In 1952, he was caught up in the roundup of alleged "right-wing deviationists" and wreckers of the economy, and arrested by the Securitate; he was allowed to preserve a teacher's post, and was slowly reintegrated politically, then fully rehabilitated, with the onset of Romanian de-satellization.

The Securitate followed closely his contacts with other political figures, noting him as a probable conspirator against the regime and a critic of its austerity policies; Rădulescu was still present by Ceaușescu's side throughout the Romanian Revolution of 1989, though he advised against its violent repression.

"[11] As an economist and journalist, Rădulescu openly embraced historical materialism with an October 1935 article in Revista de Studii Sociologice și Muncitorești, describing Italian fascism as a "brazen dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".

[31] After the right-wing Universul published an expose about the FSD camp as a "communist nucleus", Rădulescu and Constantinovski returned with another article in Cuvântul Liber, reporting that the Iron Guard and National-Christian Defense League were recruiting the wealthy peasants of Predeal and Satulung for a violent march on Moieciu.

In the resulting siege, the FSD voted to go on a hunger strike, as a means of publicizing their cause; on 12 August, Rădulescu and his colleagues published a letter of protest in Dimineața daily, noting that the Romanian left was suffering under a "regime of terror", whereas the "tens of Guardist camps carry on with their Hitlerite propaganda, totally unhindered".

[33] Negative publicity forced the Gendarmes to lift their siege, allowing the camp to function until its scheduled closure, on 20 August; five days later, Dimineața hosted a sympathetic reportage by Stephan Roll, which was effectively a pierce of UTC propaganda.

[36] He befriended a number of left-wing activists and journalists, variously including Roll, N. D. Cocea, Miron Radu Paraschivescu, Paul Păun, Alexandru Sahia, Virgil Teodorescu, Dolfi Trost, and Ștefan Voicu.

[4][5] Rădulescu remained in Bucharest during the Iron Guard's National Legionary State regime (September 1940–January 1941), which disestablished the ICE immediately after taking power;[52] he reports being shocked when the new authorities condoned Madgearu's assassination.

[53] He also witnessed the ultimate clash between the Guardists and Ion Antonescu, or "Legionary Rebellion", noting that its violence "demonstrated what sort of 'new world' was desired by these theoreticians of hatred, of caning, of robbery and assassination.

[57] At that junction in his life, Rădulescu noted that he had escaped during the confusion caused by shelling in Coropcăuți, on the Siret River; he had then refused to help the Red Army by performing a suicide mission, and was punished as a result.

[4][70] His interrogator was a Securitate Captain, Zalman Marcu, who viewed Rădulescu as part of a "counterrevolutionary" cell, alongside Zilber, Vulpescu, and Aurel Vijoli, making note of their occasional meetings with known or alleged British agents such as Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain and Hugh Seton-Watson.

[71] As Tănase writes, Rădulescu was being prepared for a show trial modeled on the Slánský Affair, expecting to be prosecuted alongside Pauker, Luca, Zilber, Teohari Georgescu, and Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu.

[81] In that context, he became involved in securing Romania's relative independence from the Soviet Union: alongside Alexandru Bârlădeanu, Mircea Malița, Ion Gheorghe Maurer and various others, he established direct links between Dej's regime and the Third World.

[84] A junior member of the nomenklatura in 1961, Ștefan Andrei recalls that Rădulescu, now trusted because "he had a Jewish wife [and] his mother was a Russian", was being proposed as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but rejected by Gheorghiu-Dej, who reportedly said: '[…] he'd be very good, but he is too ugly.

[67] Theater director Dinu Cernescu, who claims to have befriended the Trade Minister around 1960, notes that Rădulescu was "out chasing tail [when] Mrs Dorina was visiting Paris", and that this is how he embarked on another affair, with Eugenia Marian (widow of novelist Camil Petrescu).

[67] Around that time, Dorina arranged for Paraschivescu's play, Asta-i ciudat, to be produced by the Brăila State Theater—inviting literary figures such as Alexandru Piru, Ion Băieșu, Fănuș Neagu and Adrian Păunescu to its premiere.

