Category Archives: military

by | 5 November 2023 · 6:26 am

Japan’s Golden Age of Castle-building

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~460ff:

In December 1614, [Tokugawa] Ieyasu gathered together a large host and laid siege to the castle in what is known as the Winter Campaign. In less than a month the two sides came to terms in which [Toyotomi] Hideyori agreed to allow the outer defenses of the castle to be destroyed as a gesture of his good faith. The Tokugawa forces went a bit further, however, and also filled in the inner moat.

Soon after the besieging army left, Hideyori again began to gather troops at the castle. When he ignored Ieyasu’s command to cease this activity, the Tokugawa forces again descended on Osaka. This was the opening of the Summer Campaign, which began in May 1615 and ended early in June when the besieging forces fought their way into the castle. Hideyori committed suicide, bringing an end to the Toyotomi Clan. The Tokugawa were now supreme. Ieyasu died about a year later, but he had laid a foundation that gave his descendants rule of Japan for over 250 years.

The period of history just discussed might be referred to as the golden age of castle building, starting with Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, which was designed as a fortification to resist forces armed with the matchlock. Its high stone walls, deep wide moats, corner towers, and tall donjon were intended to cope with this new weapon. At the same time the castle’s design enabled defenders to use firearms to best advantage. Next came Hideyoshi’s castle at Osaka, even more formidable and impregnable. These two structures set the pattern for later castle construction. (Note: It is thought that the Portuguese helped with the design of these two fortresses.) Most castles and castle ruins extant today were built in the short three-decade period from 1580 to 1610, employing the architectural design of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. It was then that Kato built his fortress at Kumamoto with its high, imposing walls, Ikeda greatly improved and enlarged the small castle at Himeji, and Ieyasu took the small castle at Edo and developed it into one of the largest fortresses in the world.

Shortly after Sekigahara, Ieyasu called upon the tozama [“outsider”] lords to contribute heavily to the building of Edo Castle. These lords were those who were not related to, or had no hereditary tie with, the Tokugawa family and had remained neutral during Sekigahara or submitted to Ieyasu thereafter.7 In addition to Edo Castle, they were also compelled to build other castles including those of Nijo, Hikone, Nagoya, and Sumpu [in Shizuoka], and to enlarge and remodel still others. Most of these castles were located in strategic areas between Kyoto and Edo and were built on the pretext of providing for national defense. Most, however, were never used in the kind of warfare for which they were designed. The building program was undertaken to reduce the resources of the tozama daimyo, whom Ieyasu did not trust, and to keep them under control.

Policies were also laid down by the Tokugawa government to control the tozama daimyo in ways other than financial. Castles were not to be built, remodeled, or repaired without permission from the shogunate. Men of the samurai class were obligated to live in the castle town. This requirement, an extension of Hideyoshi’s sword hunt, tended to strengthen the feudal system. Marriages between the daimyo families had to be approved by the shogunate to prevent hostile alliances from developing, Tokugawa vassals were placed in fiefs where they could observe the activities of their tozama neighbors and report any evidence of conspiracy to Edo. They were moved frequently to prevent them from becoming too well established and forming alliances.

The daimyo were permitted to govern their fiefs without much interference from Edo, but they were obliged to observe the regulations imposed by the shogunate. Although they were allowed this freedom, they were required to alternate residence between their fiefs and Edo. This policy, known as sankin-kotai, was designed to prevent them from conspiring against the Edo government. While they were away from Edo, they left their families there as hostages. The traveling to and from Edo was another form of control, for the daimyo were expected to travel with a huge retinue, thereby incurring expenses that sapped their resources.

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by | 3 November 2023 · 10:09 am

Japanese Castles and Castle Towns

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~172ff:

The castles of Japan are an integral part of both feudal and modern Japanese history. During the 14th and 15th centuries the petty feudal barons built defensive castles to serve as or to protect their residences. These fortifications also became the seats of government for the domains over which the barons ruled, and they became the social centers for the areas as well. It was also during this period that domestic and foreign trade began to flourish, thus adding increased status to the castle town as an economic center.

