Romania

Chris Raducanu and Florica Murariu were in the Romanian squad that played Scotland at Murrayfield in December 1989. During the post-match banquet Raducanu fled from the hotel and claimed political asylum. Murariu didn’t. Instead, he took the flight back home and, two weeks later, was shot dead as revolution tore through their homeland.

On Saturday, 9 December, 1989, Scotland beat Romania 32-0 at Murrayfield. The match would become part of Scottish rugby folklore, but not because of anything that happened on the pitch. 

At around 1am, during the post-match banquet at Edinburgh’s Carlton Hotel on North Bridge, Romanian lock Chris Raducanu made a swift exit through the side doors. Fuelled by a rush of adrenalin, and quite a bit of alcohol, he ran and kept on running until he saw a police car on Princes Street. “I was in my official Romanian blazer, tie and everything,” explains Chris. “I said to the police officer, this is who I am and that I wanted to claim political asylum.”

He was met with what is perhaps a standard police response at weekends in the city. “Every time there is an international in Edinburgh it is pretty wild, with people out drinking, a bit like Cardiff or Dublin,” he admits. “So, the first thing the policeman obviously asked me was ‘are you pissed?’

“Then they took me to the police station for a formal interview, asked if I was a criminal and then handed me over to the Scottish immigration office. The immigration officer who looked after my case was a lovely guy and we’re still friends to this day.”

Meanwhile, Chris’s teammates boarded a flight back to Bucharest. 

A week later, the country would be in the grip of a revolution that led to the deaths of six rugby players. It ended on Christmas Day with Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife Elena, being blindfolded and executed by a firing squad behind a toilet block.

Chris was watching this play out on television while his two-month-old daughter and wife were still in Bucharest. As the revolution gathered pace, he wondered if he would ever see them again.

To appreciate why he was willing to risk so much, one needs to explain what he was escaping from, but also how rugby became his passport to a different life, which he now lives in Leeds.

It begins with a short history lesson from Chris about growing up in a communist state in the 1980s. “Oh, where do I start?” he says. “Well, Romania was a closed society, over 90 per cent of the population had no idea what was going on beyond the border. You could only watch on television what the government wanted you to watch. You only saw what was happening in Romania or other communist states.

“And when you don’t know what is happening beyond your boundaries you think everywhere is the same.

“There were one or two illegal radio stations broadcast from Germany or Austria. But if you got caught listening to them there could be consequences.

“Don’t get me wrong, I came from a privileged background,” he acknowledges. “My dad was a colonel in the military, he had a driver pick him up in the morning. My mother was the Romanian Royal Mail Syndicate President, she had three secretaries in her office.

“But when I became a teenager, I became part of the rugby life.”

Coaches used to visit schools and select kids they thought might excel at a certain sport. Chris’s height and jumping ability, which he learned from playing basketball, would make him a huge asset in every sense, especially in the lineout.

“As a young rugby player, I was taking part in tournaments across Eastern Europe, and Romania was always winning,” he says. “I first came to England when I was fourteen. We played all these posh private schools and won something like 55 out of 58 games over several years.

“We were training on concrete in Romania, and then we would come over and play on these pitches that were like Wembley. I saw a totally different way of life, and I had my eyes opened from that age.”

Romania had been under Ceaușescu’s rule since 1965. He would eventually become the living embodiment of Lord Acton’s famous maxim that ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

Yet there was a time when Ceaușescu was viewed by the West as the communist it was okay to like, and Romania was an outlier that didn’t simply kowtow to Russia’s demands. 

In 1968, he opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The following year Ceaușescu hosted a visit from US President Richard Nixon. He received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II following a state visit to the UK in 1978 (albeit a visit paid for by Romania) and he was president of the only Eastern Bloc nation that sent a team of athletes to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

But his regime became increasingly more oppressive and extreme as the country was transformed into a police state. 

You were not allowed to work outside of your own town. You had to be given permission to make calls abroad. Married women had to give birth or could face monthly fines. Contraception and abortion were illegal, which led to thousands of young children being abandoned in orphanages by parents who simply couldn’t afford to keep or feed them. 

Between 1986 and 1991, at least 10,000 Romanian children, mostly orphans, contracted HIV through infected blood transfusions. According to a report in the New York Times published in 1990, ‘An old practice of injecting blood transfusions into the umbilical cord, to stimulate the growth of small infants is now seen as one reason for the rapid spread of AIDS among babies’.

“Ceaușescu also had this bright idea that he would pay off Romania’s national debt by exporting everything the country produced,” says Chris with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “We were a very productive country. Talking to my parents and my older sister they said that in the 70s and early 80s there was food and fuel in abundance. All of a sudden from around 1983 to 1989 it got worse. So much worse.

“I think there is a Guinness World Record statistic that says Romania was the only nation in 1989 that had zero national debt,” he says. “But he achieved his dream by making everybody else’s life a nightmare. There were queues for everything. People would queue from 4am to get bread.

“There was two hours a day of national television. Half an hour was cartoons for kids, the rest was the news telling you how great the president was.”

While his subjects were living in abject poverty, Ceaușescu thought nothing of spending fortunes to build an opulent palace for his family. 

