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largest protest movement against the Communist regime in Romania
The Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977 was the largest protest movement against the Communist regime in Romania before its final days. It took place 1–3 August 1977 and was centered in the coal mining town of Lupeni, in Transylvania's Jiu Valley.
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The Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977 was the largest protest movement against the Communist regime in Romania before its final days. It took place 1–3 August 1977 and was centered in the coal mining town of Lupeni, in Transylvania's Jiu Valley.
The immediate cause of the strike was Law 3/1977 (enacted on 30 June 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, 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 physically assaulted by the miners.
Of 90,000 miners in the Jiu Valley, 35,000 decided to stop working on the evening of 1 August. Those at Lupeni were immediately joined by their fellow miners from nearby locations such as Uricani, Paroșeni, 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 Dumitrașcu, Mihai Slavovschi the engineer Jurcă and the Amariei brothers. They requested that President Nicolae Ceaușescu personally come to Lupeni to receive their demands and negotiate with them. Speeches containing demands were made and the Valley was in a state of maximum tension.
Frightened by the events, on 2 August the authorities sent a negotiating team from Bucharest. Ilie Verdeț (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, Verdeț a former miner himself. Dobre, a pit brigade chief from the Paroșeni mine, later recalled Verdeț'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 Ceaușescu could decide to alleviate. At this point the crowd shouted, demanding Ceaușescu's personal presence, whereupon Verdeț claimed the President was occupied with "urgent party and state problems" and that if work resumed Verdeț would "guarantee" his return to the Valley within a month with a favourable reply from Ceaușescu. 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 Ceaușescu personally came and publicly promised to resolve their grievances. Booed, insulted and pelted with food scraps, Verdeț 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, Verdeț promised the miners that he would convince Ceaușescu to come.
What happened next is a matter of dispute. Dobre insists that the two party functionaries were held hostage in the booth until Ceaușescu's arrival, given only water and monitored in their conversations with Bucharest; other sources confirm this account. Verdeț 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 Ceaușescu's arrival, Securitate troops as well as party functionaries were called in from Craiova, Târgu-Jiu and Deva to try to disperse the protesters.
When the strike broke out, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were on a Black Sea vacation. At Verdeț's insistence, he hastily came to Petroșani on 3 August 1977, and 35,000 people (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 "Ceaușescu 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 Ceaușescu, 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 Ceaușescu, 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, Ceaușescu 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".
Visibly shaken according to Dobre, Ceaușescu 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 Ceaușescu 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, Ceaușescu warned that "If you do not go back to work we'll have to stop pussyfooting around!" According to observers, "Down with Ceaușescu!" was then heard after prolonged booing, an account confirmed by Verdeț. Only when Dobre seized the microphone and urged the miners to let Ceaușescu 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. Verdeț and Pană were released and the strike came to an end immediately after Ceaușescu'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 bourgeoisie", 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.
The first session of the party's Central Committee after the strike took place on 4 August; it was entirely devoted to discussing the previous days' events and participants were preoccupied with finding someone to blame for what had happened. Verdeț was named at the head of a commission which investigated the strike's causes. Ceaușescu pointed the finger at "the party personnel from the region and the Mines Directorate".
Repression, led by Generals Emil Macri and Nicolae Pleșiță, 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 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 Petroșani 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.
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