As the 16th century opened, the struggle between the feudal barons intensified with each one attempting to spread his influence over a wider territory. During this struggle the castles assumed greater importance as more people moved to the castle towns. The result was that these economic centers became increasingly vital. About 1542 the first firearms were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese, an event that radically changed the course of warfare. Defenses were substantially reinforced to offset the new weapons, and those barons who were not fortunate enough to have acquired them were defeated. By the end of the century almost all of Japan had been brought under the unified control of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was made shogun (military ruler of the country) in 1603. Ieyasu set up his seat of government at Edo (present-day Tokyo) and from there administered the country as one feudal fief. The daimyo, or lords of the various fiefs, generally ran their domains much as the shogun ran the country. Similarly, the provincial castle towns began to resemble Edo, to the point where street names were identical.

Under Tokugawa rule, each fief was allowed to have only one castle; so all subsidiary strongholds were torn down, and the samurai who had manned them were transferred to the remaining castle and its town. This shift in population attracted merchants and artisans, and it was not long before the castle town was the commercial center of the fief. The samurai, who had little to do because there were no longer battles to be fought, became administrators, and many took up scholarly pursuits while others interested themselves in the arts. Thus castle towns evolved into commercial and cultural centers.

When the feudal period ended in the mid-19th century, the importance of the castle town did not diminish. Many such towns continued to flourish as population centers, and today half of the 60 or so cities with populations over 100,000 are former castle towns. That these feudal towns continue to be important administrative centers is indicated by the fact that 34 of the 46 prefectural capitals were once castle towns.

But the importance of the castle in Japan does not end with its relationship to modern urbanization. The architectural style employed in castle construction is one of the forms that is most truly Japanese in that it was relatively little influenced by Chinese design. This architectural style is called Azuchi-Momoyama after the period of history in which it developed. The amazing fact about this period was its short duration, for it lasted only from 1568 to 1603.

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by | 25 October 2023 · 5:50 pm

Britain’s 1653 Constitution

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 285-286:

The Instrument of Government provided for government by a single person, Lord Protector Cromwell, who was to be assisted by a Council of State and regular Parliaments. The fuller republicanism of the Rump and Barebone’s Parliaments was replaced by something different: a semblance at least of the old monarchical constitution from before the regicide. Yet there was no House of Lords, and both the franchise and the old constituency map were drastically reformed. Now, any man with property worth £200 or more (save active Royalists or Catholics) could vote, while growing towns like Manchester and Leeds were given representation, at the expense of rotten boroughs. MPs would sit in Westminster from Ireland and Scotland, as had been the case with Barebone’s Parliament. England and Wales remained over-represented, though, with 400 MPs. Scotland and Ireland had 30 each, even though in population terms they should probably have had twice that number each.

It was a constitution based on checks and balances. Cromwell, said the lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke when asked about it on a diplomatic mission to Sweden, would only have the ‘limited power of a chief magistrate’. Parliaments, meanwhile, were to be summoned at least once every three years, and last at least five months, but the very existence of the Instrument as a written constitution limited their power, as well as that of the Protector. The Protector had a temporary veto over legislation (though this could be overturned by a second vote). Critically, the Instrument enshrined religious toleration. There were to be no penalties to compel people to any particular faith (Clause 36); instead, ‘endeavours be used to win them by sound doctrine and the example of a good conversation’. Meanwhile, all ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ’ were to be protected in their worship (Clause 37), so long as they eschewed ‘papacy and prelacy’, i.e. Catholicism and bishops, and so long as they didn’t disturb others. It was an imperfect toleration, no doubt, but it was still remarkably broad by the standard of the day.

Whatever its merits, though, the Instrument always had its enemies. To republicans, it was a transfer of power to a single person, Cromwell, and offensive to the ideals of the kingless commonwealth. They looked in horror at the Protector’s partial veto over the will of Parliament. To conservatives, on the other hand, it was an attack on the ‘ancient constitution’, and too liberal in its provision for religious tolerance. Most fundamental of all, to civilians, it was a constitution that had come directly from the Army rather than from Parliament. Its origins lay in the politicisation of the New Model Army in 1647, not in the ancient constitution or consent from the representatives of the people. John Lambert, though undoubtedly one of the greatest political intellects of the day, remained to many civilians just a plain old Yorkshire gentleman, and not a very prominent one at that. Worse, he remained a soldier.

