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  Mugshots of Spiritual Fathers from Odaia, Moldova

  The mugshot is one of the main visual materials produced by the secret police during their investigations. Together with fingerprints and personal information, mugshots connect the police image of the alleged enemy to an actual person, whom they show stripped of personal dignity and agency, often head-shaven, dejected, pensive and nervous. Mugshots are contained in almost all secret police criminal investigation case files and were produced according to a very precise set of rules which makes them very similar from one case to another. Although at a first glance they seem less interesting than other types of visual material, their use in fieldwork can bring unexpected results. During a fieldwork trip to the village of Odaia in Moldova in the summer of 2018, we offered local believers the possibility of viewing the mugshots from the criminal case file of Dumitru Busilcov, Gheorghe Mârza, and Ermolae Croitor, the spiritual fathers of the local community. They had been arrested in 1953 accused of organising a sectarian commune of followers of Ioan Zlotea (a monk and spiritual father who attracted a large following in Bessarabia in the interwar period) and Inochentie of Balta (the founder of the religious movement commonly referred to as Inochentism), and of collaboration with German and Romanian authorities during the war and were condemned to 25 years of labour camp. The interviewed believers were surprised and slightly shocked by the photos of their spiritual leaders whose archival images differed from the way their detention in the prison camp have been imagined by the community. The mugshot photographs elicited many stories about the detention of their leaders and about the miracles they had worked in the prisons. For these believers, the mugshot made the connection between the religious leaders they knew at home in the community and their fabricated identity created by the police. Showing such images to descendent communities entails certain risks that need to be carefully balanced. The mugshots, when viewed outside of their archival context, came to possess a new agency with the potential to be both traumatic and liberatory for the community. However, the continued enclosure of Communist-era anti-sect case files in the archives and their separation from and lack of accessibility for the targeted communities also has the potential to cause future harm to minority religious groups. The disclosure of archival images represents an important means through which numerous propaganda myths about allegedly harmful sects can be deconstructed. Without the inclusion of the voices of members persecuted groups, the analysis and re-interpretion of the textual and visual materials stored in the police archives will always remain incomplete. For related entries see:
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  Defaced portraits of Soviet leaders Moldova

  These mass produced postcard-sized portraits of three soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrentiy Beria and Anastas Mikoyan, have been torn and inserted into an envelope as evidence in a secret police personal file referring to a collective penal case. They were found during the search of a house of an Inochentist leader on February 11th 1953, a few weeks before Stalin’s death. From the perspective of secret police, the disrespectful attitude towards the abovementioned leaders of those who had torn these pictures equated to an anti-Soviet act. The origin of the defaced images is open to a number of possible interpretations. Given the fact that the secret police officers claimed to have found the small portraits in the attic of the Inochentist leader’s house, the size of the portraits and the fact that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is missing from amongst them, the photographs may constitute fake evidence created by the secret police or somebody in collaboration with them. However, the tearing of the image of any of the Soviet leaders would have been a risky strategy even for high ranking secret police officers. Alternatively, the portraits may have been torn by the Inochentist community themselves. The case against the leaders of the community does not mention the torn pictures but instead translates the group’s actions into the language of the Soviet criminal code. The leaders of the group were convicted for creating an anti-Soviet sect, organizing illegal religious meetings and encouraging peasants not to fulfil their obligations towards the state. One of the two on trial was also convicted for having formerly collaborated with Nazi forces. This file is a good example of how problematic interpreting secret police files can be and the often ambiguous nature of the evidence presented within them. The Soviet regime had its own iconographic tradition, which aimed at dominating the gaze of Soviet citizens who were supposed to participate in the building of Socialism in USSR. Soviet policy in the Moldavian countryside was not only a project of transforming the social and economic life of the villages, but also aimed at replacing the culture of traditional peasant communities with a new Stalinist culture in which there was no place for religion. The Inochentist communities, which were perceived as anti-Soviet sectarians, represented an obstacle towards the projects of the Soviet state. As with Eastern Orthodoxy more generally, the vernacular tradition of the Inochentists attributed a major role to icons. The intrusion of atheist Soviet iconography into the everyday life of villages seriously disturbed Inochentist sensibilities. Later in the case file, a few days after Stalin’s death one of the witnesses reported having heard one of the Inochentist leaders saying “why do you hang his portrait, is he a saint to be viewed by everyone, or what?” This case nicely illustrates the battle to dominate the gaze of Soviet peasantry. Inochentism represents a form of local vernacular Orthodoxy drawing heavily on the conservative monastic tradition. During the first decades of the 20th century several versions of Inochentism emerged in Bessarabia. The abovementioned case refers to the followers of Ioan Zlotea. When the territory of Bessarabia was (re)occupied by Soviet forces in 1944, Inochentists once again became a target due to their maintenance of values opposed to Soviet policies applied in the countryside. Accusations included refusing the draft to the army, resisting mobilization for work on Sundays, refusing to vote in elections and refusing to join the Communist Youth Organizations. In the context of collectivization of agriculture and the recent famine in Moldova Inochentists shared a culture of apocalyptic rumor with many other religious groups in rural Russia and Ukraine. These images can be found in the file ASIS, 023171, Vol. 1-2. This file also contains nine mugshots of one arrested Inochentist and two other unknown persons produced by secret police and used in the secret police lineup. The identification of the arrested Inochentist took place in Soviet Ukraine, in the village where, according to the file, he served as a policeman during the German occupation. In addition, the file contains three mugshots of sentenced Inochentist leaders taken by secret police officers as a standard procedure during registration of the identity of the arrested persons. For related entries see:
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  Confiscated photographs of Archangelist women Moldova

  This page from an MGB investigation file from 1947 from Soviet Moldavia shows three images of women preachers from the Archangelist movement, a branch of Inochentism. The first image portrays the women holding crosses in their right hand, facing the camera and cut off at waist height. The composition and symbolism of this image reproduce the visual language of icons. Images of this kind could offend the sensibilities of Orthodox believers. The two lower images carry the same imagery but in a less obvious way. The women are dressed conservatively in dark clothes that are inspired by monastic dress, a common practice among all branches of Inochentism. The role of these photographs, which were found on the persons of the arrested individuals, were used by the secret police to both prove membership of the illegal religious group and to identify further members of the community. In the first image the central figure is identified by name as one of the significant women preachers of the group. In the lower two pictures, in a similar fashion, the secret police highlight certain individuals identified by name. Interrogation stenographs from other cases reveal that these types of images were produced by group members as mementos of group meetings. We do not know the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, but from the setting and the quality we can suppose that the photographer was invited to the community. This type of photographic practice was common and it appears to be important for the Archangelists of this period. The leader of the movement, Alexandru Culeac, produced numerous photographs of himself in large numbers to distribute to his followers. The Archangelist movement grew out of the earlier Inochentist movement in 1920s Bessarabia (present day Republic of Moldova) under Romanian rule and is one of a branches of the movement. It represents a form of local vernacular Orthodoxy drawing heavily on the conservative monastic tradition. When the territory of Bessarabia was (re)occupied by Soviet forces in 1944, Archangelists once again became a target due to their maintenance of values opposed to Soviet policies applied in the countryside. Accusations included resistance to mobilization to army, mass mobilization to work on Sundays, vote in elections, join the Communist Youth Organizations. In the context of collectivization of agriculture and the recent famine in Moldova, Archangelists shared a culture of apocalyptic rumor with many other religious groups in rural Russia and Ukraine. Beside the above-mentioned photographs, the quoted file (ASIS, 019520, vol.2) contains two Archangelist-Inochentist icons, a photograph of an Archangelist hagiographic icon and one brochure. For related entries see:
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  Archangelist Staged Ritual Moldova

  This photograph which was taken by Soviet secret police officers appears to capture a ritual performed by Archangelists (a branch of the Inochentist movement) in one of their underground chapels. On closer inspection, however, it is evident that this is not a surveillance photograph but rather a staged reenactment performed for the camera. The framing, camera angle, lighting and mood of the photograph were all determined by the secret police photographer with the intention of creating a powerful image for use by the regime. Indeed, the two Archangelists, shown wearing ritual clothing and holding sacred objects, may not be performing a genuine ritual at all. The images from this secret police photo shoot, which later appeared in Moldovan newspapers alongside a dramatized account of the dangerous and subversive activities of this group of Archangelists, demonstrate the close co-operation between the secret police and the state media organs at the time. Re-stagings of religious ritual seem to have been produced consciously as both evidence for use in trials and as propaganda tools. With access to state security files on religious groups, the close cooperation between the state security and Soviet public media and propaganda organs becomes evident as the files clearly demonstrate how the secret police collected, produced and curated images of religion for popular consumption. The file in which these images appear contains photographic materials from several cases and seems to have been made available to journalists and authors for use in their works. These photographs can be found in ASISRM-KGB 020193. Altogether, this file contains 39 photographs, 6 loose pages handwritten and two handwritten notebooks with religious texts. The materials are derived from several different cases. For further reading see: Kapaló, James A. Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity: Religious Dissent in the Russian and Romanian Borderlands. Routledge, 2019. For related entries see: