Nicolae Ceauşescu and the Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977

Abstract

The miners' strike of 1‐3 August 1977, in the Jiu Valley, Romania's largest coalfield, was a rare example of popular revolt against the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, although it did not take on an explicitly political character. This article places the strike in its international and domestic, political, and especially economic, contexts. The miners' unrest was the result of deteriorating living and working conditions, as the regime, increasingly in debt to western banks and hit by the global economic downturn, accelerated industrial investment at the expense of other sectors. This mass strike, which mobilised around a third of the miners in a proletarian 'bastion', shook the regime, and even brought Ceauşescu to visit the Jiu Valley in person, and it extracted a range of concessions. However, as archives of the Securitate secret police show, masked methods of repression were used against the miners and their leaders, while concessions were quickly reneged upon. This strike against a 'workers' state' anticipated further breaks in the social pact between the regime and the Romanian people, culminating in the fall of Ceauşescu in December 1989.