80% of those who were implicated in the movement. Thus, the coordinated national resistance was decapitated. Onset of the armed resistance movement However, starting with the summer of 1948, individuals or small groups went underground in the Carpathians, forming various units of armed resistance in what was a relatively large movement, gathering several thousand people. The rebels came from all social strata and all areas of the country, spreading everywhere the terrain could shield them. The movement was related to the spate of mass arrests hitting the country after the communists seized power on 30 December 1947, as well as to the political and economical measures which ruined a sizable part of the peasantry and the middle class. There were several reasons for people seeking shelter in the mountains. While some went underground to escape imminent arrest, more generally people fled as they abandoned hope for surviving after being economically ruined and risking detention or worse. Significantly, entire families took flight in late 1948 and early 1949. Thus, the British consular official in Cluj, reporting on 1 May 1949 on the situation of partisans under the leadership of General Corneliu Dragalina noted that: clothing and medicine are short and this is probably true as their numbers have been increased by a considerable proportion of women and children since the March 1st land expropriation. I have been given a figure as high as 20,000 as the number who has joined since the expropriation (...) The increase in the number of women and children will create problems of survival next winter (...) I am told now and again of lorries of army supplies going over to the partisans, sometimes by capture and sometimes by desertion, but I cannot say to what extent..." The members of the armed resistance did not identify themselves as "partisans", but haiduci, a word for generous highwaymen, considered folk heroes. A further major component of the armed resistance consisted of individuals and groups motivated by anti-communist convictions and persuaded that only an armed engagement could contain increasing terror and prevent an irrevocable communist takeover. Some of the resistance groups were led by ex-army officers and acted in a more coordinated and planned way. It appears that they put their hope in stirring up a more general armed insurrection, which never came to life. A smaller category of insurgents were Romanian refugees recruited in Europe by the Office of