The party renamed itself the Socialist-Communist Party () and, soon after, the Communist Party of Romania ( or "PCdR"). Government crackdown and competition with other socialist groups brought a drastic reduction in its membership—from the ca. 40,000 members the Socialist Party had, the new group was left with as much as 2,000 or as little as 500; after the fall of one-party rule in 1989, Romanian historians generally asserted that the party only had around 1,000 members at the end of World War II. Other researchers argue that this figure may have been intentionally based on the Muscovite faction figures, and, as such, underestimated in order to undermine the influence of the internal faction; this estimate was afterwards promoted in post-communist historiography in order to reinforce a stereotypical image of the regime as illegitimate.