He collaborated with the Agitprop leaders Leonte Răutu and Iosif Chișinevschi, spent time in prison for his communist activity, and ultimately exiled himself to the Soviet Union, where he trained in Marxist historiography.

Turning the focus away from nationality and on class struggle, Roller's work sought to reeducate the traditionalist public, and depicted Romania as strongly linked to Slavic Europe.

[4] Historian Lucian Boia writes that Roller, like other communist men of his generation, could not have been a card-carrying member at that stage, since that would have formed material proof of conspiratorial activity.

[9] According to political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu, Roller was also one of the Jewish and Bessarabian "déclassés" who gained top PCdR positions in the Chișinevschi–Răutu faction, and in fact a staunch anti-intellectual.

[12] Roller, who also supervised the creation of workers' antifascist sections in Bucharest in September 1934,[13] is mentioned as one of the PCdR and PSU activists who signed a formal protest against "the numerous abusive and illegal acts perpetrated by the organs of repression".

[16] A Siguranța note of May 1937 mentions the publication of his first standalone brochure, titled Din istoria drepturilor omului ("From the History of the Rights of Man") and prefaced by philosopher Constantin Rădulescu-Motru.

[3] The team comprising Roller, Răutu, Chișinevschi, Toma, Nicolae Moraru and Ofelia Manole was effectively in control of the entire directorate until 1953, and helped reconfigure Romanian culture in conformity with the Zhdanov Doctrine.

[1] However, political propaganda was still Roller's main task at that early a stage; for instance, he authored a series of articles in Scînteia meant to combat the National Peasants' Party prior to the 1946 election.

[27] Also then, Frunză notes, Roller took part in the semi-compulsory Russification campaign, launching the agitprop slogan Să învățăm limba lui Lenin și Stalin!

[29] By the summer of 1947, Roller's other party work involved exercising direct communist control over a left-wing student movement (the Democratic University Front) and instigating a purge of the "reactionary" professors.

Roller was part of a wave of new academicians; as noted by various authors, most of these were of peripheral importance in their fields, but were staunch adherents of communism and ready to act as ideological enforcers.

Roller believed the academy should shift from its former position of "a feudal caste, a closed circle, isolated from the masses and the people's needs" into "a living and active factor in the development of our science and culture".

[3][4] As a means of solidifying his control over Romanian historiography, Roller promoted his supporters at the academy's history institutes, especially the Bucharest branch, headed from 1953 by Victor Cheresteșiu and his deputy Aurel Roman.

Appearing very quickly ("in record time", according to Stoian),[1] it was not written from scratch by Roller and his collaborators, but rather used documents from the PCR's period of illegality, especially the theses adopted by the fifth party congress held near Moscow in 1931.

[54] Of the leaders, only Nicolae Bălcescu was appreciated for combating feudalism and siding with Tsarist Russia; at the other end, Avram Iancu was chided for collaborating with the Austrian Empire.

[61] According to Stoian, the political history sections was largely reliant on fabricated and backdated documents, and justified the PCdR/PMR repression of its enemies, including the "right-wing social democrats" and the Zionists.

[4][63] Pleșa does give credit to Roller for ordering publication of documents from the country's medieval period, previously missing from print nearly in their entirety, and of an index to the Hurmuzachi collection that had become virtually unusable.

[4] A frequent target of Roller's many articles in Scînteia, Lupta de Clasă and Studii was the pre-communist historiography, which he accused of falsifying the role of the working class and of the masses more broadly.

He reiterated that pre-communist historians served the "bourgeois-landowning" regimes dominated by "foreign imperialists", who wished the Romanian people to remain ignorant of their history so they could more easily be exploited.

He sought to imbue the educational system with a class character and make it serve the interests of workers, peasants and "progressive intellectuals", including those who had rushed to the new regime's side.

[65] In one instance, Roller explained that, as long as the old teaching staff could include a "war criminal" such as Ion Petrovici, his own colleagues, Răutu and Chișinevschi, were fit to lecture in Marxism-Leninism at the University of Bucharest.

Along with Radu Vulpe, he was berating for issuing field reports that were purely technical rather than ideologically shaded, concluding that "they do not seek to shed light, using scientific concepts, on the problems of the ancient history of the Romanian People's Republic".

The death of Stalin and the Khrushchev Thaw had echoes within Romania: the country's leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, with an eye to United Nations membership, relaxed repressive measures.

He also drew to his side the Romanian Academy members Constantin Daicoviciu, David Prodan and Andrei Oțetea, as well as education minister Ilie Murgulescu, and later some of Roller's former collaborators, including Vasile Maciu, Victor Cheresteșiu and Barbu Câmpina.

[71] In 1955, he also lost his position at the Agitprop section and was transferred to become deputy director of the PMR History Institute, wielding more power than the titular head, Constantin Pîrvulescu.

At the same time as the plenary, a joint meeting of Romanian and Soviet historians took place at which Oțetea sharply criticized Roller for the unprofessionalism with which he published documents and announced they would be republished.

Kirileanu accentuated the Jewish component of Roller's identity, referring to him as a "rabbi's son", and arguing that, through him, "Jews impose[d] their point on view on the evolution of Romanian spirituality.

[81] Tismăneanu and historian Cristian Vasile note that Roller's downfall was a sacrificial offering by Leonte Răutu, who survived the "unmasking" period and was still a culture boss under the national communism of the 1960s.

Some of the first monographs dealing with Roller's career and its impact on Romania were published by Romulus Rusan, the Civic Alliance Foundation, and the Sighet Memorial of the Victims of Communism.

"[1] Senior historian Florin Constantiniu reflected back on the communist period, coining the popular (but, according to Cristian Vasile, melodramatic) image of Roller as "the gravedigger of authentic Romanian culture".