[5] In his memories, Brucan said that the sharp contrast between the world of luxury of the privileged classes and the misery of those who worked hard all day to earn a living and the feeling of social injustice strongly influenced him.
[5] As a social outcast (his father had been indicted for fraudulent bankruptcy) and as a Jew in the 1930s, he was prevented by the Iron Guard supporters from formally studying at the University of Bucharest.
In his memoirs, Brucan stated that he was part of one of the left-wing groups defending the newsstands at Gara de Nord, and was involved in a fight with Iron Guard supporters, sustaining a severe head injury.
[10][11] During World War II, Brucan lived in the attic of a house in a quiet area in Cotroceni, working as an illegal press worker for the Communist Party's newspaper Scînteia.
[13] In September 1944, upon Romania's exit from the Axis camp and the onset of Soviet occupation, he was named the general secretary of Scînteia (the deputy editor in chief to Leonte Răutu), the official newspaper of the Communist Party.
[2] A close collaborator of Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej,[2][19] Brucan, along with Sorin Toma and Mihail Roller, was among the prominent party ideologues of the group that was co-ordinated by Leonte Răutu after the late 1940s and into the 1950s.
Initially, upon news that Ceaușescu had been appointed general secretary, he reportedly considered renouncing his political career to focus on an office at the university, but he was persuaded by Emil Bodnăraș to remain an activist.
Brucan also claimed to have been invited to Moscow by Soviet politicians Mikhail Gorbachev and Anatoly Dobrynin,[2][14] who endorsed criticism of Ceaușescu and a Romanian version of Glasnost.
[19] The fact that Ceaușescu allowed Brucan freedom of movement shows that Ceaușescu was not subjecting him to the same restrictions as to common dissidents, especially because of the interest about the safety of Brucan by both the Soviet Union (by making sure that the Pravda correspondent in Bucharest would keep close contact with him) and the governments of Great Britain and the United States by inviting him as a special guest in their countries.
[28] Although lacking in actual popular support,[31] the letter was argued to be among the most important and influential acts of opposition and a notorious break with the traditions of strict obedience and party discipline.
[32] Brucan was part of the National Salvation Front (FSN) during the Romanian Revolution, joining its Provisional Council and its executive committee.
[19][33] He was a member of the council (together with Ion Iliescu, Petre Roman and some generals, including Nicolae Militaru) who decided to put the Ceaușescu couple on trial at the site in which they were being held in Târgoviște.
[34] When it was decided that the 10-point programme be read on national television on 22 December, according to Dumitru Mazilu, Brucan wanted it to include a clause that Romania would honour its obligations under the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact.
[36] After public allegations, Brucan resigned from the FSN in February 1990, claiming that he had accomplished his mission to restore stability in Romania and to put the country on a course toward multi-party elections.
Early that year, he had been the host of investor George Soros at the Group for Social Dialogue, a Romanian NGO that had been formed around the intellectual élite of the previous regime.
From the late 1990s, Brucan hosted a news commentary program on the ProTV network (Profeții despre trecut - "Foretellings on the Past"), initially together with Lucian Mândruță.
In 1998, he was brought to court by Vasile Lupu, a leader of the Christian-Democratic National Peasants' Party (PNȚCD) and a deputy for Iași County.
[44] According to Victor Neumann, Brucan's role in the Bucharest episode of the 1989 Revolution had apparently helped indirectly the original and virtually unrelated revolt in Timișoara, especially by preventing a more violent repression against it, but it was never explained.
[47] Overall, Neumann contended, Silviu Brucan's political and diplomatic expertise, as well as his adaptability, had made this old Stalinist the "ideologist of political transformations in 1989 Romania",[48] and had contributed to the supremacy of left-wing discourse in the years following the Revolution[49] (in regard to the latter point, he cited Brucan arguments, which challenged the existence of the right-wing themes in the ideological makeup of the 1989 movement).