FC Steaua București in European football League semi-final against Benfica (1987–88) and one more Champions League final in 1989, which was lost 4–0 in to the Milan side of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard. During these last years of the Communist regime in Romania, dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's son Valentin was involved in the life of the team. Even though a controversial character, Valentin Ceaușescu admitted in a recent interview he had done nothing else than to protect his favourite team from Dinamo București's sphere of influence, ensured by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Though contested by some, their five-year winning streak in the
Nicolae Iorga 1948, the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History was merged into a communist institution headed by Petre Constantinescu-Iași, while Papacostea was assigned as head of the reorganized ISSEE. Beginning in the 1960s, the national communist authorities capitalized on Nicolae Iorga's image, suggesting that he was a forerunner of Nicolae Ceaușescu's official ideology. Iorga was promoted to the national communist pantheon as an "anti-fascist" and "progressive" intellectual, and references to his lifelong anti-communism were omitted. The ban on his works was selectively lifted, and some of his main books were again in print between 1968 and 1989, along with volumes of his