Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977
Encyclopedia
The Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977 was the largest protest movement against the Communist regime
in Romania
before its final days
, ushering in a period of intermittent labour unrest that would last a dozen years, and the most important challenge posed by a group of workers to the regime since the protests triggered by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It took place from August 1-3 1977 and was centred in the mining town of Lupeni
, in Transylvania
's Jiu Valley
.
Before the strike began (and perhaps while it was going on), some miners proposed sending a delegation to the capital, Bucharest
, to discuss their problems with the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party
, but this option was discarded as they probably thought any split to two locations would fatally undermine their cause. During the pre-strike period and just as the strike began, certain of the sectoral party chiefs who obstructed the miners' efforts were verbally and even physically assaulted by the miners.
, Paroşeni, Aninoasa
and Petrila
. A list of 17 demands, approved by the strikers as a body, was drawn up by the strike leaders, Ioan Constantin (Costică) Dobre (b. 1947) and Gheorghe Maniliuc, who were aided by Dumitru Iacob, Ion Petrilă, Dumitru Dumitraşcu, Mihai Slavovschi the engineer Jurcă and the Amariei brothers. They requested that President
Nicolae Ceauşescu
personally come to Lupeni to receive their demands negotiate with them. Speeches containing demands were made and the Valley was in a state of maximum tension.
Frightened by the events, on August 2 the authorities sent a negotiating team from Bucharest. Ilie Verdeţ
(first vice-president of the Council of Ministers) and Gheorghe Pană (president of the Central Council of the General Trade Union Confederation of Romania and Minister of Labour) were both Politburo
members, Verdeţ a former miner himself. Dobre, a pit brigade chief from the Paroşeni mine, later recalled Verdeţ's speech (attended by some 20,000 miners), in which he stated he could not decide what measures to take but was merely there to find out about the miners' problems, which only Ceauşescu could decide to alleviate. At this point the crowd shouted, demanding Ceauşescu's personal presence, whereupon Verdeţ claimed the President was occupied with "urgent party and state problems" and that if work resumed Verdeţ would "guarantee" his return to the Valley within a month with a favourable reply from Ceauşescu. These promises were regarded with great suspicion by the crowd, which, emboldened, began booing again and warned that they would not go back to work until Ceauşescu personally came and publicly promised to resolve their grievances. Booed, insulted and pelted with food scraps, Verdeţ and Pană hid behind Dobre and, backed up against the wall of the gatekeeper's booth, nervously begged him to assure their safety. Literally backed into a corner, Verdeţ promised the miners that he would convince Ceauşescu to come.
What happened next is a matter of dispute. Dobre insists that the two party functionaries were held hostage in the booth until Ceauşescu's arrival, given only water and monitored in their conversations with Bucharest; other sources confirm this account. Verdeţ dismissed this version as being merely a legend.
In order to avoid the possibility of violent clashes, the Jiu Valley authorities infiltrated the area with informers and Securitate
members, but avoided the visible imposition of martial law, also to keep tensions down. Arms depots were guarded for fear the miners might raid them. On the day of Ceauşescu's arrival, Securitate troops as well as party functionaries were called in from Craiova
, Târgu-Jiu and Deva
to try to disperse the protesters.
were on a Black Sea
vacation. At Verdeţ' insistence, he hastily came to Petroşani on August 3. 35,000 (some sources say 40,000) came to see him – to be sure, not all had come to hold a dialogue with him, but went out of curiosity or carried away by events, but the audience was nonetheless impressive in size. At first, despite the charged atmosphere, some shouted "Ceauşescu and the miners!", but others yelled "Lupeni '29! Lupeni '29!" (in reference to the Lupeni Strike of 1929
, enshrined in the mythology of the Romanian Communist Party
), in an effort to add legitimacy to their cause. Dobre read the list of grievances to Ceauşescu, presenting 26 demands related to work hours, production targets, pensions, supplies, housing and investments. They asked for a restoration of the status quo ante in social legislation, the guarantee of adequate food supplies and medical care, the establishment of workers’ commissions at the enterprise level empowered to dismiss incompetent or corrupt managers, and a pledge of no reprisals against the strikers. After that, Dobre recalled, "While my name was being shouted, I turned toward Ceauşescu, gave him the list from which I had read and he said to me: 'Thank you for informing me, comrade'. Once in front of the microphones, Ceauşescu was not allowed to speak. Some were booing him, others shouted that they wouldn't go into the mine, and from afar one could hear my name. In vain the appeals for quiet with raised arms from the activists on the podium".
