Religious booklets and pamphlets

Item set

Title

Religious booklets and pamphlets

Description

Publications feature heavily among the religious materials found in secret police archives or itemized on lists of confiscated materials. Most religious communities in the twentieth century promoted their ideas through the publication of religious periodicals, pamphlets and booklets which could be cheaply produced and easily distributed. Many of these items were published cheaply in shorts runs by local presses. During periods of totalitarian rule, state authorities tried to regulate or ban the production of such materials. The secret police intercepted materials sent in the post, confiscated them in house searches or uncovered them at the border when individuals attempted to smuggle them. Due to their generally small size, however, booklets and leaflets could be easily concealed. They were generally distributed through underground religious networks, both nationally and internationally, or in some cases they were distributed and sold by colporteurs (salesmen of religious literature) on markets, on trains or at pilgrimages. Many of the religious booklets and pamphlets we find in the secret police archives, which had little value for mainstream libraries and archives, are extremely rare and can be found nowhere else in state collections. Some of these materials have immense value for religious communities that were divested of their sacred materials by the state.

Creator

James A. Kapaló

Publisher

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme No. 677355

Date Created

2019

Items

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  • Baptist booklet about freedom, Russia 1917

    The image depicts the cover page of a booklet published in 1917 in Saint Petersburg. The booklet is entitled “Long live freedom! But what is the true freedom?” and was published at the printing house named “The seventeenth year”. The year 1917 was a turning point in Russian history, marked by a democratic revolution followed by the Bolshevik cue d'etat in October the same year. The Revolution eliminated the restrictive confessional policies imposed by the old Tsarist regime, and in 1917 the Baptists and other minority religious groups were granted unprecedented freedom to practice their religi

  • 'Short statement on the principles of the Churches of God (Pentecostals)' Booklet Romania 1925

    This booklet, which was published in 1925, appears in a Ministry of Religions and Arts file dated the same year. This booklet was the second official declaration of Pentecostal faith submitted to the Romanian authorities as part of their requests for official recognition. The first appeal by a Pentecostal believer came in 1924 but this was rejected by the Ministry of Religions in Decision no. 5734 of the 29th January 1925. The Ministry declared that the ‘Declaration of True Foundation’ (Declararea [sic] fundamentului adevărat) did not offer sufficient guarantees to meet the conditions of artic

  • KGB covert operation against Jehovah's Witnesses, Ukraine 1951-1954

    This network scheme of the Jehovah’s Witness organization comes from a four-volume top-secret file titled LKB, Legendirovannoe Kraevoe Biuro (Regional Bureau Covert Operation). It was produced by the Ukrainian secret police in 1953 and shows Jehovah’s Witness districts and circuits located in the Soviet Union with the organization’s country committee (called by that time the Regional Bureau) as the governing body of Soviet Jehovah’s Witnesses. The scheme shows the connections of Soviet-based groups of believers with the Jehovah’s Witness organization abroad: the East-European Bureau in Poland,

  • Novena for the freedom of the Greek Catholic Church Romania

    In the early 1970s, during a raid and house search on Fr. Aurel Leluțiu, the officers found amongst other documents a typed prayer entitled "Novena for the freedom of the Greek Catholic Church". The prayer, however, is not included in Fr Leluțiu’s file. The four images presented here are selections from the same ten-page Novena preserved in Bishop Ioan Dragomir’s secret police individual file. The prayer was considered problematic by the Securitate with mentions of it being made in several other files. This Novena, a nine-day prayer exercise, is directed to the Virgin Mary to intermediate w

  • Booklet about the life of Inochentie of Balta Ukraine

    The image depicts the cover page of a booklet published in 1918 in Odessa by the followers of Inochentie of Balta. It was confiscated by the Soviet secret police in 1921 from the Inochentist community of the village of Lipetskoe (Balta county, Odessa Governorate). The village of Lipetskoe was a spiritual center of Inochentism, where the followers of Inochentie of Balta built an underground monastery and established an utopian communal society called Gradina Raiului, the Garden of Paradise. The booklet contains 19 pages which describe the life of Inochentie of Balta, the founder of the Inochen

  • Photo-icon of Alexandru Culeac as the Archangel Michael Bessarabia

    The three images presented here all show variants of the same photo-icon of Alexandru Culeac portrayed as the Archangel Michael. In the first image he appears alone; in the second image, his photograph appears next to that of Inochentie of Balta, and the third image is a reproduction of the photo-icon that appears inside the front cover of a booklet containing Alexandru Culeac's visions entitled "A vision that appeared in 1920". The presence of multiple examples of this photo-icon in the same file reflects the importance of this devotional image to the Archangelist community. Archangelism fo

  • Photographs of confiscated religious materials smuggled into Romania

    These photos were taken in 1985 and show the search by Customs Officers of a car belonging to three tourists who were trying to cross the border into Romania. This was a normal procedure and any attempt to smuggle religious materials into the country was considered dangerous and an attack against the regime. The first image depicts the three tourists together with all the religious material that they were presumably hiding in their car. Among the books we can see a few Bibles, brochures, calendars, some cassettes and songbooks. These materials were confiscated along with the list of names of

  • Intercepted materials from Church of Turan Believers of One God Hungary

    These images have been selected from the photo-documentation of materials sent by post to Mihály Virasztó, a former religious specialist of the Church of the Turan Believers of One God. The first photo shows the cover page of the Keleti Figyelő [Orient Observer], the short-lived journal of the Turáni Történelmi Társaság [Turan Historical Society] founded by immigrant Hungarians in Melbourne, Australia. The second photo shows a certificate of honorary membership of Mihály Virasztó for supporting the study of Hungarian history, issued by the same society in 1962. The images come from a documenta

  • Confiscated Brethren Magazine Bucharest

    The images show a Brethren publication entitled Viață și Lumină volume three, issue nine from September 1930. According to the text on the cover, the publication appeared once a month and was edited by Florea Moisescu with administrative facilities in Bucharest under the direction of Gheorghe Teodorescu. Scripture references from the Gospel of John are included under the title, from which the latter is derived. The subscription cost was 60 lei per year in Romania and one dollar in America. This issue, along with two others, were included in the file composed by the General Police Division

  • Inventory and confiscated items from a house search of an Archangelist-Inochentist Romania

    The images show an inventory and confiscated photographs included in a case file forwarded to the Romanian 3rd Army Military Court on 2nd December 1938. The first image shows the inventory of items found in the house, which was located in Fălciu county. The officer lists the following Inochentist "propaganda" materials: "1. A brochure entitled 'The Deeds of the Archangel Michael', 2. a small icon of saint Paraschiva, 3. a cross sculpted from wood, 4. three photographs of Culeac dressed in white with a cross on his chest, 5. a photograph of Culeac dressed in vestments." The second image shows o

  • Confiscated Tudorist songbook Bucharest

    This songbook is located in a police file from 1938 and it appears to have been confiscated from two Tudorist believers, both of whom were women, who were distributing brochures, calendars and other religious literature to various people on the street. The images uploaded are the front cover and the contents page of a 30 pages long book. The first image depicts the cover of the book which has the name “Tudor Popescu”, the founder of the religious group and its title, Christian Songs (Cântări creștinești). The number “47” refers to the total number of songs that are contained in the songbook