Gheorghiu-Dej are ousted. The purge takes the shape of a "Romanian ethnicisation" of the party, ethnic Jews and Hungarians being the target. The chief ideologue put in charge of the purge was Leonte Răutu who, in spite of his Jewish roots, had become a stauch Romanian national communist. The "gang" members were even accused of planning to assassinate Răutu. Vladimir Tismăneanu sees the whole affair in the light of a typical Bolshevist show trial, with the Romanian national communists set out to remove Jewish intellectuals from the party. Some Jewish intellectuals, though being former underground fighters, are accused of lacking working class consciousness. Paul Ioanid's Soviet connections have become a burden, and the personal vendetta of Alexandru Drăghici and his wife Martha (née Cziko) against Alexandru Ioanid for having divorced the sister of Martha Drăghici, is given the ideological spin of him having gravely strayed from "Socialist morals". Blackmail scenario Based on what is known about the group members (journalists, a physicist, a history professor, and a Securitate colonel, all of them were fully cognizant of the Romanian situation) and about the political climate at the time, as well as on recollections of some family members, another scenario also seems likely. Following prolonged Securitate surveillance of the group, which resulted in the accumulation of evidence about conversations with dissident tones, members may have been blackmailed including threatened with harm against their families and themselves, and promised some reprieve or even permission to leave the country with their families, if they went along with the staging of the robbery to serve several government and personal purposes. In this event, the government failed to uphold its end of the bargain. As a parallel, in what was a highly unusual move for those times when nobody was allowed to leave Romania, another Jewish Securitate officer, Ion Crișan, incidentally described as "friend" of the Ioanid group, was permitted to leave the country with his family and go to Brazil around 1961, shortly after the alleged incident; this has led some to believe that he may have been the agent through whom the government communicated its promises and made them credible. In culture Apart from the original Reconstruction movie produced by the Romanian state and widely screened before Communist Party members, there have been several other movies and documentaries, including Reconstruction (2001) by Irene Lusztig and The Great Communist Robbery (2004) by Alexandru Solomon. The