Christianity in unchristian times (Pasat Valeriu “Orthodoxy in Moldova: power, the church and the believers. A collection of documents”)

Пасат Валериу, “Православие в Молдавии: власть, церковь,
верующие. Сборник документов” (Москва: РОССПЭН, 2009-2010), т.
1-2.
Pasat Valeriu “Orthodoxy in Moldova: power, the church and the
believers. A collection of documents” (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2009) Vol. 1-2.

The history of the Orthodox Church in Moldova under Communism has somehow been a marginal subject in the field. Historians of Orthodoxy have extensively studied the Romanian and the Russian Orthodox Churches, as well as their resistance to and accommodation with the socialist state.  Moldovan Orthodoxy occupies itself a peripheral position in relation to other centers of Orthodoxy,
Bucharest and Moscow. Additionally, it lacks an autonomous, autocephalous church. Accordingly, its traditional connections with the Romanian and Russian Orthodox world have been always a subject of conflict and political tension. Because of that it has been embedded in nationalist or ideological projects. In this particular sense, Moldovan orthodoxy was more than a religion – it acted as a tool for building the national identity, an official enemy of the secular state, a keeper of traditions and
popular spirituality and a source of resistance to the regime among others.

Valeriu Pasat’s two published volumes of documents (from a planned series of four) help recover the history of the Orthodoxy in the Soviet Moldova as well as its complex interaction with the state and the believers. The first volume focuses on the period 1940-1953, while the second investigates the period between 1953 and 1960. The collection includes secret documents from the archives of Russia, Moldova and Romania.
Perhaps one of the most original contributions of Valeriu Pasat’s work is to acknowledge and document the sinuous path through which Orthodoxy has survived state persecutions and the many facets of popular religiosity.
A somewhat paradoxical preliminary conclusion of the collection of documents is that the persistence of different forms of popular religiosity – adherence to rituals, wandering priests and undocumented churches has played a far more crucial role that the official church to ensure the survival of Orthodoxy.
Moreover, the open collaboration and accommodation of the church with the regime (the so-called
sergianstvo) has nurtured an illegal, underground Christianity in opposition both to the state and to the official church.
To a significant extent Moldovan orthodoxy has survived not because of the
Church but despite it.
The cases of wandering priests – priests with no official recognition that continued nevertheless to perform religious services for the community and the undocumented churches are very interesting in this respect. The wandering priests were intensely persecuted by both the official church and the state, but without much success until the 60s. Since the regime was trying to erode the existing clerical basis by persecuting priests, closing theological schools and preventing individuals to
enroll in the remaining ones, the wandering priests, not certified by the official church, were filling the gaps.
Another crucial manifestation of the popular Orthodoxy was the maintaining and repairing of churches. Parishioners gathered illegally and organized huge collective efforts to repair the churches or to construct new ones. In other instances believer assembled together in order to prevent and oppose the destruction of some religious sites such as the case of the Monastery of Răciula in 1959.

Last but not least, a diffuse popular religiosity embedded in social customs, rites de passage, traditions and rituals such as the baptismal, the religious wedding, and the funeral has kept alive the faith in a faithless state.
All these prove the mostly forgotten fact that if Orthodoxy has survived the ferocious persecution campaigns directed against it, this occurred not through the official formal administration of the ecclesiastical body, but rather through an informal and rich popular religiosity that has been alive during the entire Soviet era.

This book review was published in Dystopia. Journal of Totalitarian Ideologies and Regimes, vol. I, no. 1-2, 2012. pp. 107-108