Indeed, a visibly shaken Ceauşescu gave a halting 5-hour (other sources say 7-hour) speech that was soon interrupted by boos. Beginning in a trembling voice, he made an initial, hopeless attempt to send the miners back to work: “Comrades, this is not the war… this is a disgrace for the entire nation… a disgrace! I have taken note of your grievances.” He tried to explain the party's policy and appeal to the miners through demagogy, claiming that the party leadership had wanted to reduce working hours but that the miners had resisted, which insult to their intelligence was met by cries of “It is not us! Bandits, thieves!” A general murmur of the crowd ran through the speech, along with protests and outbursts of anger; whenever Ceauşescu began to stumble over his words, some of the men booed and whistled. Proposing that the six-hour day be introduced gradually at Lupeni and then at the other mines, the men replied, “A six-hour day from tomorrow.” Toward the end, when, angered by their audacity, he still refused to grant an immediate six-hour workday, phrases loudly heckled included "He has no idea what the people's interests are" and "He is not concerned with the workers' fundamental interests". Starting to threaten them, Ceauşescu warned that “If you do not go back to work we'll have to stop pussyfooting around!” According to observers, "Down with Ceauşescu!" was then heard after prolonged booing, an account confirmed by Verdeţ. Refusing to grasp what was taking place – a break between Party and workers on a scale unprecedented in Communist Romania –, he was both shocked by his inability to connect with the workers and frightened for his physical safety (once in the workers' midst, there was little chance for law enforcement to protect him). Only when Dobre seized the microphone and urged the miners to let Ceauşescu finish did the atmosphere become less charged. At that point he saw that his only exit lay in making conciliatory promises he had no intention of honouring; using the wooden language that miners trust, he promised to resolve their grievances (agreeing to a six-hour workday for everyone, with Saturdays and Sundays off, and to build factories that would provide jobs for miners' wives and daughters), vowed those responsible for the miners' discontent would be brought to account and that there would be no retribution, and was applauded. "Calm down and go back to work", he said, after which, exhausted by the speech and the tension which made him feel insecure, he felt physically weak when leaving the platform, having to lean on one of his men. Verdeţ and Pană were released and the strike came to an end immediately after Ceauşescu's departure, the men dispersing and some going into the mines for the August 3 evening shift. They even offered to make up the time lost during the strike.
One significant slogan used during the strike was "Down with the proletarian bourgeosie", which was targeted against the Communist functionaries who administered the Valley and profited from the miners' labour and caused their salaries to be kept down. In using it, they attacked the perceived injustice of the hierarchical Communist system with its bureaucratic nomenklatura
(which existed alongside its political and repressive sides, represented by the party and the Securitate), and invoked the Communists' decades-long struggle against the bourgeoisie in an ironic sense. To them, the regime had become a state in which capitalism continued to operate, albeit in the service of a clearly delineated group of bureaucrats.
Repression, led by Generals Emil Macri and Nicolae Pleşiţă
, took various forms. After Dobre spoke, the miners realised he would be targeted and so guarded his residence in order to prevent his arrest. He was not arrested on the spot; instead, the authorities busied themselves with identifying the miners: engineers and section heads were called to Securitate headquarters to identify them from pictures that had been taken secretly. All strikers who were party members were sanctioned or even removed from the party. Some of the miners were sent back to their native counties
. Those who were considered to have been actively violent during the strike were tried and sentenced to 2–5 years' imprisonment through correctional labour for disturbing the public order and offending good morals. In practice, correctional labour meant internal deportation, although some strikers did go to prison. The miners were intimidated and attacked, along with their families in certain cases. Miners who were questioned were insistently asked never again to strike or speak out against the party. Many strikers were called to the Petroşani Securitate building, where they were repeatedly mistreated during interrogations by, for instance, being beaten over the head and having their fingers bound to doors. The ensuing investigation tried to discover where the core of support for the strike lay, and while some 4,000 workers were moved to other mining areas in the following months, others were said to have ended up in labour camps on the Danube-Black Sea Canal
. The main strike leaders disappeared within weeks, with other outspoken miners rounded up piecemeal and dispersed over the next few months. The concessions held long enough for the authorities to break the organisational backbone of the resistance, but eventually most of these were withdrawn and the eight-hour workday imposed, though this was not made official until 1983.
