Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape

Stejărel Olaru is a historian who specializes in working with the secret services archives. He has published extensively in this area. In Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, he approaches sports as a subject for the first time. Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police is the English version of a volume that appeared in Romania in 2021 and generated extensive debates. As one of the greatest gymnasts in history, Nadia Comăneci was the subject of many articles and books, but none was focused on her relationship with the Securitate, the secret police of Communist Romania. The archives of the Securitate are accessible for research, but the files regarding Nadia Comăneci and Romanian gymnastics are scrambled in the extensive files related to sports in a randomized order, which makes Stejărel Olaru's work assembling these disparate pieces very useful. Alongside the Securitate's archives, Stejărel Olaru triangulates the information with primary sources from the Romanian Foreign Ministry Archives, the Romanian National Archives, and other sources already known, at least to the Romanian public, such as memoirs, interviews, press articles, and works on Romanian sports.The book opens and ends with Nadia Comăneci's illegal crossing from Romania to Hungary, and from there to Austria, culminating with her flight to the United States. The clandestine border crossing happened in November 1989, a month before the Romanian Communist regime collapsed. Nadia Comăneci was the symbol of perfection after she became the first gymnast to receive a ten at the Olympic Games, and the general public had the impression, influenced by Communist propaganda, that she had an ideal life. The shocking defection of the so-called Goddess from Montreal is still debated in Romanian society, and starting from her mysterious escape, Olaru analyzes the subtle control imposed by the Securitate on the gymnast, day by day, from the moment she became a national celebrity.After the first chapter, in the subsequent six, the author takes a chronological approach and examines Nadia Comăneci's evolution mainly through her relationships and the way the work environment of the gymnast was managed by coaches, family, the Securitate and, most notably, political figures of the country. Sports performances do become relevant to the author's discussion when they serve as turning points for the gymnast's career.Olaru gives special attention to the way the secret police built its network of informers in order to know everything about the Romanian gymnastics team in general and about Nadia Comăneci in particular. As the author documents, the Securitate recruited as informers almost all the important persons around the team and installed secret bugs to collect detailed information about what was happening at each moment. This contrasts with the lack of reaction from the authorities, who knew that coaches imposed an atmosphere of terror, especially Béla and Márta Károlyi. Olaru offers ample information showing that beatings, insults, and starvation were usual for Romanian gymnasts during the time and explains that this state of affairs was tolerated because the secret police and political figures prioritized the sports results while disregarding the manner in which they were obtained. In this respect, the roller-coaster relationship between Nadia Comăneci and Béla Károly occupies an essential part of Olaru's research.Alongside the secret police's surveillance actions, the author includes other topics that might interest sport historians. Describing the conditions in which Nadia Comăneci was discovered and trained, he explains how two minor cities of Romania—Onești and Deva—became emblematic poles of gymnastics. At the same time, the author argues that Romania was one of the countries that contributed in the 1970s to the transition from mature gymnasts to child gymnasts, who proved more easily controlled. Olaru also provides a comprehensive set of episodes that show constant conflicts between Romania and countries from the Communist bloc, especially the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, as Romanian gymnasts became increasingly competitive.Stejărel Olaru's book is easy to read and the primary source research is readily displayed, as the author has inserted entire documents or parts of documents in the text alongside the author's analysis. This offers historians from all over the world a means to surpass the language barrier that often comes with writing about Romanian sports, gymnastics, or Nadia Comăneci. In short, this text is a meticulously crafted work that helps scholars better understand the sports environment during a totalitarian regime and proves that, as one of the articles after the defection of Nadia Comăneci observed on December 1, 1989, sometimes reality beats fiction.

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