessors' fervor in the 1940s-1950s.

Moreover, there were Șoimii Patriei ("The Fatherland's Falcons"), a youth organization established in 1976 where children aged four to seven could enter and where they learned to respect the party, also participating in demonstrations.