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.
The paper discusses several responses to the secret police’s (non-)involvement in religious matters that posed direct or indirect problems for the regime. The secret police’s attitude of allowing communities leeway in dealing with problematic situations had several motivations: to create a culture of self-policing and self-censorship that would defer the punishment to the hierarchical chain of the religious community; so that the community internalized the state requirements; and to infiltrate the community with collaborators in positions of power. Self-punishing and self-censorship were the ways in which communities respected the regulations imposed by the state. The literature on the subject in Romania is scarce and comes mostly from primary texts (memoir, journals, and various histories of religious communities). The article presents a case study of the Sibiu Orthodox Metropolitan See in its interactions with the secret police.
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