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by | 24 October 2023 · 4:53 am

Cromwell Defeats the Levellers, 1649

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 259-261:

Levellers in the Army were close to open defiance. Things began in London, where a young trooper named Robert Lockyer – just twenty-three years old yet a veteran of Naseby – staged a minor act of insubordination. He was arrested and publicly shot in St Paul’s churchyard, on the insistence of Fairfax. His funeral was another occasion for grand Leveller public propaganda, attended by thousands.

But if the Army command hoped this act of swift brutality would quell the discontent, they were quite wrong, for by the early days of May, an uprising was already under way in the west. For the second time, the Levellers were attempting to win control of the New Model Army.

The mutiny began in Salisbury, and within weeks there was an unauthorised Leveller rendezvous at Abingdon in Berkshire. News reached Cromwell, so he gathered his forces in London and addressed them in Hyde Park. Some Leveller sympathisers had turned up with sea-green ribbons in their hats. But Cromwell talked them down. Any who wished not to fight could be discharged with their arrears paid; the rest would have to head out to the west, to face down the rebels. In all, he and Fairfax left London with five regiments: two cavalry and three foot.

It was a formidable force, and the Levellers had little choice but to retreat, especially as their numbers dwindled and as supporters melted away into the countryside. First, the Levellers were trapped near Newbridge, on the Thames, so they pulled back along the quiet River Windrush, through the Oxfordshire countryside, towards the small market town of Burford in the low dip slope of the Cotswolds.

It was here that Cromwell caught up. A midnight attack through the town did what it needed to do, and, despite a brief show of resistance, the Levellers were corralled into the great medieval parish church. In all, around 300 were kept there overnight, one of them scratching his name into the wall: ‘Anthony Sedley. 1649. Prisner.’ In the morning, the mutineers were pardoned, save three – a corporal, a cornet and a private soldier, who were taken out of the church, into the open air, and shot.

The Levellers had been defeated. The revolution was not to be theirs. As Cromwell’s soldiers packed up to leave Burford, the town could get back to the rhythms of springtime. While the lambs cried in the nearby pastures and the wood pigeons called out from the resplendent trees, Private Church, Cornet Thompson and Corporal Perkins were buried in the soil of Burford churchyard. Another quiet corner of England, manured with the blood of its people.

In the course of some 19 months, the New Model Army – increasingly Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army as Fairfax shrank back from politics – had defeated the Levellers, the social radicals within its own ranks, the Royalists, the Scots and its enemies in the Long Parliament. In just four years, a force led not by aristocrats but by members of the lower gentry and middling sort had crushed all before it, overthrown an ancient monarchy and carried out a revolution in the name of the English people. Military conquests in Ireland and Scotland lay ahead, of course. But now, with the Army’s allies in what remained of Parliament, the main challenge was going to be to govern, to bring peace and stability to a country torn apart by seven years of war, while protecting the religious congregations that had flourished but which were still viewed with great suspicion by most of the country. It was a daunting task.

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by | 19 October 2023 · 8:36 am

New Model Democracy Debates, 1647

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 229-231:

The most startling development … was the appearance around the end of September of new agitators, 16 in all, across five cavalry regiments. On 18 October, two of their number got an audience with Fairfax, where they presented him with a forceful, if rather convoluted, manifesto. Called The Case of the Army Truly Stated, it was probably written – at least in part – by a twenty-five-year-old ex-soldier named John Wildman. Fiercely bright and iron-cast in his convictions, he had the knowing sneer of exactly the kind one would expect of a man with the motto Nil Admirari – ‘Let nothing surprise you’. He was someone perpetually convinced that those in power would turn out to be hypocrites. And to be fair they frequently did.

The Case had been signed by the New Agitators at Guildford a few days earlier. It castigated the grandees and the General Council for their political failures. Power, it claimed, was originally vested in the people and their representatives. The current Parliament should be dissolved within ten months, followed by a general election in which all Englishmen aged twenty-one and over – except Royalists – should have the vote. It also demanded liberty of conscience and drastic reform of the law.

Soon, The Case of the Army was available to buy on London’s streets. This was dangerous stuff, but Fairfax – perhaps against his better judgement – agreed to discuss it at the next General Council, due to sit on the 21st. At that Council, the Case was referred to a committee, expected to produce a stern rebuttal. Instead, it wrote to the New Agitators and asked them ‘in a friendly way’ to attend the next General Council, scheduled for Thursday 28 October. It was to be a monumental decision.

