Inochentism
Inochentism is a millennialist and Charismatic Christian sect, split from mainstream Eastern Orthodoxy in the early 20th century. The church was first set up in the Russian Empire, and was later active in both the Soviet Union and Romania. Its founder was Bessarabian monk Ioan Levizor, known by his monastic name, Inochenție.
The Inochentists, regarded as heretics by Eastern Orthodox denominations, traditionally organized themselves into an underground church and were once thriving in parts of Bessarabia region. Inochenție and his followers were falsely singled out for their alleged preaching of free love and other controversial tenets, but the movement managed to survive Russian persecution and earned a dedicated following, especially among Romanians. It went into decline following its leader's death, and, during World War II, suffered mass deportation to Transnistria. Weakened by Soviet rule, with its anti-religious campaigns and Gulag deportations, it survives in small communities from the general area of Bessarabia—in Romania, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.
History
Beginnings
The roots of Inochentism relate to Russian rule in Bessarabia, when the Russian Orthodox Church was prevalent and official. According to Inochentist tradition, Cosăuți-born 19-year-old Ioan Levizor was sent by his father to carry some papers to the starosta of the nearby village of Iorjnița. When he passed the chapel marking the place of an ancient monastery, he is alleged to have heard voices saying "Ioan! The time has come! Hurry up!" three times and three days later, while passing by the same place, he saw the Mother of God, an appearance which convinced him to become a Russian Orthodox monk at the nearby Monastery of Dobrușa.Levizor spent three years at the monastery, where he acted as a holy fool, pretending to be a madman in order to push the others toward spiritual awakening. According to his hagiography, the other monks disliked him and Levizor suffered from this, finding his comfort in the Holy Mother's supernatural visits. Despite his unpopularity among the monks, his superior Archimandrite Porfiri entrusted him with the keys of the monastery, a position from which he used to help those in need, including giving monastery property to the nuns of a nearby convent. In 1897, Levizor left the monastery and wandered across the Russian Empire, moving from monastery to monastery, eventually returning to the Bessarabian Noul Neamț Monastery, founded by Romanian Orthodox monks from Neamț. In 1899, the new Bishop of Kishinev, Yakov, became more open to the use of Romanian language in religious contexts. This allowed the creation of a Moldavian monastery in Balta dedicated to Feodosie Levitzky, a priest known for his philanthropic activities. It was here that Levizor took the monastic name Inochenție.
With the Holy Synod's approval, in 1909, Inochenție moved Feodosie's remains from the cemetery into the church of the monastery. According to hagiographic accounts, a miracle occurred: the "pharisees" who tormented Feodosie during his life found themselves unable to reach the founder's tomb, and it was only Inochenție who was able to get there, for which reason the bishop had to ordain him a priest. Inochenție used his oratory skills to promote the cult of Feodosie.
Inochenție's leadership
Inochenție, a "Heavenly Emperor", began constructing a "New Jerusalem" in Balta and, by 1911, became known as a miracle worker. The ensuing phenomenon was a mass religious movement of peasants from various parts of Bessarabia, but also from Podolia and Kherson; scholar Charles Upson Clark describes Inochenție's Balta as a "Moldavian Lourdes". The new converts considered Inochenție the personification of the Holy Spirit.The hieromonk was at first encouraged by his monastic superiors, but the Imperial Russian government was alarmed by the political implications and the spread of unorthodox practice, including glossolalia. Officials brought in psychiatrists to investigate the "Balta psychosis"; their reports had it that Inochentism was either an issue of poor nutrition and lack of education or just charlatanism from its leaders. When the large crowds of Bessarabian who gathered around Inochenție's cloister were identified as a threat, in February/March 1912 he was transferred to a monastery north of Saint Petersburg, in Murmansk, Olonets Governorate.
The community of Balta continued to thrive even in the absence of their leader and in December 1912, in response to a letter of Inochenție, hundreds of Bessarabian peasants sold their belonging to move in with him in Murmansk. On February 5, 1913, the local abbot, Archimandrite Merkuri, called on the authorities to remove Inochenție and his disciples from the monastery. Within a few days, the Russian Army arrested Inochenție, who was sent to prison in Petrozavodsk, while his followers were sent home in a military convoy.
On August 23, 1913, the Holy Synod condemned Inochenție, whom they found responsible for "spreading demonic and nervous illnesses and even deaths among the people". He remained in prison until he repented; on November 26, 1914, he was released under the supervision of the local bishop. He continued to preach, but in May 1915, he was exiled to Solovetsky Monastery, on the White Sea, living in a skete on the remote Anzersky Island. Reportedly, the group preserved a mythical version of these events, which presumes that the church founder died a martyr's death: "In 1914, the Russians set fire to New Jerusalem, and Inochenție was subject to the most horrifying tortures and torments. For 40 days, he was chained, crowned with thorns and made to sit naked on broken glass. The saint's hair and nails were torn out with pliers; and for the course of seven days his left rib was poked at with a spear. Upon seeing that the Holy Prophet has braved all these torments, they proceeded to bury him in the earth, leaving only his head above ground, and for 33 more days they kept feeding him poison. On the fortieth day of torture and martyrdom, the sun went dark, and the saint rose to heaven."
