fearing that Pătrășcanu was betraying the fragile alliance established before the fall of Ștefan Foriș). Consequently, he attempted to block Bodnăraș's rise to power, and denounced his reputedly corrupt activities as Secretary in the Interior Ministry to the other members of the leadership. Historiography is divided over the possibility of Pătrășcanu having initially allied himself with the PCR's second in command, Ana Pauker, in her post-war confrontation with Gheorghiu-Dej. It is apparent that Pătrășcanu was alarmed by Pauker's close cooperation with Soviet overseers, and especially by her tight connection with Dmitry Manuilsky; it was also contended that Pauker was intrigued by Pătrășcanu's self-promotion in front of Soviet overseers during late 1944. Under arrest, however, Pătrășcanu asserted that he was closest to Pauker and Teohari Georgescu among the Romanian party leaders. Although, overall, Pătrășcanu was argued to have been much less revolutionary-minded than various other PCR ideologues, his original perspective on Marxism remained strongly connected with party doctrine in its most essential points (including his intense advocacy of collectivization, using statistics to point out the existence of a class of chiaburi, the Romanian equivalent of the Soviet kulaks). He showed himself surprised when informed that the Soviet Union had planned a rapid communization of the country, and dismissed Vasile Luca and Pauker's vocal support for the latter policy. Instead, he argued in favor of "making a distinction inside the bourgeoisie", and opening the Communist Party to collaboration with the National Liberal Party. Based on this, he denounced Pauker's agreement with Gheorghe Tătărescu's National Liberal dissidence (the National Liberal Party-Tătărescu, which he called "a gang of con artists, blackmailers, and well-known bribers"). A serious break with the party line occurred in early 1946, when Pătrășcanu decided to take initiative and intervened in the standoff between King Michael I and the Petru Groza executive (an episode colloquially known as greva regală, "the royal strike"); with the help of Lena Constante, he approached the anti-communist figures Victor Rădulescu-Pogoneanu and Grigore Niculescu-Buzești, calling on them to convince the monarch to resume communications with his government. 1946 elections During the campaign preceding the rigged elections of 1946, he was actively involved in the PCR's electoral campaign in Transylvania, and, after drought and famine surfaced in several other areas of Romania, he attempted to persuade the peasants of Arad County to sell their wheat harvest to the government, to be used as aid. Received with suspicion, he