The day before this meeting was due to take place, one of Cromwell’s soldiers, Robert Everard, was at the Army headquarters at Putney. Here he presented yet another document. The leadership were expecting to discuss the Case, but what Everard brought was something completely different. It was a short pamphlet – just a few pages – approved the same day at a meeting between the New Agitators, Wildman and some other civilian radicals.

Its pages contained a strident statement of first principles. Parliament was sovereign – there was no mention of the king or the Lords – but it could not override certain basic rights: freedom of religion, freedom from conscription and equality before the law. These could never be given away by the people: they were inalienable. There should, meanwhile, be biennial Parliaments, inferior in authority only to the electorate itself. Crucially, it suggested that the franchise should be reformed so that constituencies reflected not tax contribution – as in the Heads – but the number of people. It was a document of quite fundamental radicalism: based on the premise that the defeat of the king – and the ‘Norman Yoke’ he represented – had left the people a blank slate on which to scrawl their own, new, rational and equitable laws. Even the document’s name conveyed its democratic character: it was an Agreement of the People, and its approval by the whole population, the authors hoped, would form the basis of a new English democracy.

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by | 18 October 2023 · 6:19 am

Parliament’s New Model Army Officers, 1645

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 195-197:

The central political issue at Westminster was now the future of the Parliamentarian armies. The failure, of the old aristocratic generals, particularly Essex and Manchester, were creating serious unease about the leadership of the forces, but the issues ran deeper than this. Aristocrats like Essex were increasingly uncomfortable with the apparently democratic direction of their own side. That December, when the Lords were prevaricating over [Bishop] Laud, the Commons suggested that delay would lead to popular disorder. Essex was appalled, worrying that they were replacing ‘the yoke of the king’ with that of ‘the common people’. ‘I am determined,’ he announced, ‘to devote my life to repressing the audacity of the people.’

Manchester, meanwhile, was in the process of falling out dramatically with his most successful subordinate, Oliver Cromwell. The differences were religious, political and temperamental. The earl was a Presbyterian who valued the existing social order. Cromwell was a fiery radical, an Independent, and had rather less respect for hierarchy. Manchester fought in order to bring the king to a negotiated settlement, Cromwell to bring him to defeat.

More to the point, though, the rich aristocrats weren’t getting results in the field, so they were losing the argument at Westminster. In Parliament, hardliners, linked to the religious Independents and drawn from the war group, were pushing for radical reform of the forces. They were blocked by the more conservative ‘Presbyterians’, who drew on the peace party and were allied to the Scots. Eventually the debate resulted in an ordinance for ‘Self-Denying’, decreeing that no member of either House could hold a commission in the forces. The Lords blocked it, so attention then fell on another bill, this time to create a national army – drawn largely from the old Eastern Association – with central funding. It was to be a ‘New Model’: 22,000 strong: 14,400 infantry all in the same uniform, ‘Redcoats all’, with two musketeers to every pike; 6,600 cavalry, 1,000 dragoons. Its commander was to be the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Fairfax who though somewhat inexperienced and indeed occasionally unsuccessful on the field, was politically tepid and therefore acceptable to both Presbyterians and Independents. The experienced Philip Skippon, a hero of the European wars and of Turnham Green, was to lead the infantry. The command of the cavalry was left open, for the time being, though many MPs had a particular name in mind.

In April 1645, the Lords finally passed the Self-Denying Ordinance: this version forced everyone to resign their commission but left open the possibility of reappointment. Beneath the veneer of compromise, this was a profoundly important step: the old nobility, traditionally the military leaders of the country, were being sidelined in favour of professional soldiers like Fairfax and Skippon. As the William Lilly put it that year, ‘The nobility and gentry who have continued many generations are sinking and an inferior sort of people … are ascending.’ The New Model officer corps was made up of soldiers promoted by reason of their skill and zeal, not their birth. If they were gentry, they were from relatively minor families: men like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or Charles Fleetwood. Not poor men, by any means, and they often shared the experience of Oxbridge and the Inns of Court, but neither were they especially wealthy or well connected. And many of the New Model officers, like the firebrand Thomas Harrison and the yeoman’s son Thomas Pride, were drawn from outside the gentry entirely.

