whom were Doina Cornea and Mihai Botez. By 1983, membership of the PCR had risen to 3.3 million, and, in 1989, to 3.7–3.8 million—meaning that, in the end, over 20% of Romanian adults were party members, making the PCR the largest communist group of the Eastern Bloc after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 64,200 basic party units, answering to county committees, varying in number and representing various areas of Romanian society, were officially recorded in 1980. Statistics also indicated that, during the transition from the 1965 PMR (with 8% of the total population) to the 1988 PCR, the membership of workers had grown from 44 to 55%, while that of peasants had dropped from 34 to 15%. In the end, these records contrasted the fact that the PCR had become completely subservient to its leader and no longer had any form of autonomous activity,Deletant & Ionescu, p. 41–42; Frunză, p. 481–483 while membership became a basic requirement in numerous social contexts, leading to purely formal allegiances and political clientelism. At the same time, the ideological viewpoint was changed, with the party no longer seen as the vanguard of the working class, but as the main social factor and the embodiment of the national interest. In marked contrast with the Perestroika and Glasnost policies developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev, Romania adopted Neo-Stalinist principles in both its internal policies and its relations with the outside world. As recorded in 1984, 90% of the PCR members were ethnic Romanians, with 7% Hungarians (the latter group's membership had dropped by more than 2% since the previous Congress). Formal criticism of the new policies regarding minorities had also been voiced by Hungarian activists, including Károly Király, leader of the PCR in Covasna County. After 1980, the nationalist ideology adopted by the PCR progressively targeted the Hungarian community as a whole, based on suspicions of its allegiance to Hungary, whose policies had become diametrically opposed to the methods of Romanian leaders (see Goulash Communism). Especially during the 1980s, clientelism was further enhanced by a new policy, rotația cadrelor ("cadre rotation" or "reshuffling"), placing strain on low-level officials to seek the protection of higher placed ones as a means to preserve their position or to be promoted. This effectively prompted activists who did not approve of the change in tone to retire, while others—Virgil Trofin, Ion Iliescu and Paul Niculescu-Mizil among them—were