Yet the Ceaușescu years were also a golden age for Romanian sport. He used it as a platform for propaganda, to show the outside world that his country could compete with the best. His government spent millions on sports programmes, hiring foreign coaches to produce world-class athletes and their triumphs became a source of national pride.

The decision to compete at the Olympics in ’84 was handsomely rewarded when the country finished second in the overall medal table.

In 1986, Steaua Bucharest pulled off one of the greatest upsets in European Cup Final history by beating Barcelona in Seville on a penalty shoot-out and then went on to beat Dynamo Kyiv in the European Super Cup. The 80s saw the emergence of the country’s greatest footballing talent, Gheorghe Hagi, nicknamed ‘the Maradona of the Carpathians’.

Gymnast Nadia Comăneci won two gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics to add to the three she had won at Montreal in 1976.

The rugby team also established itself as the best XV outside of the Five Nations/Tri-Nations. It was a period that reaped two home wins against France (1980, 1982), one over Grand Slam winners Scotland (1984), a draw with Ireland, and a narrow defeat to the All Blacks.

And then there were the famous wins over Wales. In 1983, Eddie Butler skippered the side to a 24-6 defeat in Bucharest – his men were battered by a team of man mountains. 

The Romanian squad would spend weeks in training camps preparing for matches, while their western counterparts would have to juggle day jobs with playing for their club and country. 

The Oaks, as they are known, then came to Cardiff in 1988. The afternoon started inauspiciously for Wales as the band played the wrong national anthem for the visitors. Still, at least they were in tune. 

Wales would put in a performance that was a discordant mess, losing 15-6. It prompted Phil Bennett to say, ‘The last 25 minutes were the worst in Welsh history.’

The following year, Romania returned to the UK to play Scotland, which would mark Chris’s retirement from international rugby at the age of 22.  “It was a chance that me and my wife, Ruxandra, knew we had to take,” he says. “But based on previous defectors it would have taken four, five, six years to be reunited. You would either go through an official process or try and curry favour with the officials.

“My first daughter had just been born and we wanted to give her a better way of life. So we had this talk about two weeks before the game.

“I said it could happen in Edinburgh,” he continues. “But there wasn’t really a plan. It was just talk.”

Legend has it that Chris was not the first man to defect from Romania to Britain via a rugby match.

According to the late Swansea player Vivian Davies, when the Oaks toured Britain in 1955, he became embroiled in a plot that involved accompanying an unnamed Romanian along the seafront at Langland Bay. They were met by a pair of MI5 officers who took the man away, never to be heard of again.

And Chris’s story also attracted its own mythology. 

One version, that has been told many times over, states that he was smuggled out of the hotel by Scottish centre Sean Lineen, avoiding the Securitate (Romanian Secret Police) who were sent along to monitor the players’ every move.

The pair bolted down North Bridge into the Tron Tavern, through a set of tunnels underneath the pub – now known as the Edinburgh Vaults – before emerging once more at street level, at which point he spotted the police car.

Chris lets out a hearty roar. “Ha! Yeah, that’s not true,” he says. “While I was in Edinburgh, I was offered a job as a labourer by (ex-Scottish international) Norrie Rowan. He really helped me out. 

“Along with Sean, he had a successful business as a property developer, and when I joined his company he owned the Tron Tavern. While we were doing construction work there, they discovered these tunnels under the pub.

“So, Norrie put a plaque there which read ‘This Is The Tunnel Where Romanian Rugby Player Chris Raducanu Escaped From The Securitate’.

“There was this one time when the Romanian Embassy in London visited Edinburgh. I know somebody who works for the Embassy and they sent me a picture of the plaque!

“People believe what they want to believe. But it was just a clever piece of marketing.”

Another account suggested that Chris’s father knew what was about to happen back at home and had tipped off his son. Again, he instantly dismisses the suggestion, and nobody could have predicted how events would unfold.

“We were very fortunate all this trouble happened,” says Chris. “As I defected, the following day they retired my father from his post. Then, a month after the revolution, they wanted to reinstate him and he refused to come back.

“That was the consequence of my actions. If you were in the army and you were connected to somebody who had defected you would get retired.”

Ruxandra was promptly questioned by the police but their newly-born daughter provided a plausible cover story. “She said ‘my husband is a bastard who has left me holding the baby’,” says Chris. 

Back in Romania, the growing sense of unrest only gathered pace following demonstrations in Timișoara on 17 December. Four days later, Ceaușescu summoned thousands of people to Palace Square in Bucharest, to show their support or face losing their jobs.

The crowd turned on its president. The moment where he can see he has lost his authority was captured on film and became one of the defining moments in the collapse of communism.

In the days that followed, more than 1,000 Romanians died in clashes with the police and army reservists. Among the casualties was one of the nation’s greatest rugby players, flanker Florică Murariu. He represented Romania seventy times, played alongside Raducanu at the inaugural Rugby World Cup in 1987 and captained his country in that victory against Wales in Cardiff. Butler rated him as one of the best forwards of the 80s.