Then there was Oliver Cromwell. He was the man many MPs expected to take command of the cavalry. Although his position in the new army wasn’t yet secure – he was still an MP, of course – for many he was emblematic of that ‘inferior sort of people’. Born in 1599, he was in his mid-forties, with an ungainly face, fierce blue eyes and a hot temper. He was known for promoting comrades for talent rather than social position: ‘I had rather,’ he once wrote, ‘have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ He himself was, as he put it, ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’, although his wife, Elizabeth Bourchier, came from a wealthy Essex family. After a brief spell at Cambridge, young Cromwell had suffered severe melancholy in his later twenties. Come the 1630s he was a farmer, and his income had fallen to around £100 a year. By that time he’d also experienced a Calvinist ‘conversion’, bringing a belief that he was one of the elect. His views at this point were probably those of a country Puritan: fiercely anti-Laudian and anti-Catholic. But in the course of a war in which he tramped the country as part of a disciplined force of cavalry ‘ironsides’, his views moved strongly towards Independency, and he was developing a deep distrust in the idea that state officers should force religious practices on the people.

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by | 15 October 2023 · 6:18 am

Soviets Annex Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 304-305:

Soviet government officials never relinquished their claim to the region between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, for them a strategic area given up to Romania in 1918 because of Russia’s military weakness at the close of World War I. Indeed, Bessarabia was a fertile hinterland to the Black Sea harbor of Odessa, a checkpoint at the mouth of the Danube and bridgehead for a Soviet presence in Southeast Europe.

Providing a crucial premise for the Soviet’s seizure of Bessarabia was the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was signed on August 23, 1939, in Moscow by representatives of both countries. In the course of agreeing to “delimitation of bilateral spheres of interest in East Europe,” established in a Supplemental Secret Protocol in the accord, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop accepted that Estonia, Latvia and Finland should be added to the Soviet sphere of influence. He went on to declare Germany’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

After the Moscow agreements, the USSR’s annexation of Bessarabia was only a matter of time. On June 26, 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented the Romanian envoy in Moscow an ultimatum in which he demanded that the Romanian government relinquish Bessarabia as well as the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR and leave the country within three days. The Romanian government was forced to bow to the Soviet demand after its petition for help in Berlin had been turned down.

On June 28 the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. Even though the Romanian government had feared a Soviet offensive for some time, it was surprised by the invasion. By the first day, the quickly advancing Soviet vanguard had occupied the most important cities—Cetatea Albă in the south, Chișinău in the center and Chernivtsi (Chernowitz) in the north—and plunged the retreating Romanians into hopeless confusion. Fleeing Romanian government officials and armed forces feverishly took to their heels. Along the way, they grabbed at any sort of transportation—horses and teams—they could get their hands on in order to get themselves and their heavily loaded wagons to safety on the other side of the Prut. Romanian squadrons in retreat were constantly overtaken by Russian parachutists and tanks. In the chaotic retreat there were isolated attacks from bands of civilians. The invading, crack Soviet troops soon had everything under control.

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by | 1 October 2023 · 3:40 pm

English Factions Choose Sides, 1642

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 169-171:

By summer 1642, not only were there two distinctive political ideologies at play, but the Parliamentarian side were starting to argue – grounded in a theory of popular sovereignty – for wresting control of the executive away from the king.

The warm months were spent jockeying for support in the country. Great ‘musters’ for Parliament took place in a number of counties under the Militia Ordinance, with thousands of men turning out with arms and horses; Charles responded by activating the old medieval device of ‘Commissions of Array’, which called people out to join him to defend the realm. It was a long-lapsed mechanism, and many considered it of dubious legality. The commissions were also in Latin, which hardly helped. But some musters under the Array did take place. And where both opposing sides were hoping to take control of the same strategic town or arsenal, there were moments of confrontation, even if both sides were reluctant to fire the first shot. In July, in Manchester, a skirmish broke out that resulted in at least one death. The Midlands was said to be ‘like a cockpit one spurring against another’. Another scrap took place near Street in Somerset, followed by a confrontation on the Mendips in which the Marquess of Hertford, attempting to recruit for the king, was opposed by a large gathering of 12,000 Somerset men and was forced to retreat.

The navy backed Parliament: both king and Junto tried to get its support, but it was the latter’s man, the Earl of Warwick, who got to the Downs first, and it was Warwick the sailors wanted anyway. Most towns, too, were Parliamentarian, although many were split. Oxford and Cambridge universities were Royalist, while the towns themselves supported Parliament. Similarly, in many cathedral cities, the townsmen were Parliamentarian, while the clergy in the close were Royalist. In Canterbury, one Royalist minister worried ‘that we can hardly look upon one another in charity’.