In the party-led meetings that followed the strike, the protesters were labelled "anarchic elements", "base" and "worthless people". At trial they were called "Gypsies", "lowlifes", "impostors" and "infractors". At least 600 miners were interrogated; 150 penal dossiers were opened; 50 were hospitalised in psychiatric wards; 15 were sentenced to correctional labour and actually imprisoned, while a further 300 or more (who were considered dangerous) were internally deported. Almost 4,000 were fired on the pretext that there was no work, or else the smallest dispute with or protest against the mine management was used to sack them. Several hundred families were moved out of the area. After prison or deportation, several former protesters continued to be harassed by the Securitate; one man, disappointed at the outcome of events, became a monk after his release from prison. The area was surrounded by security forces; two helicopters were brought in to monitor happenings and ensure a tight link with Bucharest, although the official reason for their presence was to fly mining accident victims to the hospital.
The number of Securitate and Militia
forces at Petroşani was doubled and military units were placed near all mines in the Jiu Valley. Securitate agents were hired as miners, not only to inform on other workers, but also to exert psychological pressures on them and even beat them before witnesses so as to create a climate of intimidation. A relatively large number of common criminals released from prison were brought into the mines as well. The Valley was declared a restricted area from August 4 until January 1, 1978. Strict surveillance was intended to block the flow of any information to the rest of the country or contact with the outside world, yet 22 miners acting on behalf of 800 others managed to send a letter (dated September 18) to the French
newspaper Libération
, which published it on October 12. Foreign media drew a link between Paul Goma
's movement that spring and the miners' unrest several months later, though no connection actually existed.
, Turda
and Iaşi
, where students and workers in two separate protests apparently marched through the streets to party headquarters. There was a strict news blackout on such events, but it seems these were peacefully and easily defused given the non-political nature of the demands (poor factory and dormitory conditions) and their timely resolution. The Jiu Valley strike, along with the Goma episode, taught dissidents that any public deviation from the regime would not be tolerated.
Gheorghe Maniliuc was imprisoned for three and a half years, and after his release died in 1987 of heart trouble. Dobre's fate was long a source of speculation – even the first version of the Tismăneanu Report
claimed he had been killed, while others theorised he became a party activist, was put in a mental hospital, etc. Dobre gave an interview in 2007 in which he clarified later events. The salient points of his later life are as follows: he and his family were moved to Craiova
on August 31, 1977, where they lived until May 1990, in total isolation and under constant Securitate surveillance until December 1989 (over 50 agents informed on him). He was given work as an unskilled auto mechanic and, after a calculated rejection from other universities, he attended the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy
in the 1980s but never authored Communist propaganda and showed a rebellious attitude toward the faculty. He repeatedly asked to be permitted to emigrate but was refused, and holds the Securitate responsible for the 1979 airplane crash that killed his brother, a pilot. During the Revolution, he was hailed by a crowd in Petroşani and appeared on television but was sidelined due to his hostility toward the National Salvation Front, being labelled an "extremist" and a "terrorist", particularly in the Craiova and Jiu Valley newspapers. In spring he moved to Bucharest, but soon the June 1990 Mineriad
broke out and barely managed to hide from a group of armed miners looking for him. He arrived with his family in London
that September, seeking asylum, was sentenced in absentia by a Romanian court to five years' imprisonment in 1992, was granted asylum in 1994 and became a British citizen
in 2002.
a few years later. In a country labouring under hardline Communism, the strike offered a brief opportunity for an exercise in democracy: for almost three days, miners demanded and protested before a microphone; they spoke freely, none were excluded and no censorship was imposed. Those investigating the miners who had been arrested perceived the strike as an "uprising", frequently using this term during interrogations. This term had significant implications as the miners were part of a social class until then supposed to be an ally of the party, and the apparent break with workers frightened the leadership boded ill for the regime, which could depend even less upon the peasants (then being forced into agricultural cooperatives) or the intellectual élite (part of which at the time was chafing under the rise of Protochronism
heralded six years earlier by the July Theses
). Ceauşescu himself appeared stricken; as his near-fainting episode indicates, he was not prepared for the outbreak of dissent and had seen that the regime was not as stable as he might have believed. It was, Verdeţ said, "the first self-abasement of Ceauşescu's political career."
The strike—probably the first workers' protest since 1958, with the exception of a September 1972 strike in the Jiu Valley—began not as an anti-Communist or even an anti-Ceauşescu movement but rather a socio-economic one in spontaneous reaction to the new pensions law, as confirmed by the miners’ inexperience, which led them to improvisation and hasty decision-making. However, once the Communist leaders were sequestered, it moved in a political direction and, given the repression that followed, was interpreted as such by the authorities. At the same time, the strike did have an intrinsically political character in the sense that the miners—thought of as essential components of the Communist working class—revolted against their ideological bosses and conditions created by the very political system that used them as part of its labour force. So while collective and unpremeditated, the protest challenged the Communist leadership of the day and ultimately the regime itself.
