Lupeni strike of 1929
(After the strike, the opposition press asserted that the union had very close links with the PNȚ and that its members had taken part in a large electoral demonstration in Alba Iulia in May 1928.)
However, communist agitators were active in the spring of 1929 in the Jiu Valley,[1] and the workers grew increasingly desperate as their conditions failed to improve and the court's ruling was delayed.
On the morning of 5 August, following a decision by the mine owners not to allow the union to pay each employee a days' wages from its own funds, some 200 workers met and decided to strike.
A radical group went inside, forcing the men there to stop their work, endangering the lives of 200 miners still underground (who had refused to join the strike) and causing a power outage for the entire Jiu Valley.
(A prosecutor later reported that the men inside the power station were "armed with stakes, iron bars, bludgeons and revolvers and were awaiting the authorities with aggressive poses".)
As the miners' aggressiveness was undiminished, the troops fired 78 bullets into the crowd (without orders, as established by an enquiry), some lodging in the power station's chimney.
On 9 August, the 20 miners (or 22[9]) were buried under tight security, with only their closest relatives allowed to be present; the graves were closely guarded for a time so as to prevent new disturbances.
Another member of the government blamed the mine directors; he alleged that the repeated refusals of the bosses to yield to the workers' demands and their dismissive assertions that they were led on by provocateurs of the banned Romanian Communist Party had driven them to desperation.
The mines belonged to a group of bankers from the National Liberal Party (the Peasants' bitter rivals), and one of their owners was Gheorghe Tătărescu, a minister in the previous government.
Later, the chief military and civilian figures responsible for the shooting were removed from their positions as the press came to accept the fact that the strike dealt with poor conditions and was not a communist-led anti-regime action.
As early as 9 August, the left-leaning Adevărul wrote: "What happened at Lupeni is a warning for our leaders, who for ten years have divided the country and ruined her economically, everywhere spreading misery, the mother of desperate mass actions".
Răducanu, the Minister of Labour, went to the Jiu Valley to investigate, and even Nicolae Lupu, a prominent PNȚ politician, pleaded the workers' cause in Parliament.
The film, inspired by The Battleship Potemkin, portrayed the event as part of the class struggle and was also directed against the then-disgraced underground party activists; the role of the traitor Lucan was based on Vasile Luca (who participated in the preparations for the strike), fictionalised as the embodiment of human abjectness.
[12][13] As late as 1999, the strike still featured in Romanian political discourse, when a press release of the Ministry of Defense (then in the hands of anti-communists), in response to ex-communist former President Ion Iliescu's commemoration of the strike, described it as "a deliberate provocation of the Comintern, which evidently wished to destabilise the Romanian state" and asserted that the army's "energetic intervention" at the time "re-established peace and the rule of law".
