Around the scheduled onset of de-Stalinization, Scînteia Tineretului's staff was populated by liberals or generic nonconformists—examples include Teodor Mazilu, Fănuș Neagu, Iosif Sava, and Radu Cosașu.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was received with alarm by the regime, including at Scînteia Tineretului; in its wake, Cosașu was sacked, and the editorial line was more strictly reinforced by a new editor, Dumitru Popescu-Dumnezeu.

Embracing market socialism, the regime tried but largely failed to make Scînteia Tineretului genuinely popular with the youth, especially in rural areas; the lasting result of such policies was that the newspaper diversified its content and earned respect inside the writers' community.

The PCR and UTC intervened more directly to ensure that Scînteia Tineretului was taking part in Ceaușescu's personality cult, thus pushing contributors to adopt a standardized wooden language for much of the content.

[2] Scînteia Tineretului's inauguration came just weeks after the August Coup, which had toppled the repressive dictatorship of Ion Antonescu and had restored multiparty democracy; it had also legalized the PCR and the UTC, and had opened the country to a Soviet occupation.

[10] Gheorghiu tolerated especially harsh mockery of the latter, denouncing it as a venue for escapism; the circle's own publication, Revista Cercului Literar, responded by an article by Ștefan Augustin Doinaș, who declared himself bemused by Scînteia Tineretului's take on literature.

According to Caraion's own account, he was disgusted into the opposition movement when, as a Scînteia Tineretului correspondent, he attended a New Year's Eve party hosted by the PCR Secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej; the latter humiliated his guests by urinating over their buffet while they stood applauding.

[12] Scînteia Tineretului soon became highly politicized, described in a 2007 dictionary of Romanian literature as of an "obvious propaganda-focused [and] normative orientation"; according to this overview, it was especially "aggressive" in the late 1940s, when it was mainly dedicated to imposing the ideological monopoly of Marxism-Leninism.

[19] Throughout the 1950s and into the early '60s, Scînteia Tineretului continued to put out official communiques by the PCR (which was styled "Romanian Workers' Party", or PMR), while also hosting conformist opinion pieces and works in the reportage genre, meant to illustrate the success of communist policies.

[23] In 1953, Mazilu was supervising the latter section, urging its members to "pour more pain" into their on-location coverage of industrialization; Țic briefly took over the coordination of fieldwork, but, by his own account, generated a "complete disaster", upon which the envoys were stranded and penniless.

[25] Enduring as a staff writer throughout the 1949–1956 interval, Mazilu also tested his employers with his unconventional lifestyle and his approach to political commands, producing a string of articles that he later reshaped into a volume of satirical sketches.

This was contributed by writers such as Zaharia Stancu, Geo Bogza, Mihu Dragomir, Corneliu Leu, Savin Bratu, Titus Popovici, Alexandru Mirodan and Eugen Barbu, and later also by Laurențiu Ulici.

[36] On either side of the political repositioning, poetry appeared sporadically, and had two main sources—one was the republication of Romanian classics such as Vasile Alecsandri and George Coșbuc; the other was a sampling of young or mature contemporary poets, selected for their commitment to socialist patriotism.

Examples of the latter include Iureș and Labiș, as well as Florența Albu, Alexandru Andrițoiu, Horia Aramă, Mihai Beniuc, Ion Brad, Marcel Breslașu, Nina Cassian, Dan Deșliu, Eugen Jebeleanu, Florin Mugur, Darie Novăceanu, Adrian Păunescu, Veronica Porumbacu, Marin Sorescu, George Țărnea, Gheorghe Tomozei, and Victor Tulbure.

Commenting on these developments, geographers Octavian Groza and Ionel Muntele noted that traditional villages were more closely integrated with urban culture, which was tinged by propaganda: the Romanian Post would distribute Scînteia Tineretului "down to the very last of the hamlets".

[46] In January 1966, the Directorate of the Press dedicated more funds to increasing the size of its central newspapers, with Scînteia Tineretului now running a six-page issue thrice a week, instead of a once-a-week special.