Just how significant the strike's implications were becomes apparent when considering the miner's place in Communist myth-making: he represented an “archetypal proletarian”, a “new man” whose symbolic aura was conferred by his Stakhanovite
determination. The idea of the new man particularly caught on in areas dominated by a single industry, like the Jiu Valley, where the working masses could easily be controlled by the party. The uneducated miners, drawn largely from poor rural or socially disadvantaged layers of society, believed in the Communist ideology and discourse, which rang true to them, and awaited the arrival of a classless society. The miserable conditions in which they actually lived did not match the propaganda, and the disillusioned miners responded forcefully. After the strike, Ceauşescu took to posing as an “honorary miner” or as a national leader flanked by Securitate members dressed up as miners. He had been genuinely shocked that the representatives par excellence of the new man had unexpectedly revolted against the system that had so carefully crafted them. The image of the model miner had come crashing down, and for that reason the strikers were terrorized—they had destroyed a myth that had served not only them and other “new men”, but also Ceauşescu himself.
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
in Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
before its final days
Romanian Revolution of 1989
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...
, ushering in a period of intermittent labour unrest that would last a dozen years, and the most important challenge posed by a group of workers to the regime since the protests triggered by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It took place from August 1-3 1977 and was centred in the mining town of Lupeni
Lupeni
Lupeni is a mining city in the Jiu Valley in Hunedoara County, Romania with a population of 31,409. It is one of the oldest and largest cities in the Jiu Valley. It is located on the banks of the West Jiu river within the Jiu Valley, at a height varying between 630 m and 760 m...
, in Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
's Jiu Valley
Jiu Valley
The Jiu Valley is a region in southwestern Romania, in Hunedoara county, situated in a valley of the Jiu River between the Retezat Mountains and the Parâng Mountains...
.
Prelude
The immediate cause of the strike was Law 3/1977 (enacted on June 30 that year), which ended disability pensions for miners and raised the retirement age from fifty to fifty-five. Other issues included the extension of workdays beyond the legal eight hours, low wages, overtime not paid since March, work on Sundays, paycheck deductions for failing to meet production targets, poor living conditions and the leadership's indifference toward their plight.Before the strike began (and perhaps while it was going on), some miners proposed sending a delegation to the capital, Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
, to discuss their problems with the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
, but this option was discarded as they probably thought any split to two locations would fatally undermine their cause. During the pre-strike period and just as the strike began, certain of the sectoral party chiefs who obstructed the miners' efforts were verbally and even physically assaulted by the miners.
Opening and first attempt at resolution
Of 90,000 miners in the Jiu Valley, 35,000 decided to stop working on the evening of August 1. Those at Lupeni were immediately joined by their fellow miners from nearby locations such as UricaniUricani
Uricani is a town in the Jiu Valley region of Hunedoara County, in southern Transylvania, Romania. it had a population of 10,307.-History:Uricani is first mentioned in a certified document dated 1818, when the locality was referred to as Hobiceni-Uricani, the name it carried until the union of 1918...
, Paroşeni, Aninoasa
Aninoasa
Aninoasa is a town in Hunedoara County in the Transylvania region of Romania. The town is located in Jiu Valley, which is a coal basin, and many of the towns residents are coal miners...
and Petrila
Petrila
Petrila is a town in the Jiu Valley, Hunedoara County, Romania. It is located near the junction of the East Jiu with Taia and Jieţ Creeks.The town administers four villages: Cimpa, Jieţ, Răscoala and Tirici.-History:...
. A list of 17 demands, approved by the strikers as a body, was drawn up by the strike leaders, Ioan Constantin (Costică) Dobre (b. 1947) and Gheorghe Maniliuc, who were aided by Dumitru Iacob, Ion Petrilă, Dumitru Dumitraşcu, Mihai Slavovschi the engineer Jurcă and the Amariei brothers. They requested that President
President of Romania
The President of Romania is the head of state of Romania. The President is directly elected by a two-round system for a five-year term . An individual may serve two terms...
Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
personally come to Lupeni to receive their demands negotiate with them. Speeches containing demands were made and the Valley was in a state of maximum tension.
Frightened by the events, on August 2 the authorities sent a negotiating team from Bucharest. Ilie Verdeţ
Ilie Verdet
Ilie Verdeţ was a Romanian politician.Born in Comăneşti, Bacău County, and a miner from age 12, he joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1945. After graduating from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, he climbed through the Party apparatus...