Some places tried to avoid taking sides: the Isle of Wight, in August, simply declared itself neutral, while Lincolnshire and Staffordshire went so far as to raise men to defend the county borders from all comers. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a lawyer who had been involved in the Strafford trial, was horrified by it all. ‘It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea.’ We ‘scarce know how,’ he lamented, ‘but from paper combats…we are now come to the question of raising forces, and naming a General and officers of our army.’

The drift to war was shocking and unfathomable. If only Charles had defeated the Scots; if only the Irish rebellion hadn’t broken out; if only the king hadn’t launched his ham-fisted coup against the Five Members. Charles’s own unwillingness to part with his prerogatives without a fight or a plot didn’t help, but then isn’t it also unfair to expect someone brought up to expect divinely ordained rights to power to give that up freely? More to the point, the coming war had deeper causes. It was born out of fundamental disagreements over faith and government: about religious conformity and about the proper role of Parliament in the constitution, and, of course, also about the monarch: whether they could override human laws and if they did, could the people legitimately resist.

Those disagreements had been played out in a world of rising literacy, particularly among the middle sort of people and the gentry, and particularly in London. The people had been crucial. At key moments, the opposition of a significant segment of the English population – whether their reluctance to mobilise against the Scots, their willingness to elect opposition MPs twice in 1640, the petitions that reached Westminster, the demonstrations against Strafford, the iconoclasm of 1641 and, most of all, the great popular uprising in London in the winter of 1641–2 – had prevented Charles from keeping control. The breakdown wasn’t just about mistakes by politicians and the king. It was about the politicisation of the English population.

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by | 30 September 2023 · 10:38 am

Nadia’s Well-timed Escape, 1989

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 225-226:

Nadia Comăneci never showed any intention to take advantage of a trip abroad in order to defect. It would have been too hard for her to be so far away from family and friends. Sometimes, when she returned from a trip, when her brother Adrian would half-jokingly ask why she hadn’t stayed abroad, she would answer that she felt happier at home, in the kitchen, with her pots and pans, at which everybody would laugh. Although she sometimes fell prey to emotion, she was otherwise highly practical. She refused to believe in foreigners, to allow them to inveigle her into projects that seemed unachievable at first sight. She was optimistic by nature, and only acted after making a thorough examination of the situation in which she found herself. In other words, Nadia was not one to daydream. Consequently, it is all the more obvious that it was the absurd restrictions imposed on her after 1985 that caused her to accept the proposal to flee the country, when the opportunity arose, even if it meant placing her life in danger. All the restrictions in her life convinced her that she should abandon caution and do something that was not in her nature, especially since she knew that if she left Romania, she would never see her family again.

The episode of her escape was rightly regarded as spectacular and captured the imagination of the West, as Le Figaro declared on 1 December 1989: ‘Dramas now come to us from Eastern Europe, rather than from Hollywood. In Romania the plots of films are happening in real life. The former champion escaped the country on Wednesday, after she had once been a heroine of the communist system. Real life beats fiction. Many episodes in Nadia’s life surpass the fictional.’

In the days after her escape, as the Western media debated all kinds of outlandish theories, there was uproar in Bucharest, too, not in the press, but in government cabinets, and the fury was the greatest at the headquarters of the secret police. As is often the case of intelligence services, the Department of State Security’s reputation was often exaggerated. The Nadia Comăneci Case is a good example, revealing as it does Securitate incompetence. Incapable of preventing Nadia’s escape and finding out about it only once it had actually happened, the Securitate was caught by surprise, an embarrassing and blameworthy situation for an intelligence service. Nadia Comăneci’s escape even created a genuine crisis within the Securitate, which was exacerbated from outside the country by massive international coverage of the event and inside the country by the fury of Nicolae Ceauşescu, in despair at having lost the gymnast who had been the country’s ‘best advertisement’, as The Independent aptly put it at the time.

