Kolkhozniks or Parishioners? Peasant Mass Resistance Against the Campaigns to Close Churches in Soviet Moldavia, 1944–1964

This paper examines the characteristics of postwar rural communities in Soviet Moldavia and seeks to explain why some villages were more successful than others in resisting the policies of the Soviet regime. It focuses on resistance to the Soviet policy to close sacred buildings, using villages from the Bălți district as a case study to examine in more detail how the characteristics of rural communities shaped their relations with state authorities. The paper argues that in postwar Moldavia, the peasantry was far from homogeneous. Rural communities differed in their levels of internal cohesion, the forms of resistance they employed, and their capacity to exert pressure on state officials operating at the local level. The availability of cultural resources for resistance, as well as the ability of officials to coerce rural populations, was shaped by villages’ distance from administrative centers and their access to transportation infrastructure. The study draws on archival materials produced by state and party authorities in the Bălți district and by the Moldavia’s Plenipotentiary of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church. It also examines data collected through a series of interviews conducted in four villages. The paper focuses on the period between the 1944 occupation of the territory of Moldavia by the Red Army and 1964, when Khrushchev’s five-year antireligious campaign ended. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .