Ștefan Gheorghiu Academy in the 1980s. Dobre claimed he never authored Communist propaganda and that he showed a rebellious attitude toward the faculty. He repeatedly asked to be permitted to emigrate but was refused, and holds the Securitate responsible for the 1979 airplane crash that killed his brother, a pilot. During the Revolution, Dobre claims he was hailed by a crowd in Petroșani and appeared on television but was sidelined due to his hostility toward the National Salvation Front, being labelled an "extremist" and a "terrorist", particularly in the Craiova and Jiu Valley newspapers. In spring he moved to Bucharest, but soon the June 1990 Mineriad broke out. Though Dobre claimed he barely managed to hide from a group of armed miners looking for him, around the time he become an employee of Romania's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He arrived with his family in London as an employee of the Romanian embassy that September and afterwards demanded asylum; he would be later sentenced by Romanian court to five years' imprisonment in 1992 for running off with the embassy's funds. Dobre was granted asylum in 1994 and became a British citizen in 2002. Legacy Dobre sees the strike as a "prelude" to the events of December 1989. According to writer Ruxandra Cesereanu, communist leaders feared the movement could "break the myth of unity between the Communist Party and the working class". Cesereanu considers that the strike offered an "exercise in democracy": for almost three days, miners demanded and protested before a microphone; they spoke freely, none were excluded and no censorship was imposed. Those investigating the miners who had been arrested perceived the strike as an "uprising", frequently using this term during interrogations. Noting the miners were part of a social class until then supposed to be an ally of the party, Cesereanu believes the apparent break with workers frightened the leadership, which could depend even less upon the peasants (then being forced into agricultural cooperatives) or the intellectual élite (part of which at the time was chafing under the rise of protochronism heralded six years earlier by the July Theses). Ceaușescu himself appeared stricken; as his near-fainting episode indicates, he was not prepared for the outbreak of dissent and had seen that the regime was not as stable as he might have believed. It was, Verdeț said, "the first self-abasement of Ceaușescu's political career." The strike—probably the first workers' protest