World Youth Festival

World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS): The World Youth Festival, as it was known, was by most metrics the largest serial propaganda event held in the Cold War. At two year intervals in the late 1940s and 1950s, slowing to every five or more by the 1970s and 1980s, the Festival hosted loosely organized delegations of people aged 16 to 30 (and frequently older) from well over 100 countries in the tens of thousands. WFDY and IUS were the Festival's official sponsors, with their staffers holding high positions in the Festival's International Preparatory Committee (IPC) and its executive, the Standing Commission. Nevertheless, the Festival's tolerant admissions policy obliged planners to interact with a far wider spectrum of political opinion than they were accustomed to in Budapest and Prague.