[5] At the Kharkiv Congress of 1928, where he was present under the name Mironov,[10] Pătrășcanu clashed with the Comintern overseer Bohumír Šmeral, as well as with many of his fellow party members, over the issue of Bessarabia and Moldovenism, which was to be passed into a resolution stating that Greater Romania was an imperialist entity.

[11]With Imre Aladar, Eugen Rozvan, and two others, Pătrășcanu was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1931 as a candidate for the Workers and Peasants' Bloc, an umbrella group masking the outlawed party.

[12] Later in the same year, the 5th Party Congress (held in Soviet exile, at Gorikovo), chose him among the new Central Committee members while Alexander Stefanski rose to the position of general secretary.

[13] In 1932, he was involved in polemics at the Criterion group, where he and his collaborator Belu Zilber defended a Stalinist view of Vladimir Lenin in front of criticism from the right-wing Mircea Vulcănescu and Mihail Polihroniade,[14] as well as from the Austromarxist perspective of Henri H.

Like his fellow activist Scarlat Callimachi, he was set free by the National Legionary Government while the fascist Iron Guard, which allied Romania with Nazi Germany, was trying to preserve good relations with the Soviet Union.

[21] According to Ioan Mocsony Stârcea, marshal of King Michael I's court between 1942 and 1944, he met Pătrășcanu in April 1944 in order to mediate an agreement between the monarch and the Communists regarding a pro-Allied move to overthrow Antonescu and withdraw Romania, which was fighting the Soviets on the Eastern Front, from the Axis.

Pătrășcanu (together with Belu Zilber)[25] authored the proclamation to the country which the king read on National Radio immediately after the coup,[26] and, confronting the new Premier Constantin Sănătescu, imposed himself as a PCR representative on the delegation that signed Romania's armistice with the Soviets, on September 12, 1944.

After the ascension of the Petru Groza government, Pătrășcanu was also one of the initiators of purges and persecutions, being responsible for dismissing and arresting members of the civil service who were considered suspect, for the creation of the Romanian People's Tribunals, as well as the appointment of prosecutors (promoting Avram Bunaciu, Constanța Crăciun, and Alexandra Sidorovici).

[30] Citing a statement by Pătrășcanu rendered by The New York Times, British Trotskyist commentator Tony Cliff extended his critique of the people's democracies of the Eastern Bloc to the realm of justice systems and retribution for war crimes.

[31] According to the American newspaper, Pătrășcanu had reassured media that "industrialists, businessmen and bankers will escape punishment as war criminals";[32] Cliff also argued that the new course in justice had failed to alter what he saw as Romania's "bureaucratic and militarist character".

[34] Pătrășcanu put pressure on King Michael to sign legislation that went against the letter of the 1923 Constitution, which contributed to the latter's decision to initiate the "royal strike" (a refusal to countersign documents issued by the Groza executive).

"[37]Around February 1945, he began to fear the possibility that Emil Bodnăraș was planning his assassination and that he intended to blame it on political opponents of the Communist Party (as a means to direct sympathy towards the latter group).

[44] 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.

[50] Nevertheless, Pătrășcanu's writings of the time show that, in contrast with his 1928 point of view, he had largely accommodated Leninist principles regarding the national issue and Bessarabian topics,[51] although he used more neutral terms than the ones present in official propaganda,[52] and was known to have deplored the unwillingness of the PCR to reduce and refine its internationalist policies.

According to Belu Zilber, during this time, he read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon[54] (a glimpse into forced confessions alluding to the 1936-1937 Moscow Trials, the book was banned throughout the Eastern Bloc).

[59] Belu Zilber claimed that having himself been subject to suspicion and marginalisation, he had attempted to warn Pătrășcanu of the change in climate, and had asked him to consider fleeing the Eastern Bloc, only to be stiffly rebuffed.

[60] On April 28, 1948, Pătrășcanu was arrested and came under the investigation of a party committee, comprising the high-ranking Communists Teohari Georgescu, Alexandru Drăghici, and Iosif Rangheț; interrogations were occasionally attended by Gheorghiu-Dej.

[65] The day after the SSI began its inquiry, Pătrășcanu attempted suicide by slitting his veins with a smuggled razor blade; upon his recovery, he tried to take his life a second time by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills.

[67] When the inquiry resumed in February 1951, Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu ordered that the detainees in the case were not to be physically coerced, in stark contrast to the expressed instructions of the ministry's chief Soviet adviser, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, to do everything necessary to determine the guilt of the accused.

[81] The execution took place in the courtyard of Jilava Prison; Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed in his book, Cartea neagră a Securității, that Pătrășcanu was shot in the back of the head by a Securitate colonel.

[89]A party committee which included Ion Popescu-Puțuri[62] investigated the matter of his arrest and interrogation, concluding that evidence against Pătrășcanu was fabricated, that he had been systematically beaten and otherwise ill-treated, and that a confession had been prepared for him to sign.

In his most important volumes (most of which attracted public attention only after 1944),[97] Pătrășcanu combined his commitment to Marxism-Leninism with his sociological training, producing an original outlook on social evolution (focusing on major trends in Romanian society from the time of the Danubian Principalities to his day).

[97] Aside from its support for communist tenets, his work shared many characteristics with the prominent currents of the Romanian sociological school (notably, the attention paid to prevailing social contrasts in a peasant-dominated environment),[98] and made occasional use of material provided by Dimitrie Gusti's comprehensive surveys.

He rejected the notion that, despite Vladimirescu's statements to the contrary, the rebellion had a peasant character, and argued instead that it was evidence of low-ranking boyars and merchants ("the embryo of a class, that was to become the bourgeoisie")[99] attempting to emancipate themselves from Ottoman pressures.

[97] The Wallachian Revolution of 1848, the most successful of similar revolts at the time, was, according to Pătrășcanu, a mature reaction of bourgeois circles against boyar supremacy[97] ("it only sought [...] to replace a [privileged] minority with another"),[99] but was generally not opposed to preserving an estate-based economy.

[102] As part of his reflection on post-1900 realities, Pătrășcanu contended that, relatively delayed in comparison to economies of the Western world, Romania had become subject to "primitive accumulation of capital", where the role of colonialism was taken by exploitation of the peasantry.

[97] While endorsing some aspects of Dobrogeanu-Gherea's theories regarding the ways in which serfdom was allegedly prolonged, in a discreet form, even after the 20th century, Pătrășcanu challenged his refusal to investigate the effects of capitalism in rural areas.

[104] Arguing in favor of a Romanian communist society during the late 1940s, Pătrășcanu indicated a series of essential steps to this goal: after discarding all legislation passed by the Ion Antonescu regime and purging the administrative apparatus, a political amnesty was to be declared, all properties upwards of 50 hectares were to be confiscated, the National Bank passed into state property while trade unions came under government supervision and a new labour code was enforced, and civil liberties were enhanced.

Elena, who was Jewish, avoided the first wave of official antisemitic persecutions at the end of the 1930s (under the Octavian Goga government) by converting to the Romanian Orthodox Church (she was baptized by the socialist sympathiser Gala Galaction).

Titus Popovici's play Puterea și adevărul ("The Power and the Truth"), published in the early 1970s (staged by Liviu Ciulei and filmed, in 1971, by Manole Marcus), centers on the character Petrescu, largely based on Pătrășcanu, who is persecuted by the party secretary Pavel Stoian (a disguised reference to Gheorghiu-Dej), while living to see his hopes for a better future fulfilled by Mihai Duma (standing for Ceaușescu).