Category Archives: USSR

by | 4 January 2024 · 4:07 am

Fall of Budapest, 1945

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 309, 315-316:

We have had three great tragedies in our country: the Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century, the Turkish occupation lasting 150 years – and the Soviet liberation. György Faludy (1910–2006)

…

If women were scared of rape, the fear among men was to be picked up off the streets and used as slave labour by the Soviets for public works like clearing rubble, shoring up buildings and repairing the city’s bridges. General Malinovsky reported back to Moscow that 110,000 men had been taken as ‘prisoners’ in this way. According to one well-informed journalist, ‘Count Géza Teleki [who would later himself become briefly Minister for Public Works] and a former Mayor of Budapest were seized without any warning and found two days later when an officer to whom they could talk finally released them. Prince Pál Esterházy was discovered in a cemetery burying dead horses.’ Around half of these detainees were returned home within weeks of the end of the siege. But the rest, including men from all walks of life and essential workers like firefighters, ambulance drivers, train and bus drivers – people who would be needed to rebuild Hungary – were transported east to the Soviet Union for forced labour on building projects in the Urals and Siberia. Some returned to Hungary decades later, but most never did – one of the Soviet war crimes rarely mentioned amid all the other horrors of the Second World War. Forty thousand of these men – abducted from their homes and from the streets – were corralled into a concentration camp near Gödöllő, 30 kilometres north-east of Budapest, in appalling conditions before being taken to the USSR.

…

Budapest in the spring of 1945 ‘was nothing short of hell on earth’, said the high-ranking prelate Bishop József Grősz at the end of the year. ‘Thousands of women from girls of twelve to women in the ninth month of pregnancy raped; men deported for slave labour. Almost every home looted; the city and its churches in ruins; the restaurants and stores empty, dead horses in the streets along with unburied bodies; in the cellars people half-demented with hunger, cutting pieces of flesh from animals dead for days.

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Filed under Germany, Hungary, labor, migration, military, nationalism, slavery, USSR, war

by | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

…

Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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Filed under Austria, economics, food, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, USSR

by | 8 December 2023 · 2:24 am

Hungary’s Crown of St. Stephen

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 33-34:

Every 20 August, the date of St Stephen’s canonization and a national holiday in Hungary, a casket containing what is believed to be the king’s mummified right hand is carried in solemn procession around the basilica which bears his name in central Budapest. This grisly celebration, followed by a Mass, took place even in the darkest days of the Soviet era when the Communists tried to suppress religion. Yet the holiest relic associated with Stephen is not a skeletal hand. One of the most popular tourist sights in Budapest – all Hungarian schoolchildren are encouraged to see it once in their lives – is the Holy Crown of St Stephen. It was for a long time the central symbol of royal legitimacy and has been venerated for centuries. The validity of a King of Hungary was coronation with the use of this crown, and no other, in the ceremony. The crown is shrouded in myth, like so much of ancient Magyar history.

It is certain that the crown on display in modern Budapest was never worn by King Stephen. The original was lost or stolen soon after the king’s death and there are many theories about its fate. It is said that in 1044 it was found by soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, and he returned it to the Vatican. The lower half of the crown on display now, the so-called ‘Greek part’, made in 1074, nearly forty years after King Stephen’s death, was a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII to the Hungarian King Géza I. The upper ‘Latin’ part was made in Hungary, probably at some point in the late twelfth century, to replace the lost original. The two halves were welded together around 1330, in order to make a solid base for a gold cross that surmounts the crown.

Lost again and found in a series of centuries-long dramas and adventures, the crown was taken to Austria towards the end of the Second World War by Hungarian fascists – either, as one group said, to sell it on the black market or, as others claimed, to preserve it from the clutches of the Communists. Somehow it fell into the hands of the US army in Vienna in 1945. The Americans kept it in Fort Knox, to ensure its safety, until 1978 when it was ceremoniously returned to Hungary. The crown and other royal regalia thought to have belonged to Stephen or his immediate successors were then installed by a Communist regime aiming for national respectability in a large shrine in Budapest’s National Museum under permanent armed guard. To mark the millennium of the Hungarian state, the first of Viktor Orbán’s governments in 2000 transferred all the royal jewels, amid great solemnity and fanfare, to the Parliament building. In a republic, it seemed at first sight an odd place to move the crown jewels, but in the Hungarian context there was logic to it. For a nation that has been occupied by other powers for so many periods in its history, the crown has always been the symbol of independence and freedom, rather than of royalty. And besides, the crown jewels are magnificently presented in inspiring surroundings.

