A first protest began when students from the Faculty of Letters called on Iosif Chișinevschi, then vice president of the Council of Ministers, to reply to a list of questions composed by the students. They chose Chișinevschi as an interlocutor not only due to his government position. Unlike in most communist countries in Eastern Europe, there had been no changes in the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party after Stalin's death. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej continued to lead the country using the same authoritarian methods and he was not influenced by Nikita Khrushchev's 23 February Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in which Stalin's abuses were denounced and the negative impact of the personality cult was exposed, nor by the reactions of the other communist countries, which purged their Stalinist leadership at least partially. Still, it was known that at the March 1956 Plenum of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party, Miron Constantinescu and Chișinevschi had opposed Gheorghiu-Dej, arguing for the need of a liberalisation according to Khrushchev's orientation, a proposal categorically rejected by Gheorghiu-Dej. Students interpreted the lack of an armed Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution's first days as Khrushchev's acceptance of the demands of the Hungarian reform movement. Hence, some students considered Chișinevschi, who had backed the notion of liberalisation, however mild, to be a preferable interlocutor to other hardline leaders.