Category Archives: nationalism

by | 23 October 2023 · 4:13 pm

England Becomes a Republic, 1649

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 256-257:

From morning the next day [30 January], a huddled crowd gathered outside the grand Banqueting House at Whitehall, where a scaffold had been hastily thrown up, draped in black and surrounded by troops and their horses. But there was a delay. Why? Nobody in the crowd knew. At last, at around two in the afternoon, there was movement. As the crowd watched, Charles Stuart appeared, accompanied by Juxon. After a short speech, and a few formalities, he lay his head down on the low block in front of him, gave a signal and the executioner cut off his head. As the axe fell, a terrible groan came forth from the assembled crowd. Within half an hour, the troops had cleared them all away.

A week later, the Commons abolished the monarchy. The ‘office of a king,’ they declared, ‘is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people of this nation; and therefore ought to be abolished’. The reason it took a week to abolish the monarchy was that the Rump was busy with another matter – what to do with the House of Lords. In the end, they plumped for abolition of this, too: declaring it ‘useless and dangerous’, although not before a debate in which Henry Marten quipped that it was ‘useless, but not dangerous’.

News of the king’s execution filtered out to a stunned nation.

…

Was this what the wars had been fought for? Virtually no one, in 1642, let alone 1640, had envisaged the execution of the king and the abolition of the kingly office. To get this far, events had taken on a life of their own, driven by political accidents and unfathomable decisions. Charles himself must carry much of the blame: he had been a stuffy authoritarian, but never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant. He had emerged as a competent – even charismatic – leader, though we must take care to separate the charisma of the man from that of his office. But he was only ever successful at inspiring those who already agreed with him, and his pathological inability to understand his opponents’ position would cost him dear. His great opportunity had been in 1647, when he could have accepted Ireton’s Heads [proposing a constitutional monarchy], and marched into London, garlanded by a grateful New Model Army. Parliament would surely have fallen in line, and a new, tolerant Church could have been created, with room for both Independent prayer meetings and the old Book of Common Prayer. It would have left a balanced constitution with regular parliaments. But instead Charles tried to hold out for a better deal, costing him his own head and – much more importantly – the blood of countless thousands of innocent people.

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by | 17 October 2023 · 6:29 am

Bessarabian German Fates

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 1-5:

The Germans in Bessarabia were the last of an emigrant band that resettled in Russia over the course of an eighteenth–nineteenth century state-sponsored colonization effort. After Russia’s defeat of the of the Turks in 1812, Czar Alexander beckoned foreign colonists to his country to “peuplate” the deserted southern expanse of the newly conquered province of Bessarabia and to bring about economic development of the region along the Black Sea’s northwestern coast. Over a span of 125 years, the foreign settlers predominantly from Southwestern Germany established more than 150 thriving communities and daughter colonies on a fertile but otherwise desolate plain. They were planted in the middle of a multi-ethnic population where they managed to lead a life of peaceful coexistence.

At the close of World War I, the lives of Bessarabian Germans took a different turn than that of their other German-Russian brethren. Their region fell under Romanian authority in 1918, not under Soviet rule. The Bessarabian Germans—at that time almost eighty thousand people—now were part of the German ethnics of Greater Romania, a population segment that in the years between the two world conflicts came to encompass roughly 750,000 Germans, translating into about 4 percent of Romania’s total population.

Bessarabian Germans, Bukovinian and Dobrujan Germans, Transylvania (Siebenbürgen) Saxons, Banat and Satu Mare (Sathmar) Swabians—all openly differentiated themselves in their history of origin and settlement as well as denominational and social composition, in cultural mintage, in ways of doing business and in mentality. Unlike in Transylvania, an urban middle-class culture had not come into its own in the relatively short settlement period of the Bessarabian Germans. Up until the resettlement of 1940, farming defined their way of life; they always looked upon themselves as “colonists.” In a rural, pietist-steeped culture, playing a leading role were pastors, teachers, as well as academics and other notables.

The history of German settlement in Bessarabia came to an abrupt end in 1940. A Soviet ultimatum in late June that year compelled the Romanians to clear out of the region within three days. On June 28, 1940, the Red Army marched into Bessarabia and North Bukovina. The premise for the Soviet annexation was the less than year-old Non-Aggression Treaty of August 23, 1939—the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact—drawn up between the National Socialist German Reich and the Stalinist USSR. An appending “secret protocol” to this treaty contained agreements between both countries concerning limits on their spheres of political influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The protocol’s German representative, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, made clear his government’s “total political disinterest” in Bessarabia.

