being asked to hide some illegal party documents (speeches at a Comintern meeting in Prague) at his home. In 1935, the moderate left-wing Dimineața newspaper was competing against Universul, a nationalist right-wing newspaper. To eliminate his rival, the owner of Universul, Stelian Popescu, began an anti-Semitic campaign (the owners of Dimineața were Jews) leading to fascists burning copies of the newspaper and associated posters. The communist and socialist youth organized vigilante groups to defend the newsstands. 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. He subsequently worked as a journalist, first writing a fashionable social column at Gazeta de seară, then working as a proofreader at Adevărul Literar Brucan met Aurel Alicu, a leader of the National Peasant Youth, with whom he started in 1937 a weekly called Dacia Nouă, having writers from both the traditional parties (National Liberal and National Peasants Party) and from left-wing circles (Miron Constantinescu, Corneliu Mănescu, Roman Moldovan, and Victor Iliu). The newspaper was published for a year until the Octavian Goga government shut it down. In late 1938, he was conscripted, serving at a border guard unit at the frontier with Bulgaria, where he was acquainted with both komitadji extremists who attacked Romanian outposts, the Aromanian colonists in Southern Dobruja, and the Middle Eastern smugglers who illegally crossed the border with hashish or opium. 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. In 1943, he was arrested by a police agent who accidentally noticed him on Buzești Street, recalling his face from a photograph of a fellow Communist who had been previously arrested. However, as the police could not find any incriminating evidence, he was released a few days later. After the 23 August 1944 coup 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. As long as the other newspapers still were published, Scînteia competed with them for the readers and Brucan, with the rest of the editors, tried to make a