Stephen brought order out of chaos, stability and the beginning of a legal code. He is, rightly, one of the most revered figures in Hungary’s history.

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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 | 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 | 17 September 2023 · 5:43 am

Cold War Gymnastics

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 46-48:

More than two decades later, in 2001, Nellie Kim was to recall the Montréal Games and her clash with Nadia Comăneci in an interview with Jean-Christophe Klotz, the presenter of Les Grands Duels du Sport on the Franco-German Arte channel. Even after so many years the disappointment Kim had felt at the time obviously still rankled when she said that while Nadia was a great gymnast and almost perfect, she was by no means superior to anybody in the Soviet team. ‘I can’t say that she was better than we were. Her routines were as difficult as those of Turishcheva, Korbut and myself. On a few apparatuses she was better than Turishcheva and Korbut, but on others, not quite. But the press turned her into the “goddess of gymnastics”,’ she said, suggesting that it was not so much Nadia’s performance that had counted, but the influence of Western journalists, who deliberately exaggerated her prowess.

Kim’s opinion is only partly justified. Given that the Cold War was still at its height, Western journalists must have felt a bias towards anybody able to rock the myth of Soviet sporting invincibility. This had been the case of Olympic, World and European champion Věra Čáslavská, who at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics was done an injustice by the judges: the Czechoslovak gymnast had been forced to share the top of the podium with Larisa Petrik of the U.S.S.R. and had bowed her head and turned it to the right when the Soviet national anthem was played. Čáslavská was protesting not at the unfairness of the scoring to which she had fallen victim during the competition, but at the fact that her country had fallen victim to an invasion by the Soviet army just weeks before.

And the Western journalists loved her for it. But four years later, they also fell in love with little Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics, recognising even then the decisive rôle she was to play in gymnastics. They dubbed her ‘the darling of Munich’, so captivating was her performance, which gives us to believe that regardless of political circumstances or personal sympathies, the international press was still able to preserve its objectivity in the face of obvious talent.

By the time of the 1976 Montréal Olympics, Romania had indeed gained its own separate image internationally, as Czechoslovakia had in 1968. The country was part of the Communist bloc, but a number of past political gestures on the part of Nicolae Ceauşescu had created the impression that Romania distanced itself from and sometimes even defied Moscow, an impression that was also bolstered by Bucharest’s closer and closer ties with Washington and other Western capitals. Which is why the sympathy towards Nadia Comăneci on the part of both press and public could be viewed as all the more genuine.

But political circumstances could have no influence on how Nadia’s performance was judged, where technique and artistic elements that were all that counted, and journalists could not award points in place of the judges. It was the fullness of Nadia’s performance that was her secret, and it distinguished her from the Soviets, as Cathy Rigby remarked in her commentary for ABC: ‘Oh look at that amplitude!’ Nadia controlled her body in a way that stood out, without any tremor to betray hesitation, and with the ambition to control her balance to the utmost degree. She was fast, but at the same time elegant and certain, which made some of her movements seem unreal. The elements in the routines that won her scores of ten were achieved with flawless poise, seamlessly combined, in a style that Nadia was to make uniquely her own.

The International Gymnastics Federation’s scoring code for the uneven parallel bars now includes the Comăneci Salto and Comăneci Dismount, named after the moves Nadia pioneered at Montréal. In the first, ‘the gymnast begins in a support position on the high bar. She casts away from the bar and performs a straddled front somersault and regrasps the same bar’ – an element deemed to be of an extremely high level of difficulty. In the second, the ‘gymnast begins in a handstand on the high bar and then pikes her feet onto the bar and does a sole circle swing around the bar. She then releases the bar first with her feet and then with her hands as she performs a half-twist immediately into a back somersault dismount.’ Such moves are only a few of those that were to inspire future generations of gymnasts, leading them to tackle elements of increasing complexity and even risk. In Munich in 1972, Olga Korbut had done the same thing. Likewise, Japanese gymnast Mitsuo Tsukahara revolutionised gymnastics with the spectacular vault that now bears his name. To this day, each generation of gymnasts takes inspiration from the daring of their predecessors.

