communes, the country was supposed to be left with 6,000); it also brought massive changes for the cities—especially Bucharest, where, following the 1977 earthquake and successive demolitions, new architectural guidelines were imposed (see Ceaușima). By 1966, Romania outlawed abortion, and, progressively after that, measures were endorsed to artificially increase the birth rate—including special taxes for childless couples. Another measure, going hand in hand with economic ones, allowed ethnic Germans a chance to leave Romania and settle in West Germany as Auslandsdeutsche, in return for payments from the latter country. Overall, around 200,000 Germans left, most of them Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians. Although Romania adhered to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (1973) and signed the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, Ceauşescu also intensified political repression in the country (beginning in 1971). This took a drastic turn in 1977, when, confronted with Paul Goma's movement in support for Charter 77, the regime expelled him and others from the country. A more serious disobedience occurred in August of the same year, when Jiu Valley miners went on strike, briefly took hold of Premier Ilie Verdeţ, and, despite having reached an agreement with the government, were repressed and some of them expelled (see Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977). A newly created and independent trade union, SLOMR, was crushed and its leaders arrested on various charges in 1979. Progressively during the period, the Securitate relied on involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals as a means to punish dissidence. 1980s A major act of discontent occurred inside the party during its XIIth Congress in late November 1979, when PCR veteran Constantin Pîrvulescu spoke out against Ceaușescu's policy of discouraging discussions and relying on obedient cadres (he was subsequently heckled, evicted from the Congress hall, and isolated). In 1983, Radu Filipescu, an engineer working in Bucharest, was imprisoned after distributing 20,000 leaflets which called for a popular rally against the regime, while a protests of miners in Maramureș County against wage cuts was broken up by Securitate forces; three years later a strike organized by Romanian and Hungarian industrial workers in Turda and Cluj-Napoca met with the same result. Also in 1983, fearing the multiplication of samizdat documents, Minister of the Interior George Homoștean ordered all citizens to hand over their typewriters to the authorities. This coincided with a noted popular rise in support for outspoken dissidents who were kept under house arrest, among