ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Inochentist experience in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Romania under Marshal Antonescu. In the context of dictatorship and war, further repressive measures were deployed against Inochentist communities in Romanian Bessarabia, culminating in plans for their deportation to concentration camps in Transnistria alongside Jews and Roma. In the Soviet Union, Inochentists were targeted in anti-religious campaigns and also suffered during the collectivisation of agriculture. In both the Romanian and Soviet contexts, the special role that women played in the movement caught the attention of the authorities. Women’s agency and leadership represented both an important source of strength for the movement whilst also forming one of the main pretexts for the authorities to attack and eliminate Inochentist communities. Despite the risk of arrest, imprisonment or deportation to the Gulag, as borders shifted and armies advanced and retreated, the belief in the immediacy of the End of Days encouraged an exodus of Bessarabian Inochentists back to their sacred places of the Garden of Paradise and the town of Balta.