(first vice-president of the Council of Ministers) and Gheorghe Pană (president of the Central Council of the General Trade Union Confederation of Romania and Minister of Labour) were both Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
members, Verdeţ a former miner himself. Dobre, a pit brigade chief from the Paroşeni mine, later recalled Verdeţ's speech (attended by some 20,000 miners), in which he stated he could not decide what measures to take but was merely there to find out about the miners' problems, which only Ceauşescu could decide to alleviate. At this point the crowd shouted, demanding Ceauşescu's personal presence, whereupon Verdeţ claimed the President was occupied with "urgent party and state problems" and that if work resumed Verdeţ would "guarantee" his return to the Valley within a month with a favourable reply from Ceauşescu. These promises were regarded with great suspicion by the crowd, which, emboldened, began booing again and warned that they would not go back to work until Ceauşescu personally came and publicly promised to resolve their grievances. Booed, insulted and pelted with food scraps, Verdeţ and Pană hid behind Dobre and, backed up against the wall of the gatekeeper's booth, nervously begged him to assure their safety. Literally backed into a corner, Verdeţ promised the miners that he would convince Ceauşescu to come.
What happened next is a matter of dispute. Dobre insists that the two party functionaries were held hostage in the booth until Ceauşescu's arrival, given only water and monitored in their conversations with Bucharest; other sources confirm this account. Verdeţ dismissed this version as being merely a legend.
In order to avoid the possibility of violent clashes, the Jiu Valley authorities infiltrated the area with informers and Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
members, but avoided the visible imposition of martial law, also to keep tensions down. Arms depots were guarded for fear the miners might raid them. On the day of Ceauşescu's arrival, Securitate troops as well as party functionaries were called in from Craiova
Craiova
Craiova , Romania's 6th largest city and capital of Dolj County, is situated near the east bank of the river Jiu in central Oltenia. It is a longstanding political center, and is located at approximately equal distances from the Southern Carpathians and the River Danube . Craiova is the chief...
, Târgu-Jiu and Deva
Deva, Romania
Deva is a city in Romania, in the historical region of Transylvania, on the left bank of the Mureș River. It is the capital of Hunedoara County.-Name:...
to try to disperse the protesters.
Ceauşescu speaks
When the strike broke out, Ceauşescu and his wife ElenaElena Ceausescu
Elena Ceaușescu was the wife of Romania's Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, and Deputy Prime Minister of Romania.-Background:She was born Elena Petrescu into a peasant family in Petrești commune, Dâmboviţa County, in the informal region of Wallachia. Her family was supported by her father's job...
were on a Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
vacation. At Verdeţ' insistence, he hastily came to Petroşani on August 3. 35,000 (some sources say 40,000) came to see him – to be sure, not all had come to hold a dialogue with him, but went out of curiosity or carried away by events, but the audience was nonetheless impressive in size. At first, despite the charged atmosphere, some shouted "Ceauşescu and the miners!", but others yelled "Lupeni '29! Lupeni '29!" (in reference to the Lupeni Strike of 1929
Lupeni Strike of 1929
The Lupeni Strike of 1929 took place on August 5 and 6 1929 in the mining town of Lupeni, in the Jiu Valley of Transylvania, Romania.-Chronology:...
, enshrined in the mythology of the Romanian Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
), in an effort to add legitimacy to their cause. Dobre read the list of grievances to Ceauşescu, presenting 26 demands related to work hours, production targets, pensions, supplies, housing and investments. They asked for a restoration of the status quo ante in social legislation, the guarantee of adequate food supplies and medical care, the establishment of workers’ commissions at the enterprise level empowered to dismiss incompetent or corrupt managers, and a pledge of no reprisals against the strikers. After that, Dobre recalled, "While my name was being shouted, I turned toward Ceauşescu, gave him the list from which I had read and he said to me: 'Thank you for informing me, comrade'. Once in front of the microphones, Ceauşescu was not allowed to speak. Some were booing him, others shouted that they wouldn't go into the mine, and from afar one could hear my name. In vain the appeals for quiet with raised arms from the activists on the podium".
