FC Steaua Plays Up in the Mountains—1987
Several dozen mostly young and middle-aged men walk in small groups close to each other. They pace softly, in silence, but firmly; one can see that they know very well where they are heading. As they move, it is clear that they know the way. They have just left behind the central railway station, built at the turn of the century, and now they are passing the cobbled streets of the residential suburb behind it. Sometimes they cynically or morosely exchange a manly, vulgar remark or two. They talk confidentially among themselves, it is clear that they know very well the ones with whom they are walking in the same group. As they leave the houses behind, it seems that their conversations become livelier, too. They start speaking more loudly and look more relaxed and more open in expressing their dissatisfaction. Most of them are Romanians, but there are also quite a number of ethnic Hungarians among them.
Faded, uniform-like attires are characteristic; many of the men come directly from the factories, where their shifts have just ended, as they say in workman slang. There are younger boys, too, among them, with secondary school age/teenage faces, joining the constantly growing, not-so-jolly company after the usual agricultural “patriotic work”. School had just started the previous day; the academic year was officially declared open by the dictator and his wife three days before, on the 13th of September, the Romanian Firefighters’ Day, right here, in Cluj . It happened at a rally, of course, where all pupils and students, and many workers were obliged to partake and shout “with enthusiasm”. Yet the pupils did not arrive from the school benches, but from one of the fruit gardens around the city, where in the next two weeks they will regularly go to pick apples, pears and plums. Learning can wait; in this system the studying youth must also diligently participate in the harvesting of the produce. Students cannot be exempted from this compulsory “volunteer” activity.
From time to time the walking groups are left behind by overcrowded cars, only intensifying the irritated atmosphere. Those driving will get there more quickly and occupy the best spots, while the walkers will have to look hard for the places with a good “signal”. Friends, neighbours and colleagues in the smaller groups take turns in carrying the small portable TV sets and their heavy batteries. Reaching the cowsheds of the agricultural cooperative at the edge of the town the equipment changes carriers more frequently because of the steeper roads. Everyone takes good care of the “treasures”; without them the “excursion” today would have no point at all. Perhaps they could join another group with an already installed TV set, but they could surely not see too much from the last row.
Climbing on the side of the hill called Lomb, people become more and more relaxed and louder, and occasionally swear like sailors as they reach the top. They make unambiguous and plain remarks about their miserable situation… they say things they would not say so openly elsewhere. From up here there is a good view on the city down below, stretching along the valley of the Someș River. It is Cluj , the historic capital of Transylvania , to which the name of Napoca, meant to evoke the times of the Roman Empire, was attached by the dictator visiting here exactly 10 years previously.
Nick is also here with his group of friends; in this multitude of people, he is also eager to watch the match. If he is lucky and “the signal comes in” (intră semnalul), he will be able to see the opening game of the 1987/1988 season of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup. Steaua București will play against the champion of the Hungarian football league, MTK. As an ethnic Hungarian and a Hungarian-hearted person, Nick will not have an easy task rooting in this particular match. He now cannot support Steaua, the football team of the army, the quasi-national team of Romania, yet cannot manifest his real feelings in this group of mainly Romanians, either. There are many others like him in the crowd. He is impatiently waiting for the match, just like at every previous match he had seen on the hills surrounding the city in the past years, together with many other people. The good many members of the group express their indignation more and more loudly for having been forced to come out here to watch a football match: it can be heard quite clearly—as Nick vividly recalls—that they openly criticise the system, saying that “It’s such a shame that we are playing at home and yet we must come out in the fields to follow the game!” (In original Romanian: “Este o rușine, că jucăm acasă și noi trebuie să vedem meciul pe câmp!”).
It is the 16th of September, 1987, a few minutes before five o’clock in the afternoon. The sun shines beautifully—Nick remembers—which is not necessarily good news. According to experienced “movie masters” and those “with antennas”, overcast but not yet rainy weather is the most adequate for the TV waves coming from the neighbouring country to produce the best possible image quality. Viewers are of course convinced, more or less with reason, that the authorities also “jam” (bruieaza) the programme. Most of them are not here for the first time; they come out frequently to take part in “football gatherings”. The location is widely known as one of the most suitable places to watch the games. From here on, in a crow’s flight westward, there is an unobstructed strip towards Hungary , which makes a relatively large area suitable for enjoyable reception. That’s why there are so many people here, at least 150–190 in number, with at least 30 cars parked, because one can be “almost certain” here to come through with the antennas and amplifiers made at home from components stolen from the factory. This is never sure, of course, and an unexpected blast of wind can sweep the signal away for minutes, destroying the image, with the result that the viewers are unable to see anything.