The Soviet Union’s occupation now fully realized in June 1940, Bessarabia’s German population (about 93,500 people) faced expulsion from their homeland. Based on a September 5, 1940 German-Soviet resettlement accord regarding Bessarabian and North Bukovinian Germans, as early as October–November 1940 the evacuation had been completed by members of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office of “VoMi”) and the SS. The resettlers endured transport on Danube boats to interim camps in Yugoslavia [Serbia] and then by rail to almost eight hundred different “observation camps” in the “Old Reich,” in Austria and the Sudetenland. After extended encampment, the Bessarabian Germans—as Germans from the Baltic States, from Volhynia and Galicia before them—were resettled 1941–42 for the most part in German Wehrmacht-occupied Poland. Not long after, in January 1945, they—like millions of refugees from other countries of origin—fled westward from an approaching Soviet army. Thus the Bessarabian Germans were equally resettlers and refugees, for prior to their episode of flight, by being uprooted from their homeland they had experienced a massive breakdown of connectedness which was then followed in 1945 by a greater, catastrophic fall.

Landing in postwar Germany, most Bessarabian Germans were drawn to Swabia, the one-time home to most of their forefathers. Others settled in  the British Occupation Zone, mostly in Lower Saxony. Many fugitive Bessarabian Germans, whose arduous sojourns became bogged down in northern and central Germany, remained as refugee Neubauer* [*small farmers in the Soviet Occupation Zone who were settled on limited, newly created 5- to 8-hectare plots carved out of expropriated but uncompensated private estate land] in the Communist East Zone of that time, where so-called democratic agrarian reform appeared to foster a resumption of their rural way of life. Nevertheless, the laboriously restored farms were lost again in the wake of the German Democratic Republic’s agrarian collectivization in the 1950s and 1960s. Not a few Bessarabian Germans emigrated overseas in postwar years, mostly to Canada and the U.S., in search of a new home.

Though Bessarabian German integration into German Federal Republic (West Germany) society was accompanied by almost complete occupational reorientation, it has long since been deemed a success. All the same, it demanded an extreme measure of adaptability from resettlers originally cast in a rural environment and now catapulted into a postwar industrial society. Because the Bessarabian Germans dared not view their circumstances as temporary—unlike for other refugees and expellees, any hope of return to the former homeland was ruled out—they had no other choice that to build a new way of life under the given conditions as quickly as possible. In this process, they were aided by the idea that they, having taken a long historic detour, really had come full circle and were returning to their ancient homeland.

Today the former German Bessarabian settlement area is split in two and belongs to Moldova and Ukraine [and Transnistria].

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by | 16 October 2023 · 4:15 am

Soviet Occupation of 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. 305-308:

The people of Bessarabia heard the news of a Soviet ultimatum on radio the evening before the invasion. It created profound shock in the German villages that soon paralyzed the entire country. It appeared that the Germans in Bessarabia would now meet the very same fate that they had escaped in 1918 by a stroke of luck. For years their friends and relatives on the other side of the Dniester kept them meticulously informed of the catastrophic effects of Soviet agrarian policies, collectivization and kulak persecutions, about famine and massive dying, political repression and deportation. The uncertainty over their future was enormous.

Gradually it leaked out that the German government was negotiating an evacuation, intending to transfer Germans in Bessarabia and North Bukovina to the German Reich. A precedent had been set in the fall of 1939 with the evacuation of about 67,000 Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia. In the winter of 1939–40, German resettlement commandos had removed an additional 130,000 Germans from Volhynia, Galicia and the Narev region towards the West across the new demarcation line.

In fact, a German delegation, residing in Moscow since July 22, 1940, was negotiating over the transfer of the population. On September 5, 1940, the “German-Soviet Russian Agreement Regarding the Resettlement of Germans from Bessarabia and North Bukovina” was signed. As news of this reached the German communities, it was greeted with an overwhelming sigh of relief. Meanwhile, during a better than two-month interval of excruciating uncertainty, it became clear to most of the Bessarabian Germans that the Soviet invasion meant the end of independent farming and a colonist culture founded on it for over five generations. as they had come to know it.