Indeed, a visibly shaken Ceauşescu gave a halting 5-hour (other sources say 7-hour) speech that was soon interrupted by boos. Beginning in a trembling voice, he made an initial, hopeless attempt to send the miners back to work: “Comrades, this is not the war… this is a disgrace for the entire nation… a disgrace! I have taken note of your grievances.” He tried to explain the party's policy and appeal to the miners through demagogy, claiming that the party leadership had wanted to reduce working hours but that the miners had resisted, which insult to their intelligence was met by cries of “It is not us! Bandits, thieves!” A general murmur of the crowd ran through the speech, along with protests and outbursts of anger; whenever Ceauşescu began to stumble over his words, some of the men booed and whistled. Proposing that the six-hour day be introduced gradually at Lupeni and then at the other mines, the men replied, “A six-hour day from tomorrow.” Toward the end, when, angered by their audacity, he still refused to grant an immediate six-hour workday, phrases loudly heckled included "He has no idea what the people's interests are" and "He is not concerned with the workers' fundamental interests". Starting to threaten them, Ceauşescu warned that “If you do not go back to work we'll have to stop pussyfooting around!” According to observers, "Down with Ceauşescu!" was then heard after prolonged booing, an account confirmed by Verdeţ. Refusing to grasp what was taking place – a break between Party and workers on a scale unprecedented in Communist Romania –, he was both shocked by his inability to connect with the workers and frightened for his physical safety (once in the workers' midst, there was little chance for law enforcement to protect him). Only when Dobre seized the microphone and urged the miners to let Ceauşescu finish did the atmosphere become less charged. At that point he saw that his only exit lay in making conciliatory promises he had no intention of honouring; using the wooden language that miners trust, he promised to resolve their grievances (agreeing to a six-hour workday for everyone, with Saturdays and Sundays off, and to build factories that would provide jobs for miners' wives and daughters), vowed those responsible for the miners' discontent would be brought to account and that there would be no retribution, and was applauded. "Calm down and go back to work", he said, after which, exhausted by the speech and the tension which made him feel insecure, he felt physically weak when leaving the platform, having to lean on one of his men. Verdeţ and Pană were released and the strike came to an end immediately after Ceauşescu's departure, the men dispersing and some going into the mines for the August 3 evening shift. They even offered to make up the time lost during the strike.
One significant slogan used during the strike was "Down with the proletarian bourgeosie", which was targeted against the Communist functionaries who administered the Valley and profited from the miners' labour and caused their salaries to be kept down. In using it, they attacked the perceived injustice of the hierarchical Communist system with its bureaucratic nomenklatura
Nomenklatura
The nomenklatura were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the...
(which existed alongside its political and repressive sides, represented by the party and the Securitate), and invoked the Communists' decades-long struggle against the bourgeoisie in an ironic sense. To them, the regime had become a state in which capitalism continued to operate, albeit in the service of a clearly delineated group of bureaucrats.
Repression
The first session of the party's Central Committee after the strike took place on August 4; it was entirely devoted to discussing the previous days' events and participants were preoccupied with finding someone to blame for what had happened. Verdeţ was named at the head of a commission which investigated the strike's causes. Ceauşescu pointed the finger at "the party personnel from the region and the Mines Directorate".Repression, led by Generals Emil Macri and Nicolae Pleşiţă
Nicolae Pleşiţă
Nicolae Pleşiţă was a Romanian intelligence official and secret police investigator. From 1980 to 1984, he led the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Securitate, the secret service of Communist Romania...
, took various forms. After Dobre spoke, the miners realised he would be targeted and so guarded his residence in order to prevent his arrest. He was not arrested on the spot; instead, the authorities busied themselves with identifying the miners: engineers and section heads were called to Securitate headquarters to identify them from pictures that had been taken secretly. All strikers who were party members were sanctioned or even removed from the party. Some of the miners were sent back to their native counties
Counties of Romania
The 41 judeţe and the municipality of Bucharest comprise the official administrative divisions of Romania. They also represent the European Union' s NUTS-3 geocode statistical subdivision scheme of Romania.-Overview:...
. Those who were considered to have been actively violent during the strike were tried and sentenced to 2–5 years' imprisonment through correctional labour for disturbing the public order and offending good morals. In practice, correctional labour meant internal deportation, although some strikers did go to prison. The miners were intimidated and attacked, along with their families in certain cases. Miners who were questioned were insistently asked never again to strike or speak out against the party. Many strikers were called to the Petroşani Securitate building, where they were repeatedly mistreated during interrogations by, for instance, being beaten over the head and having their fingers bound to doors. The ensuing investigation tried to discover where the core of support for the strike lay, and while some 4,000 workers were moved to other mining areas in the following months, others were said to have ended up in labour camps on the Danube-Black Sea Canal
Danube-Black Sea Canal
The Danube – Black Sea Canal is a canal in Romania which runs from Cernavodă on the Danube to Agigea and Năvodari on the Black Sea...
