[3] In either case, the student environment at Iași had drawn him into communist circles by 1933,[3] a move bolstered by his reading of Marxist texts and the widespread poverty of the period.

Ending up in the Karaganda area, for nearly two years he was a teacher, school director, miner and party activist on a kolkhoz, until being sent to Moscow in 1943 to resume his studies.

From June to November 1946, he worked as instructor and assistant director at the central committee's economic section, beginning a rise that was aided by his start in an important position and his educated background.

[3] Following the establishment of a Communist regime, he was, together with Gheorghe Gaston Marin, a creator of the planned economy imposed on the country,[1] serving successively during 1948 as deputy Industry and then Commerce Minister.

[6] In 1964, he helped conceive a foreign policy declaration of active neutrality within the communist bloc, wherein Romania was no longer subservient to the Soviet Union but neither embraced the militant outlook of China under Mao Zedong.

As such, he sidelined the national football team from competition, withdrawing it from the 1962 FIFA World Cup qualification on the grounds that it would lose anyway and had no need to participate in capitalist propaganda.

[3] This forced retirement saw colorless apparatchiks appointed in his stead to supervise scientific and technological research, further solidifying Elena's rise to the apex of political power.

[10] With economic experts like him long sidelined, by the late 1970s, the dictator's wife was far more influential than any civil or military official; of her, Bârlădeanu wrote that "hateful vindictiveness, stupidity, nastiness, insensitivity and brazenness" were her "most obvious" negative qualities.

[11] In later years, he and Paul Niculescu-Mizil helped create the myth of a "patriotic faction" within the party where a radical break was marked between early Stalinism and post-1960 developments; Bârlădeanu in particular fostered the image of a benign Gheorghiu-Dej in contrast to Ceaușescu.

[12] During the two decades after his fall from grace, he ran into trouble with the authorities twice: once in the 1970s for publishing an article in Contemporanul without approval, and once in the 1980s for discussing with Gheorghe Apostol how Ceaușescu might be removed from the leadership.

[2] In March 1989, he was a signatory of the Letter of the Six,[1] terrified of Ceaușescu's approach to the command economy;[13] the regime responded by placing him under house arrest,[3] while accusing him of being a spy and a speculator and removing him from the party.

[2] Following the fall of the regime at the end of that year, he was awarded important posts and honors as an elder statesman of the National Salvation Front (FSN),[1] and as part of its council belonged to a group who had fallen foul of Ceaușescu.

[16] That year also saw open conflict between him and Prime Minister Petre Roman and the latter's ally Adrian Severin over the speed of price liberalization and economic privatization, with Bârlădeanu, at the forefront of the FSN's more cautious wing, unsuccessfully pushing for a slower pace.