Agreeing to resettlement from their trusted home to a highly uncertain future required of the Bessarabian Germans a difficult decision. Especially for the older ones, evacuation meant a fundamental interruption to their way of life as they knew it that would demand of them and their families even more difficult adjustments ahead. On the other hand, they had no alternative if they wanted to avoid living in a Soviet sphere of power and partaking in the fate of other German colonists in the remaining Black Sea region—collectivization, deprivation of rights and deportation.

All the same, officers of the invading troops had generally treated the German population correctly. The promise of security that Molotov had made to the German government was largely adhered to. That was not true for the other nationalities. While the Germans were hardly bothered by the Soviet secret police (GPU)—except for isolated harassment or arrest—they were forced to observe how their affluent Russian, Jewish or Bulgarian neighbors were hauled off to interrogations—mostly at night—and often never heard of again. The German pastor, Erwin Meyer of the Leipzig, Bessarabia parish, wrote in his April 1941 personal essay:

“Almost none of the Germans were deported—many of the Russians, Bulgarians and well-to-do Jews were, however, taken away. Nothing was done to us, the pastors, but the Orthodox clergy had to immediately remove their vestments, cut their hair and shave off their beards—as was the case in Ismail. None of us Germans were evicted from our homes, but other nationalities were. German property was either not seized or returned immediately, but not in the case of others. Factories, mills and churches were not nationalized until shortly before our departure. We have German protection to thank for this.” (Jachomowski 1984, 61–62)

Not just fear of harassment from the Soviet secret police, but also the grave changes in everyday life in the wake of the Soviet occupation spurred on in the German villages a willingness to resettle. Shortages, mismanagement, deprivation of personal liberties and reprisals were on the horizon. Within a short time, consumer goods such as fabrics, notions, leather goods, sugar, salt, kerosene and tobacco were in short supply or available only at ever-increasing prices. The German community officials were dismissed and new village soviets formed. Local committees were placed under the jurisdiction of regional committees in which Russian communists set the agenda. The business world was also restructured. All private business was dissolved. Larger industrial firms and commercial enterprises remained largely intact but were placed under new managers. Even the German Commercial Association in Artsiz was reorganized after a Soviet model.

In contrast to this creeping dispossession, the property of German farmers, including large estate farmers, was not touched for the moment. They continued going about their work but were under the supervision of the village soviets. Soviet officials insisted that the harvest still be brought in before resettlement and, using absurd measures and harassment, often pressed hard against the work tempo and farming methods. The imposed and arbitrarily fixated taxes frequently exceeded the farmer’s proceeds but still had to be paid. Quickly, the accusation of sabotage came into play. Relatives and neighbors banded together to help out those farmers who had gotten into difficulties.

Church life and Stundist Brethren gatherings went mostly unhindered. Of course, holidays falling on work days were banned and, during the harvest, work had to be done on Sundays, too. In light of the profound disruptions in the lives of the German communities, Pastor Erwin Meyer came to the conclusion in his previously mentioned essay that “all rules and concepts, order and traditions and self-evident assumptions in living together with people” had been “turned upside down in the Soviet state.”

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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 | 3 October 2023 · 6:52 am

English Civil War Not a Class Struggle

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 180-182:

England was divided. Political crisis had escalated and the country’s differences would have to be settled on the battlefield. Now that the king’s initial plan to take London had floundered in the face of mass opposition at Turnham Green, both sides were digging in for a longer conflict than anyone wanted.

Broadly, the king was strong in the north, the west and in Wales; Parliament in the south and east. But this isn’t the whole story: Puritan towns in Royalist regions, like Bolton, Manchester or Dorchester supported Parliament. Even individual families could be torn asunder. When the son of Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh, declared for Parliament, she wrote to him trying to persuade him to change his mind. His refusal to support the king, she told him, was more painful to her than childbirth: ‘I do more travail with sorrow for the grief I suffer for the ways that you take,’ she wrote, ‘than I ever did to bring you into this world.’ London was split, though control for now lay with Parliament. Hold of the capital was both a blessing and a curse. A grumbling hive of disorder and opinions, it was hard to control, yet it boasted a huge wealth of manpower and money, not to mention the lion’s share of the English print trade. It was, though, also a great target: if the Royalists could take London, they might break the Parliamentarian war effort at one blow.

