Dobre sees the strike as a "prelude" to the events of December 1989. To be sure, the movement helped break the myth of unity between the Communist Party and the working class, something that Solidarity would also do in Poland a few years later. In a country following hardline Stalinism, the strike offered a brief opportunity for an exercise in true popular 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. This term had significant implications as the miners were part of a social class until then supposed to be an ally of the party, and the apparent break with workers frightened the leadership boded ill for the regime, 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."