on before the strike, and Romanian-Soviet relations were quite strained, with the USSR having been involved in the Tatarbunary Uprising five years earlier. In the fall of 1929, because of the anti-strike measures taken, the Comintern branded Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu's government as "fascist". In the fall of 1929, Panait Istrati, an author and communist sympathiser, wrote, "What happened at Lupeni was not the quelling of a revolt but a hunt for people. The authorities drank till daybreak and gave drink to the soldiers. A drunken prefect fired the first shot after the alarm was sounded. The miners were surrounded and slaughtered, without being given the opportunity to flee; then, when they managed to flee, the frontier guards ran after them, drunk with wine and blood". Legacy The strike was glorified by the Communist regime as a symbol of the struggle of labour against capitalism. Although the communists' overall role had been small, the regime claimed that the PCR had taken a leading role in it. The history textbook, edited by Mihail Roller, makes no mention of the independent union and claims that the PCR started the strike. It portrays the local authorities as assassins, alleging that the county prefect fired the first shot into a worker's chest. In 1948, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (who led Romania until 1965) said, "The calling of the Romanian communists penetrated the miners' ranks and showed them the path to the struggle". The event featured in statues and songs, and Miners' Day was celebrated until 1989 on the first Sunday in August. Additionally, it was portrayed in an award-winning 1962 film (Lupeni 29) starring , the daughter of Gheorgiu-Dej (and conceived with her in mind). The film, inspired by The Battleship Potemkin, portrayed the event as part of the class struggle and was also directed against the then-disgraced underground party activists; the role of the traitor Lucan was based on Vasile Luca (who participated in the preparations for the strike), fictionalised as the embodiment of human abjectness. During the Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977, which started at Lupeni, strikers shouted "Lupeni '29! Lupeni '29!" in an effort to add legitimacy to their cause. As late as 1999, the strike still featured in Romanian political discourse, when a press release of the Ministry of Defense (then in the hands of anti-communists), in response to ex-communist former President Ion Iliescu's commemoration of the strike, described it as