The aristocracy were mostly Royalist, though with some major exceptions like Warwick, Mandeville (now the Earl of Manchester) and Northumberland. In fact, fully a quarter of Charles’s old Privy Council ended up as Parliamentarians. Beneath them, the gentry were more evenly divided. In many areas they were instinctively Royalist: it was said because they hated the common people more than they hated tyranny. ‘How many of the nobility and gentry were contented to serve arbitrary designs,’ asked the radical Parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow, ‘if they might have leave to insult over such as were of a lower order?’ That said, in parts of the country, notably the south-east, the gentry were largely Parliamentarian.

Beneath the gentry we have less idea, though there were evidently real divides and genuinely heartfelt opinions. Some thought the middling sort were more likely to support Parliament. The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson remembered how most of the Nottinghamshire gentry were Royalist, but ‘most of the middle sort, the able substantial freeholders, and the other commons, who had not their dependence upon the malignant nobility and gentry’, were Parliamentarian. In Gloucestershire, meanwhile, the king’s support was alleged to come from the rich and the ‘needy multitude’ who depended on them, while ‘the yeomen, farmers, clothiers, and the whole middle rank of people’ supported Parliament.

There were plenty of members of the middling sort who supported the king, though, and statements such as those just quoted should certainly not be understood as implying the war was neatly divided on a class basis. Rather, they showed that people were taking notice of the apparently newfound political consciousness of the middle sort of people. They were evidently acting independently of their superiors, and this was worthy of comment.

More to the point, the suggestion by some on the Parliamentarian side that those below the middle ranks who followed the king did so simply out of dependence on the rich should be treated very carefully. The reality was that each side’s war effort relied on support from across the social spectrum. This wasn’t just a mobilisation of the rich followed blindly by the poor. When London, for example, built up its defences against a potential Royalist attack, the work was done by thousands of ordinary women and men from the capital: a vast, collective project. Women, sniffed a Royalist some years later, ‘From ladies down to oyster wenches / Laboured like pioneers in trenches.’ In the end, perhaps around a quarter of adult males would fight – and they were supported by everyone else, men and women. Women, indeed, would look after soldiers, and would work on civil defences, among so much else. Sometimes they would even fight in battles. Some donned men’s clothes and joined the armies, or fought to defend towns, such as the woman at the siege of Gloucester who took potshots at the enemy from the city’s defences. The war affected everyone, and everyone took part in one way or another.

The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class. The Royalists were anti-Puritan, they stood by the old hierarchies in the Church, notably bishops. They were nostalgic for ‘Merry England’ before it was ruined by Puritans moping at their books. Parliamentarians claimed they were fighting for God and the constitution; Royalists did, too.

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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 | 28 September 2023 · 9:29 am

Romanian Delegation to LA Olympics

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-223:

Nadia Comăneci’s attendance of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, not as a competitor but as a special guest, was painstakingly negotiated by the Romanian authorities with their U.S. counterparts. Peter Ueberroth, the head of the organising committee, negotiated patiently, but accepted most of the Romanians’ demands in order to persuade them to take part, given that it was boycotted by the Communist countries, headed by the U.S.S.R. It was said that one of the conditions was that any sportspeople who attempted to defect would not be allowed to stay on U.S. soil but sent back to Romania. The Securitate was satisfied to note that Ueberroth showed a ‘receptive and favourable attitude’ and ‘in press conferences, official contacts with the Romanian delegation and in other circumstances, Peter Ueberroth expressed positive opinions of the Romanian S.R. During the press conference held for Nadia Comăneci, Peter Ueberroth interrupted to put Nicolae Munteanu, an editor for Radio Free Europe, in his place when he asked tendentious questions about the political conditions for our country’s presence at the Olympics. At the same time, through his intervention, hostile declarations made by Béla Károlyi about the social-political situation in the Romanian S.R. were prevented from being published in the Los Angeles Times daily.’

Nadia Comăneci remembers that she was shocked when she found out that she would be able to travel to the U.S.A.:

I did not think that the 1984 Olympics would involve me. There was no way I would be allowed to travel to the United States when I wasn’t even allowed to go to Europe. But I received a phone call from a government official saying that I would be part of the Romanian delegation. I remember staring at the phone I held in shock because I couldn’t believe the government was actually going to let me get on a plane! I was assigned a ‘chaperone’ for the trip, but I really didn’t care that I was going to be watched. I was travelling to America, and I planned to eat, shop, and meet as many fun people as possible. For a brief moment, I felt almost free.