[49] Around that time, the Directorate became aware that Scînteia Tineretului was one of the newspapers relying on "collective subscriptions" by the state institutions, which had reduced its overall profits and made its actual readership hard to ascertain.

[53] Late that year, Grigore Traian Pop and Elena Zaharia-Filipaș were contributors to a new section on philosophy, introducing Romanian youth to the works of Herbert Marcuse, and classifying the various schools of Existentialism.

Ștefănescu (who held the "young literature" column), Dan Ciachir, Gheorghe Grigurcu, Mircea Iorgulescu, Cornel Nistorescu, Artur Silvestri, and Henri Zalis; their collective effort was toward diversifying the content and securing a venue for freer speech.

[73] Assisted by Ștefănescu and Iorgulescu, in October 1980 he began a campaign against the "literary reportage", compiling an anthology of "received ideas" and inept quotations from the previous decade, and declaring the genre as a whole to have been an instrument for lying.

[73] Scholar Nicolae Bârna reviews SLAST's first-issue manifesto as "opportunistic [and] conformist", though only to the measure were it "blunted the vigilance of 'superior [party] cadres'"; the text paid lip service to "engaged art" as demanded by the authorities, but vented mild criticism of routine and conventionality.

[77] From its first issues, the weekly fascicle had poetry and short prose by authors of various backgrounds—examples include Ciachir, Fruntelată, George Arion, Lucian Avramescu, Traian T. Coșovei, Carmen Firan, Carolina Ilinca, Ioan Lăcustă, Ion Bogdan Lefter, Mircea Nedelciu, Tudor Octavian, Sorin Preda, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, Grete Tartler, Cristian Teodorescu, Doina Uricariu, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor.

[79] SLAST popularized creators in other fields, including theater crafts (as a series of interviews with Cătălina Buzoianu, Mihai Mălaimare, Alexa Visarion, Matei Vișniec, and various others), as well as Romanian science fiction.

[85] In October 1982, at Predeal, Scînteia Tineretului and the UTC hosted a meeting of "central youth newspapers" from all around the Eastern Bloc—with delegations sent by Junge Welt, Juventud Rebelde, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Magyar Ifjúság, Mladá Fronta, Narodna Mladezh, Smena, Sztandar Młodych, and Tiền Phong.

[89] The Optzeciști continued to be featured, but had to pay their own public tributes to the regime's newfound anti-Western sentiment—this was noted by literary historian Marian Victor Buciu in relation to one of Nedelciu's articles for SLAST, which mocked Radio Free Europe.

[92] Despite a pledge to publish only "socialist poetry", SLAST made occasional returns to pure or even cosmopolitan literature—hosting large portions of a novel by Stelian Tănase, and regular translations from various exponents of the Latin American Boom (beginning in 1982, with a conversation between Gabriel García Márquez and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza).

The latter work was also the center of a national controversy, since it exposed the aesthetic compromises made by various authors during the age of Socialist Realism; according to Bârna, this exposure was tacitly endorsed by Ceaușescu's PCR, since it only referred to the Gheorghiu-Dej era.

[97] A set of articles produced in 1987–1988 by Martin, Sorescu and Paul Nancă signaled another challenge to the official policies, giving praise to the Optzeciști and to the emergent "generation of 1990", while also introducing the reading public to the concept of a "postmodern literature".

[107] Publishing some 1,28 million copies per issue in 1990, Tineretul Liber ranked as the third most read daily in Romania—after România Liberă and Adevărul; at the time, it was also fully supportive of the post-communist National Salvation Front and of its leader Ion Iliescu, and gave endorsement to the Mineriad counter-protests.

[106] Tineretul Liber had declared itself a publication for "authentic literature", assigning columns to Nedelciu, Tzone, Dan Stanca, and Cristian Tudor Popescu (alongside Piru and Ștefănescu, who were kept on).