On the morning of Christmas Eve 1989, two weeks after he had returned to Bucharest from Edinburgh with the rest of the Romanian squad, Murariu was walking with his godfather along Drumul Taberei Boulevard in Bucharest.

He was stopped by an army reservist who asked him for ID. Murariu explained who he was, but when he reached inside his pocket, the reservist opened fire.

There had been erroneous TV reports of terrorists wearing foreign clothes coming into the country. One theory, albeit unproven, suggested that Murariu had been wearing a Zimbabwean rugby shirt, which prompted the reservist to panic and pull the trigger.

Murariu’s  brother, Costica, only discovered that he was dead after turning on the television news later that day and seeing Florica’s body in a morgue.

For over twenty years, Costica waited for an official explanation about what happened. 

In 2011 he decided to write to the Military Prosecutor’s Office to find out if there had been any progress on his brother’s case.

The reply was not only surprising but ultimately soul-crushing. An official inquest had been held in 1993, and the reservist had been acquitted. 

The prosecutor responsible for investigating the circumstances behind Murariu’s death had been instructed not to make the verdict public or communicate it to his family. “Do you know why I still live?” Costica said in an interview published by ProSport in 2014. “Just to see my brother’s killer and ask him why he shot him.”

Radu Durbac was another Romanian rugby legend, who played for the national team during the 60s and 70s. He was also killed in the revolution; a victim of ‘friendly fire’. 

Petre Astafei, Bogdan Stan and Florin Butirii all played for Rapid Bucharest while Cristian Toporan represented Energia Bucarest. They too all died during the conflicts. Stan was the oldest of that quartet, and he was just 21.  

Every year a memorial service is held to commemorate the players who lost their lives during the revolution. But trying to find out exactly who was responsible for their deaths became a lengthy pursuit of justice. 

Ceaușescu was gone, but the old guard still held many high-ranking positions within the judiciary and the government and had little or no desire to find out the truth. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

Then, in 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Romanian government to pay 46 families around 17,000 euros each as compensation for relatives that had died in the revolution.

One of the recipients was Bogdan Stan’s mother, Elena Bancila. “There is a cover-up, Romania buried these cases,” she told Associated Press. “The court in Strasbourg did what the Romanian justice system was unable to do.” 

Their deaths would become symbolic; the revolution also heralded the beginning of the end for Romania as a force in world rugby.

Even without Ceaușescu’s regime, Romania remained competitive for several years, though it is said there were tensions between players who were on opposite sides during those conflicts.

Victories followed against France and Scotland, before they beat Fiji in the ’91 World Cup. Around the same time, there was an approach for Romania to join what would become the Six Nations. The offer was turned down, apparently because the team wouldn’t be able to balance the demands of domestic and international rugby.

Crucially, with Ceaușescu gone, state funding for the top teams dried up. Corporations that wanted to sponsor teams to gain political influence and keep on the right side of the government also walked away.

The final straw was rugby turning professional in 1995. The foundations of the national team had been built on the strength of its two biggest clubs, Steaua and Dinamo Bucharest. Their best players left to join teams in France and the domestic game went into decline. 

As for Chris, he started a new life in Edinburgh with his family, who arrived from Romania in July 1990. 

Rowan not only found him a job but put in a good word with Boroughmuir RFC before he was persuaded to join Headingley and move to Leeds the following year.

He now calls himself an ‘honorary Yorkshireman’. Indeed, he was the first foreigner to represent ‘god’s own country’ and skippered Yorkshire to the County Championship in 1994. 

The Raducanus also started their own business, importing furniture from Romania. 

Life in the UK has not been without its dramas. Floods in 1995 nearly wiped out the business, although signing professional terms that year with Leeds, helped to soften the financial blow. 

Nowadays the family run a small property company, but they still have ties to the ‘old country’ and he laments for what has happened to the Romanian team. 

“Andy Robinson [the former England and Scotland head coach] is there now and everybody directly involved in the team tries to make things better. 

“But the corruption and politics are still there,” he claims. “The money they receive from the International Rugby Board [World Rugby] doesn’t filter down through every level of the game.”

In 2018, players complained about not being paid by the Romanian Rugby Federation. The following year, the Oaks missed out on playing in the World Cup after fielding ineligible players.

More recently a row has broken out over who should play in their revamped stadium, Arcul de Triumf. “We always had a designated rugby stadium,” says Chris. “The ground was donated to the RRF and it was redeveloped into a state of the art facility – the first purpose-built rugby ground in Romania.

“All of a sudden one of the ministers decided it has to be shared. So it’s a big mess.”

Yet he is clearly excited about developments just up the road from where he lives and the decision taken last year by Leeds to become Leeds Tykes and go back to their roots. “I would love to get involved again at some point, at a club where everyone knows each other and where they build a club for the community.”

But whatever happens next, he will be eternally grateful for the opportunities that the sport has given him. “We’ve had a good life,” he concludes. “The most important thing for me was getting involved in rugby. It taught me the best lessons in life; work hard, help others, be friendly, never regret what you never did and always look forward.”

Story by  Ryan Herman

Portrait by John Ashton | Archive Pictures by Getty Images and Shutterstock

This extract was taken from issue 14 of Rugby.
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