But if the Securitate was incapable of preventing it, when and how did the authorities in Bucharest learn the news that Nadia Comăneci had defected? The information came in the next day, 28 November, at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was received by military counterintelligence officers from Department Four of the Securitate. It was not thanks to their own operational capacities, but sooner an accident – or maybe a deliberate act of defiance on the part of the Hungarians – since they obtained the information from other fugitives who had illegally crossed the frontier the day before and been sent back to the Romanian side surprisingly quickly. Alexandru Cinca, Maria Balea and Maria Ezias, the two women being accompanied by their sons, both minors, had escaped across the border on 27 November and at the Kiszombor border post they had met Nadia Comăneci and the other six members of her group the next morning. Maria Ezias, a Romanian citizen of Hungarian ethnicity, was asked by the Hungarian border guards to translate a part of their discussions with Nadia. Then, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, Alexandru Cinca and Maria Balea and her son had been surrendered to the Romanian authorities, while Maria Ezias and her son had been allowed to remain in Hungary.

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by | 24 September 2023 · 10:48 am

New Spy Network for Nadia

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 138-139:

The Securitate adapted to the new situation, deploying a new ‘network to influence, protect and defend gymnast Nadia Comăneci,’ as it is named in the archive documents, and simultaneously conducting surveillance and covert recording. As Géza Pozsár was no longer part of Nadia’s entourage, his reports from the first part of 1978 make only intermittent references to her. As a result, the secret police sought other solutions, and the measures they took starting from December 1977 entailed total monitoring: recording equipment in the gymnasts’ rooms at the 23 August National Sport Hotel, background checks on all the members of the team that had been assembled, talks ‘with a view to softening them up, in order to discover and prevent any action that might injure Nadia Comăneci’, alerting Section 5 of the Militia to provide additional security and protection measures in the area of the sports centre, and the instruction of the ‘three intelligence sources within the team of trainers and medics.’ Although Department One’s report gives us to understand that there were already three informers tasked with monitoring Nadia Comăneci, in reality the number seems to have been higher.

Even if the documents show that the trainers were kept under surveillance, it was also true that they had already collaborated with the secret police, albeit not all to the same extent. In February 1978, Iosif Hidi was an ‘operational connection’. He presented Captain Nicolae Ilie reports that he signed with his real name, followed by his title, ‘I.E.F.S. head’. Gheorghe Condovici was recruited as an informer in 1966 and was given the code name ‘Iosifescu Dragoş’ but in the archives it has not been possible to find any reports he may have written on Nadia, which suggests that for unknown reasons the Securitate did not use him as a source. But Atanasia Albu, alias ‘Monica’, was a secret police collaborator so devoted that the Securitate probably regarded her as more valuable even than Géza Pozsár.

Carmen Dumitru, who was esteemed by gymnasts and trainers alike for the skill with which she practiced as a physician, was an ‘official source’. She was not recruited as an informer by the usual procedure, but when information was required of her, she provided it. A specialist in cardiology and sports medicine, Carmen Dumitru treated members of a number of Romanian national squads, but the Securitate was interested in obtaining from her information about Nadia Comăneci’s evolving state of health in particular. In the same period, the Securitate also drew upon another informed, codenamed ‘Lili’, who was probably a nurse at the sports complex’s medical office, but whose identity remains unknown. From her reports it may be concluded that she was instructed to win Nadia’s confidence, and for a few months, she succeeded. Pianist Corneliu Grigore, who signed his reports under the pseudonym ‘Lazarovici Traian’, was recruited as an informer while doing his military service. Those who knew him describe him as a very good pianist, in love with what he did, a serious-minded and generous man, but overly timorous and lacking in courage. As an informer he filed only sporadic reports on the members of the national squad. As the intelligence machinery still included Nicolae Vieru and Mrs Mili – who continued their careers as informers ‘Vlad’ and ‘Lia Muri’ – the Securitate remained a presence in both Nadia’s professional and personal life.

The freedom Nadia hoped to enjoy in Bucharest was limited, as she was not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied or without giving her reasons and planned route in advance. Her daily schedule and trips were known in advance by Securitate officers. When she did manage to slip outside the sports complex without permission, the authorities would enter red alert. An army of Militia and Securitate officers would set out in search of her, while top officials from the Party and N.C.P.E.S. went to the 23 August Centre anxiously to wait for the officers to bring her back or for her to return by herself. It was said that in such situations, even the borders were closed, to prevent her being taken out of the country against her will in the event that she had been kidnapped. Nadia lived out her life in the sports complex, which, no matter how comfortable it might have been, was too small and suffocating a world for a curious, developing adolescent.

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