In the Romanian delegation to the Los Angeles Olympics, among the sportspeople, trainers, judges, medical personnel and reporters, the Securitate had a network of ninety-eight agents: forty-six informers, forty-five officers with operational missions, and seven officers tasked with maintaining official relations. They were co-ordinated by three officers, under the usual cover of being advisers or sports instructors. Some had the mission of keeping Nadia under constant watch. The ‘chaperone’ referred to by Nadia must have been judge and teacher Elena Firea, who had been recruited as an informer as long ago as 1966, and who accompanied her everywhere. The only room into which she did not manage to follow her was the one where Ronald Reagan received her, welcoming her to Los Angeles.

Fo[u]r years later at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Nadia Comăneci was not part of the delegation. The decision was so aberrant that even the Securitate’s informers were surprised by it. On finding out, ‘Monica’ and ‘Cristian’ made inquiries at the N.C.P.E.S., where they were given the disarming answer that it was ‘an order from above’, while Nadia Comăneci herself said, ‘she was expecting it, she would have liked to have gone to Seoul, but “that’s the situation” ’. The Communist régime was not prepared to risk her defection, and from 1985 she was not allowed to travel abroad except to Communist countries.

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by | 26 September 2023 · 2:09 pm

Soviet vs. Romanian Gymnastic Rivalry

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 185-186:

The rivalry between the Romanian and the Soviet schools of gymnastics began in earnest in the mid-1970s. It was to last for decades and proved to be one of the fiercest clashes in the history of sport. It was often lacking in fair play, with some results being decided before tournaments even began, but the gymnasts from the two countries knew nothing of these behind-the-scenes machinations and in every contest, they gave their very best to win on each apparatus. Communist jargon held that the Soviet experiment was the prime factor in developing the creative spirit of the working class. In gymnastics this was by no means an empty slogan. The Soviets were genuine pioneers, bold innovators. In every major competition, the Soviet gymnasts stood out for their acrobatics and exceptional grace. In the decades immediately after the war, the Romanians watched Soviet women’s gymnastics with admiration and tried to learn from it as much as they could during educational trips and exchanges organised as part of the two countries’ bilateral relations. They took part in competitions held in the U.S.S.R. and maintained links with trainers there, not only because they said it was a pride to learn the secrets of the sport from ‘the big brother to the East’, but because the Soviets genuinely were the best.

In 1973, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation took a decision that showed collaboration between the two countries had become closer than ever, hiring Soviet trainer Aleksandr Bogdazarov as manager of the women’s national squad. Bogdazarov was given the task of training the team for the 1974 World Championships in Varna and supervised four groups of Romanian trainers: Ioan Pătru, Gheorghe Condovici, Gheorghe Gorgoi, Atanasia Albu, Norbert Kuhn, and Elena Leuşteanu, alongside whom worked choreographer Géza Pozsár and pianist Carol Stabişevshi. Bogdazarov’s results were not spectacular, but by 1976, the Romanian team had risen two places in the ranking, compared with the 1972 Munich Olympics.

From 1975, the comradely spirit between Romania and the U.S.S.R. began to deteriorate. It was in 1975 that Nadia Comăneci first made an international name for herself, winning the Champions Trophy in London. The Soviets saw that their supremacy was in danger. Mircea Bibire, a gymnastics trainer in Oneşti and a longstanding informer, confessed to a Securitate officer in late April, after returning from a trip to the U.S.S.R., that the young gymnast from Romania had caught the Russians’ attention: ‘On return from the U.S.S.R., prof. Bibire Mircea recounted to me the enormous interest that the Soviet specialists have in gymnast Nadia Comăneci from Gh. Gh. Dej [Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej = Oneşti]. He even found it suspect that they were obsessed with knowing as much about her as possible and he confessed his fear that they might undertake “unsporting” measures against her in question, who threatens their supremacy in women’s gymnastics. He signalled to me that the sanitary assistant who takes care of the gymnast’s food is of Russian ethnicity and he is afraid that they might act via her to ruin the gymnast’s form.’

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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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