. The main strike leaders disappeared within weeks, with other outspoken miners rounded up piecemeal and dispersed over the next few months. The concessions held long enough for the authorities to break the organisational backbone of the resistance, but eventually most of these were withdrawn and the eight-hour workday imposed, though this was not made official until 1983.
In the party-led meetings that followed the strike, the protesters were labelled "anarchic elements", "base" and "worthless people". At trial they were called "Gypsies", "lowlifes", "impostors" and "infractors". At least 600 miners were interrogated; 150 penal dossiers were opened; 50 were hospitalised in psychiatric wards; 15 were sentenced to correctional labour and actually imprisoned, while a further 300 or more (who were considered dangerous) were internally deported. Almost 4,000 were fired on the pretext that there was no work, or else the smallest dispute with or protest against the mine management was used to sack them. Several hundred families were moved out of the area. After prison or deportation, several former protesters continued to be harassed by the Securitate; one man, disappointed at the outcome of events, became a monk after his release from prison. The area was surrounded by security forces; two helicopters were brought in to monitor happenings and ensure a tight link with Bucharest, although the official reason for their presence was to fly mining accident victims to the hospital.
The number of Securitate and Militia
Romanian Police
The Romanian Police is the national police force and main civil law enforcement agency in Romania. It is subordinated to the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reform.-Duties:The Romanian Police are responsible for:...
forces at Petroşani was doubled and military units were placed near all mines in the Jiu Valley. Securitate agents were hired as miners, not only to inform on other workers, but also to exert psychological pressures on them and even beat them before witnesses so as to create a climate of intimidation. A relatively large number of common criminals released from prison were brought into the mines as well. The Valley was declared a restricted area from August 4 until January 1, 1978. Strict surveillance was intended to block the flow of any information to the rest of the country or contact with the outside world, yet 22 miners acting on behalf of 800 others managed to send a letter (dated September 18) to the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
newspaper Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
, which published it on October 12. Foreign media drew a link between Paul Goma
Paul Goma
Paul Goma is a Romanian writer, also known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and currently resides in France as a stateless person...
's movement that spring and the miners' unrest several months later, though no connection actually existed.
Aftermath
The response to the unrest—giving the appearance of acquiescing to the workers' demands and meeting local grievances, then isolating the ringleaders by sending them away or imprisoning them once the strike had ended, and reneging on concessions—established a model for dealing with such incidents in the future. For example, other disturbances followed in Cluj-NapocaCluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca , commonly known as Cluj, is the fourth most populous city in Romania and the seat of Cluj County in the northwestern part of the country. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest , Budapest and Belgrade...
, Turda
Turda
Turda is a city and Municipality in Cluj County, Romania, situated on the Arieş River.- Ancient times :The city was founded by Dacians under the name Patavissa or Potaissa...
and Iaşi
Iasi
Iași is the second most populous city and a municipality in Romania. Located in the historical Moldavia region, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life...
, where students and workers in two separate protests apparently marched through the streets to party headquarters. There was a strict news blackout on such events, but it seems these were peacefully and easily defused given the non-political nature of the demands (poor factory and dormitory conditions) and their timely resolution. The Jiu Valley strike, along with the Goma episode, taught dissidents that any public deviation from the regime would not be tolerated.
Gheorghe Maniliuc was imprisoned for three and a half years, and after his release died in 1987 of heart trouble. Dobre's fate was long a source of speculation – even the first version of the Tismăneanu Report
Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania , also known as the Tismăneanu Commission , is a commission instituted in Romania by President Traian Băsescu to investigate the Communist regime and provide a comprehensive report allowing for the condemnation of...
claimed he had been killed, while others theorised he became a party activist, was put in a mental hospital, etc. Dobre gave an interview in 2007 in which he clarified later events. The salient points of his later life are as follows: he and his family were moved to Craiova
Craiova
Craiova , Romania's 6th largest city and capital of Dolj County, is situated near the east bank of the river Jiu in central Oltenia. It is a longstanding political center, and is located at approximately equal distances from the Southern Carpathians and the River Danube . Craiova is the chief...
on August 31, 1977, where they lived until May 1990, in total isolation and under constant Securitate surveillance until December 1989 (over 50 agents informed on him). He was given work as an unskilled auto mechanic and, after a calculated rejection from other universities, he attended the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy
Stefan Gheorghiu Academy
The Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy The Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy The Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy (Romanian: Academia Ştefan Gheorghiu, in full: Academia de învăţămînt social-politic Ştefan Gheorghiu de pe lîngă CC al PCR - approx...