This September football game watching is a strange one from many perspectives. It is not accidental that a dissident audience (Mustață 2015), which was vexed and irascible anyway, started to curse state leadership much more loudly than usual. On the one hand, RTV , the state-owned public television gave up its good habit, and in spite of the expectations of the optimistic rooters , decided not to broadcast the match with MTK. Until now they transmitted at least the decisive matches in which a Romanian team was playing. Now the authorities decided that this was not a decisive game, and a smooth victory could be expected. With this argument they now “forbade” (ne-au interzis) the match of the Romanian star team from being broadcast. Apparently, the former state of rarity became a state of lacking in the fall of 1987. The account of Dumitru Graur (2010)—a later leader of the sports department of the television—given in connection with the Romanian championship in an interview after the change of the political system, is expressive. After 1985, the TV staff had regularly gone out to the local stadiums with the broadcasting van, and had waited at the location for the telephone approval of the Central Committee of the Party to start live transmission , but later on they gave up this pointless practice.
FC Steaua won the European Champion Clubs’ Cup in 1986 in Seville, against FC Barcelona. Steaua was exclusively the showcase team of the system, and was formally under the direct supervision of the army. However, its true leader was Valentin Ceaușescu , who was the elder son of the dictator. He had a degree in physics and was a person who carefully shunned publicity. As a recognition of the European success in 1986, on the 12th of May, the dictator himself awarded the members of the heroic team the highest state decoration of the Romania, the Star of the Romanian Socialist Republic First Class, as they had contributed to the glory of the country and the international success of Romanian sports.
The match that day started at 16:00 CET (Central European Time), as the stadium of Steaua did not have a system of illumination necessary for evening matches. The usual TV programme had already been narrowed down to two hours after January 1985 (Matei 2013), and the match was 90 minutes anyway. It seems that this extra programme was not authorised by the party leadership. That is why the few minutes’ presentation video about the match available on YouTube has no voice, because the uploaders took off the Hungarian language commentary from the Hungarian public TV . The same video can also be viewed elsewhere in its original form, with the voice of the Hungarian sports commentator. The match was not included in the TV programme of that day, either.
It is quite understandable that this made the rooters feel indignant and humiliated, and forced them to rely on their own creativity to overreach the system and sort out the issue of game watching. As always, they went out again to watch the match on the higher hills around the city, where the programme of the Hungarian Television permeated, albeit jammed. The lethargic statement, “It’s such a shame that we are playing at home and yet we must come out in the fields to follow the game” is expressive in many respects, and it is clearly indicative of the mood of the general public in eighties Romania. It conveys well the climate and the general atmosphere spread among the masses forced to survive under worsening and economically straitened conditions and the political rhetoric and discourse characteristic for national communism . In the given situation—as many of the rooters in the hills could well sense—it was not unimportant that the “unbeatable” Steaua , which slowly became the sole source of pride for the nation, would play against the champion of Hungary MTK Budapest in mid-September 1987. To understand this, one must know that during this period, the total dictatorship (which at least seemed to be total from the inside), facing acute problems of legitimacy, tried to strengthen its power and influence among others by intensifying the image of an internal and external enemy. The reform processes started in the neighbouring country and the official statements and counter-statements with reference to the publication in 1986 in Hungary of a treatise on the history of Transylvania (Köpeczi 1986), served as an excellent base to identify the entire Hungarian minority in Romania as an internal enemy, and Hungary as an external enemy in the eyes of the regime (Boia 2016). By this scapegoating procedure, the system wanted to create a diversion to distract the attention from rapidly worsening living standards (Burakowski 2016), and also to rhetorically intensify national feelings and, naturally, to slow down the erosion of its legitimacy. The nationalistic, or even openly chauvinistic, and neo-Stalinist political discourse became official (Tismăneanu 2014) and its effects were felt on people’s everyday lives. Part of the population in great straits was indeed afraid of the “Hungarian danger”, which was usually connected by the silent suggestion of the power to revisionism, irredentism and the phantasmagoria of losing Transylvania.
A Romanian–Hungarian football match with ethnic bearing was an excellent opportunity for the feelings to become harder on both sides, especially in a large city with an ethnically mixed setting and bearing so many symbolic historical and social meanings as Cluj . We know that football always has significance beyond itself; it strengthens, and at the same time expresses, collective identities (Giulianotti 2004; Péter 2016). Some of the Romanian rooters of the Steaua –MTK match thought that a victory might, at least temporarily, balance the known economic and standard of living superiority of Hungary in a Romanian–Hungarian relationship, and could strengthen the national pride as cultivated and exacerbated by the Romanian communist system—against all the terrible financial circumstances. After all, the magnificent Steaua will play against the ancient “enemy”, as the propaganda so frequently described it.
Cluj had already been declared a “closed city” by then: it was only possible to move to the city with a special permit that was quite diffic...