[100] He returned the visit in April, when he was welcomed at the Rothschild holdings in France, including the Château de Ferrières; this prepared the ground for a bilateral meeting between Ceaușescu and French President Georges Pompidou, itself a peak in the Franco–Romanian detente.

[110] As argued by scholar Constantin Petrescu, Rădulescu personally invented the institution to ensure his own survival upon Maurer's relative marginalization—and also to provide Ceaușescu with "leverage" over "the structures of party and state.

Fruntelată highlights the contradictions emerging from this positioning: "he brought together in Comana commune, where he owned a villa, all the dissident writers and had them present for colloquiums and for other things I can't be sure of in his grand living-room bed, and then he would head to see 'Comrade Elena' to defend his cubs".

[126] In 1979, he and his circle of artistic friends were threatened by Ceaușescu's promise to ban urbanite Romanians from owning homes in the countryside—as Rusan notes, the project was abandoned not by Rădulescu's resistance, but rather because the PCR leadership found out it would also affect miner communities on the Jiu Valley.

"[131] In 1977, Rădulescu, alongside Niculescu-Mizil, Leonte Răutu and Ștefan Voitec, served on the preparatory committee for the 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences, which was ultimately held in Bucharest in 1980; Ceaușescu used this venue for popularizing the ideology of "Protochronism"—a belief in the primordial nature of Romanian civilization, linked to the a revisionist history of Ancient Dacia.

On 16 October 1986, România Literară hosted his piece, Profesorii mei de limba și literatura română ("My Teachers of Romanian Language and Literature"), which specifically referred to the interwar thinkers Eugen Lovinescu and Ștefan Zeletin, both of whom had championed Romania's complete Westernization.

[146] In 1989, the Securitate began investigating rumors that, also at Comana, Rădulescu (granted the code name "Marcel") was creating an alliance of Ceaușescu rivals, with Niculescu-Mizil, Andrei, and Ion Dincă as the other participants, readying to take over in a potential regime change.

[155] Buzura himself recalls that Rădulescu was in fact arrested by the FSN on the month's next-to-last week, on 23 December, shortly after having attempted to address the revolutionary crowds gathered in the Romanian Television building (and narrowly escaping a lynching).

[157] Tudor Rădulescu, Gogu and Dorina's adoptive son,[5][61] was also being investigated by FSN officials in January 1990: he had served as director at the Institute for Scientific Research and Technological Engineering, and had been accused by his colleagues of being an unqualified profiteer.

[169] Revisiting the issue in 2002, poet and critic Gheorghe Grigurcu noted: "We have every reason to believe that the regime tolerated, even encouraged, an 'opposition of the coffeehouses', a neutered 'dissidence', which was obviously of little use, but which 'made us look good' abroad as evidence of our 'democracy', and appeared internally as a vent for grievances that were spinning out control.

Represented by characters with a first-rate "socialist-realist' past, including the likes of Eugen Jebeleanu, Geo Bogza, Marin Preda (not by chance were they joined by high-ranking activists such as George Macovescu and Gogu Rădulescu), such 'opposition' was designed as a substitute for true resistance, a nechezol to its coffee.

This nonentity—whose one merit was getting beaten up by the Guardists for being a communist—had been cultivating scores of genuine writers [...], calling them up to his table as if in some sort of 'court', and helping them to solve, on and off, this and that issue that never threatened his own privilege and the party-and-state hierarchy; all this for the sake of an ideal 'leftism', long-since buried under the manure of communist-Ceaușescuist totalitarianism".

"[4] In 2012, poet Florin Iaru, who had not been a Comana visitor, replicated the positive view of his peers: "Gogu Rădulescu was the only slightly luminous figure among the leaders of socialist Romania, the only one to have extended some protection to the writers.

In his view, "Saint Gogu" was primarily an intriguer, whose circle of influence was the Romanian equivalent of Propaganda Due, and who had "rehearsed methods of political and literary combat" that were eventually used by the FSN, in lieu of an ideology.