in the 1980s but never authored Communist propaganda and showed a rebellious attitude toward the faculty. He repeatedly asked to be permitted to emigrate but was refused, and holds the Securitate responsible for the 1979 airplane crash that killed his brother, a pilot. During the Revolution, he was hailed by a crowd in Petroşani and appeared on television but was sidelined due to his hostility toward the National Salvation Front, being labelled an "extremist" and a "terrorist", particularly in the Craiova and Jiu Valley newspapers. In spring he moved to Bucharest, but soon the June 1990 Mineriad
June 1990 Mineriad
The June 1990 Mineriad was the suppression of an anti-National Salvation Front sit-in protests in Bucharest, Romania by the violent intervention of coal miners from the Jiu Valley, brought to Bucharest by the government to counter the rising violence of the protesters...
broke out and barely managed to hide from a group of armed miners looking for him. He arrived with his family in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
that September, seeking asylum, was sentenced in absentia by a Romanian court to five years' imprisonment in 1992, was granted asylum in 1994 and became a British citizen
British nationality law
British nationality law is the law of the United Kingdom that concerns citizenship and other categories of British nationality. The law is complex because of the United Kingdom's former status as an imperial power.-History:...
in 2002.
Legacy
Dobre sees the strike as a "prelude" to the events of December 1989. To be sure, the movement helped break down the myth of unity between the Communist Party and the working class, something that Solidarity would continue in PolandPoland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
a few years later. In a country labouring under hardline Communism, the strike offered a brief opportunity for an exercise in democracy: for almost three days, miners demanded and protested before a microphone; they spoke freely, none were excluded and no censorship was imposed. Those investigating the miners who had been arrested perceived the strike as an "uprising", frequently using this term during interrogations. This term had significant implications as the miners were part of a social class until then supposed to be an ally of the party, and the apparent break with workers frightened the leadership boded ill for the regime, which could depend even less upon the peasants (then being forced into agricultural cooperatives) or the intellectual élite (part of which at the time was chafing under the rise of Protochronism
Protochronism
Protochronism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealised past to the country as a whole...
heralded six years earlier by the July Theses
July Theses
The July Theses is a name commonly given to a speech delivered by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on July 6, 1971, before the Executive Committee of the Romanian Communist Party...
). Ceauşescu himself appeared stricken; as his near-fainting episode indicates, he was not prepared for the outbreak of dissent and had seen that the regime was not as stable as he might have believed. It was, Verdeţ said, "the first self-abasement of Ceauşescu's political career."
The strike—probably the first workers' protest since 1958, with the exception of a September 1972 strike in the Jiu Valley—began not as an anti-Communist or even an anti-Ceauşescu movement but rather a socio-economic one in spontaneous reaction to the new pensions law, as confirmed by the miners’ inexperience, which led them to improvisation and hasty decision-making. However, once the Communist leaders were sequestered, it moved in a political direction and, given the repression that followed, was interpreted as such by the authorities. At the same time, the strike did have an intrinsically political character in the sense that the miners—thought of as essential components of the Communist working class—revolted against their ideological bosses and conditions created by the very political system that used them as part of its labour force. So while collective and unpremeditated, the protest challenged the Communist leadership of the day and ultimately the regime itself.
Just how significant the strike's implications were becomes apparent when considering the miner's place in Communist myth-making: he represented an “archetypal proletarian”, a “new man” whose symbolic aura was conferred by his Stakhanovite
Stakhanovite
In Soviet history and iconography, a Stakhanovite follows the example of Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov, employing hard work or Taylorist efficiencies to over-achieve on the job.- History :...
determination. The idea of the new man particularly caught on in areas dominated by a single industry, like the Jiu Valley, where the working masses could easily be controlled by the party. The uneducated miners, drawn largely from poor rural or socially disadvantaged layers of society, believed in the Communist ideology and discourse, which rang true to them, and awaited the arrival of a classless society. The miserable conditions in which they actually lived did not match the propaganda, and the disillusioned miners responded forcefully. After the strike, Ceauşescu took to posing as an “honorary miner” or as a national leader flanked by Securitate members dressed up as miners. He had been genuinely shocked that the representatives par excellence of the new man had unexpectedly revolted against the system that had so carefully crafted them. The image of the model miner had come crashing down, and for that reason the strikers were terrorized—they had destroyed a myth that had served not only them and other “new men”, but also Ceauşescu himself.