Volume 14 (2022): Edizione 2 (September 2022)

This study deals with the emergence of organised forms of resistance to the Bolshevik policies of secularisation, and the role that documents introduced into the religious landscape in the 1920s by the Soviet regime played in it. Integral to the Bolshevik campaign of eliminating religions, the mandatory registration of religious communities transposed into the religious landscape the organisational forms and techniques of the production of documents characteristic of bureaucracy, which enhanced the capability of believers to pose an organised resistance to antireligious policies. This paper measures the consequence of these documents and bureaucratic practices, their role in the consolidation of religious organisations and the creation of antagonism between parishioners and state officials. My study is centred on the case of the Orthodox Church of our Lady of Kazan from Cioburciu (Moldavian Region of Soviet Ukraine), the construction of which was at the heart of the confrontation of Orthodox believers from this settlement with the Soviet authorities.

In the late Russian Empire, and later Soviet Ukraine, aspects of Baptist doctrine and communal life earned Baptists the suspicion of their Orthodox neighbors and of state and ecclesiastical authorities. Depending on the dynamics of change, the perceived foreign origins of Baptism, their advocacy of pacificism, and their understandings of morality and transformation were either viewed favorably and allowed these communities to grow through conversion. Or, the same attributes earned Baptists the wrath of state and Church authorities and led to repression. This article analyzes how and why the threat posed by a minority faith group changed over time and how these communities adapted.

Vasilica Barbu, also known as Mother Veronica, a seer and then an abbess in mid-twentieth century Romania, had visions of Jesus, Mary, and a variety of angels and saints, beginning in 1937. Supported by her parish priest and other local believers, she published an account of her visions and founded a convent for adolescent girls. The Vladimireşti convent proved to be very successful, but the Securitate (secret police) decided to close it down on the grounds that it was harbouring fascist fugitives. A close reading of how Barbu navigated the challenges of poverty, patriarchy, and the rise of state socialism reveals not only a story of incredible tenacity in the face of adversity but also how fundamentally religious values changed following the Second World War. Whereas in the late 1930s Barbu’s visions enabled her to bring together a strong community of supporters and to attract the attention of the most powerful men in the country, in the early 1950s both Church leaders and the Securitate attacked “mysticism” as heterodox and socially deviant.

The paper discusses the forging of a carceral legionary theophany based on oneiric experience and the apparitions of saints to imprisoned members of the Iron Guard in contemporary Romania. It also approaches the post-Communist instrumentalization of the legionaries’ prison experience (dreams, visions of the Virgin and saints, “dreams of terror”) in supporting their claim of canonizing fascists martyrs as saints of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Father Dimitri Dudko’s fame as a popular 1970s Soviet Orthodox priest and his public ‘recantating’ and subsequent disgrace in 1980 shed light on several aspects of religion in the late Cold War. Diasporas like the ROCOR fostered practices and beliefs-especially conservative ones-forced to go underground in the homeland. Soviet atheism responded to revived religious practice worldwide, with Dudko’s persecution being a part of that response. The formal and informal relationships between ROCOR clerics and Dudko, and between Dudko and the KGB, suggest that Dudko’s apparent about-face may have had deeper roots and longer-lasting effects than previously suspected.

The secret police archives present the life of the religious underground as seen by the secret officers who were seeking to facilitate those communities’ destruction. The state’s official narrative about these clandestine groups is mirrored in alternative documents and narratives. This article focuses on the Old Calendarist Orthodox monastic community of the Dormition of the Mother of God Monastery in the Strada Televiziunii in Bucharest at the end of the communist regime. It showcases the life of the monastery as described in the diary of a monastic novice whose written account of becoming a monk described the last days of the monastery before its destruction by the secret police in 1983.

Absence is made present through objects, images, texts, or thoughts and, through various practices, absence also has agency. Absence was often a reality which Old Calendarists had to endure due to the intrusive character of the secret police: their churches were destroyed, they were deprived of their religious books, photographs, icons, and even religious leaders. These actions created an absence which, in turn, I argue in this article, inspired the Old Calendarist’s strive for survival. Today, the secret police archives in Romania store many of these absences, be they objects, images or life stories, that could become presences and continue, complete, or simply end some chapters in the histories of the Old Calendarist Church. In this study I will offer examples that convey the manners in which the Old Calendarist Church managed to navigate through and make use of these absences in order to survive persecution, highlighting the value of the secret police archives as sites or spaces of recovery from absence and loss.