The impact around the world of Nadia Comăneci’s achievements at Montréal was remarkable. The popularity of the sport suddenly increased, and Nadia became an inspiration not only for younger gymnasts and even those of her generation, but also for countless little girls who dreamed of becoming like her. Some of those little girls went on to become champions, such as Mary Lou Retton, who watched Nadia at Montréal on television and was electrified by her refinement and natural grace.

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by | 19 July 2023 · 6:17 am

Romania’s Ruling Elite Before 1989

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 117-120:

Ceauşescu (1918–89), the third of ten children, came from poor peasant stock, signed on as a shoemaker’s apprentice at age eleven, and joined the Communists as a teenager. As a “person dangerous to the public order,” he spent much of his youth in Romania’s Doftana Prison—the “Marxist University”—where he met [Gheorghe Gheorghiu]-Dej. Following the late-1947 Communist takeover, Ceauşescu was eventually put in charge of personnel. When he became general secretary at age fortyseven in 1965, he was not only the youngest Romanian Politburo member but the youngest party chieftain in Eastern Europe. Six years later, during the Sino-Soviet split, he provoked Soviet military maneuvers on Romania’s border by undertaking a bold state visit to China. Ceauşescu aimed to study what could be adapted from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to forestall “socialism with a human face” in Romania. On the same trip he visited Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, and liked what he saw there, too. Back in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s mini—cultural revolution and maximal cult unfolded, at least twenty-seven members of his extended clan got high posts. Most prominently, and unusually for Communist regimes, his wife, Elena (1916–89), who had dropped out of grade school but suddenly held a doctorate in chemistry, became coruler. Their debauched son Nicu (1951–1996), the minister of youth, became the heir apparent. The patriarch himself, who had completed only the four-year elementary school in his village, became a god. He bore the same title as had Antonescu (and Dej): Conducător.

Samizdat was virtually unknown in Communist Romania, and dissidents there always seemed fewer than even the small numbers elsewhere in the bloc. “Romanian dissent,” went the saying, “lives in Paris, and his name is Paul Goma” (the Romanian writer [1935—]). One reason was that unlike dissenters under other Communist regimes, those in Romania elicited indifference or even scorn from the West, where Ceauşescu was lauded as the great “maverick” willing to buck Moscow. As one analyst noted, “three presidents of the United States, three presidents of France, the Emperor of Japan, the Queen of England and a lot of other important people expressed their admiration” for Romania’s supposed “independent course.” In 1968, Ceauşescu, alone among East bloc leaders, refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, on August 23, a holiday in Romania commemorating the anniversary of the 1944 coup against the pro-Nazi regime, he publicly condemned the operation against the Prague Spring. The West was not alone in going bananas with approval: the overjoyed Goma joined the Romanian Communist party. In 1973, however, he was expelled from the party and in 1977 exiled for supporting the Czechoslovak Charter 77 human rights movement and writing two letters to Ceauşescu denouncing the Securitate, making Goma an international cause célèbre. Still, that such a nonparty critic could have joined the Romanian Communist party, even if only briefly, showed that many Romanians strongly identified with the regime’s gestures to distance Romanian communism from Soviet tutelage, while aiming for a special Romanian mission within the Communist world.

Leaving aside the few pro-Western critical types, such as Goma abroad and, at home, Doina Cornea (1929—), a professor of French literature at Cluj and advocate for human rights, the émigré historian Vladimir Tismăneanu has observed that “many Romanians despised, even hated Ceauşescu and his tyranny, but did not like liberal, Western-style democratic values either.” Communism drew upon and deepened this illiberal side of Romania’s political culture, while also spawning a new elite—Romania’s uncivil society. Around 10,000 made up the central establishment and 200,000 the regional one. This elite, largely provincial and undereducated, by design had become far more Romanian and far less Jewish, Hungarian, or German than any previous elite in Romania. Its grateful members shared career paths and life experiences—to a point. Officials “regularly attended party meetings and courses for ideological indoctrination and in this way were molded and shaped in a certain spirit and acquired a certain behavior in society,” explained Silviu Brucan (1916–2006), a onetime protégé of Dej. “The cohesion of this social group sprang from the status of its members and the special relations among them, from their position in the structure of power, from their high salaries, and particularly from their access to a wide range of restricted benefits and privileges.” Brucan—a Jew who had been born Saul Bruckner—was uncivil society’s ambassador to Washington (1956–9) and to the United Nations (1959–62), and then head of Romanian TV.

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