Soviet takeover and Bessarabian survival
Inochenție was however freed following the February Revolution of 1917 and returned to Balta, reunifying the movement which had been divided by schismatic infighting during his absence. Together with several hundreds followers, mainly female and Romanian-speaking, he founded a commune in Ananiv raion. The commune, was reportedly designed by a Bessarabian German, and divided along three streets. It covered some 45 hectares, including a vineyard, orchard and garden, a deep pond used in baptism, a wooden church which could hold 600, a hostel and an inner citadel with a tower. Also featured was an intricate underground complex of galleries: from it, Inochenție would "ascend to heaven" every evening. These stone "caves" also held private rooms or prayer cells, and were supposedly the most attractive part of the religious complex. Inochenție died only months later, toward the end of 1917.Sources attest that, around 1918, the commune was in the care of Simeon Levizor, assisted in this task by fellow "Apostles" Iacob of Dubăsari and Ivan of Cosăuți. On September 14, 1920, the monastery was forcefully closed by the Bolsheviks, while Inochenție's family and the leaders of the Inochentists being either killed or arrested and tried in Odesa. The Rai establishment continued to function in the 1920s, when Ananiv was included in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The new Soviet administration tried to transform it into a kolkhoz named "From Darkness to Light". However, in 1930, the Soviet anti-religious newspaper Bezbozhnik announced that Inochentism had been stamped out of Soviet Moldavia, noting that the sect was still active in Romanian Bessarabia. According to one Romanian account of the mid-1920s, the Inochentists were even making converts in the west and south, among peasants from the "Old Kingdom". By the 1940s, the estimated total of Romanian Inochentists was 2,000. The surviving Inochentist sections in Soviet lands suffered during the Great Purge: all the Inochentist nuns still living at Rai were put to death by the NKVD.
In Romanian territories, the movement became the subject of renewed media and political interest, while coming into conflict with the prevalent Romanian Orthodox Church. The new keepers of Inochentist doctrines, described as by "charlatans" by Clark, were self-appointed patriarchs, deemed incarnations of the Holy Spirit or Second Comings of Christ. The government perceived the movement as "harmful" for Romanian society and in contradiction with public order, so, in 1925, the Inochentist church was officially banned. In 1926, a church leader was arrested by Romanian authorities as he tried to set up a new congregation in Budești.
Romanian state repression
During mid 1930, the surviving branches were investigated by the authorities, who took with them field reporters from Dimineața daily. The resulting reports were compiled and analyzed by Romanian scholar and racialist Henric Sanielevici, who focused on their allegations about the Inochentists' sexual promiscuity. At the time, the congregations had resorted to holding mass in Bessarabia's caves, forests and catacombs; from 1928, the church was presided upon by the 35-year-old Neculai Barbă Roșie, formerly a Gendarme in Cetatea Albă County, and two "eunuchs".Successive Romanian governments continued to issue anti-sectarian directives targeting the church. One such act, passed in 1937 by the Gheorghe Tătărescu cabinet, prohibited the activities of Inochentists, whom it grouped together with the Old Calendar Orthodox, the Pentecostals, the Nazarenes, the Apostolic Faith Church of God, Jehovah's Witnesses and Bible societies. Official Christian propaganda warned Romanians to shun the dissident preachers, who lacked "the godly gift of preaching God's law", be they Inochentists, "Tudorites" or Adventists. Interest in the activities of Inochenție's followers was kept alive by Romanian writer Sabin Velican, in his 1939 novel Pământ nou ; it fictionalizes the movement's alleged sexual practices.
Bessarabia's Inochentists fared badly during World War II. In 1941, the region changed hands between a Soviet administration and Nazi-allied Romania. The region's recovery through Romania's participation in Operation Barbarossa was welcomed by Romanian intellectuals. In a special issue of the official literary magazine, Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Orthodox theologian Gala Galaction paid tribute to "the Balta movement" as a Romanian mystical phenomenon, placing in doubt allegations made about the Inochentists' heretical stances.
However, in summer 1942, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu gave the order that virtually all conscientious objectors belonging to the Inochentist church to be deported to the concentration camps in Transnistria, together with the Bessarabian Jews and nomadic Roma. During the Antonescu years, Romanian Orthodox Church authorities also received help for setting up a special mission to Transnistria, which was designed to target local Inochentist and Baptist communities. Some Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, taken together with the Inochentists, were deported from other areas to internment sites in Transnistria. At his 1946 trial, Antonescu acknowledged some of these measures: "Many Romanians, unfortunately, joined these sects in order to escape the war . What was the spiritual basis of these sects? To avoid taking up arms and fighting. So when we called them up, they refused to lay their hands on a weapon. There was a general revolt, and so I brought in a law introducing the death penalty. I did not apply it. And I succeeded in getting rid of these sects. The more recalcitrant ones I seized and deported."