 Nicolau also joined the Romanian section of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West, where he lectured on topics such as history and social sciences, and worked as a teacher for the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages.Nicolau was among the Romanian Communist refugees in Soviet Russia who in 1924 signed a memorandum calling for the creation of a Moldovan national territory inside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, near the disputed border with Romania.Along with Dicescu, the main author of the document, Nicolau considered Moldovans to be Romanians, and saw the new polity primarily as a base for propaganda across the Dniester, in Bessarabia and Romania.