‘The Light Rises from the East’: Orthodoxy, Propaganda and Communist Terror, 1947–52

Abstract

The installation of the communist regime on 30 December 1947, through Law 363 which abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Romanian People’s Republic, represented the start of a new era. The country was ruled by a Presidium¹ while on 4 January 1948 King Michael was forced to leave the country. The abolition of the monarchy affected the Orthodox Church which now came under the power of the new rulers. The transformation of the church and the rupture with the past were visible from the first days of 1948. Every year on 6 January, on the religious celebration of Christ’s baptism, the patriarch had gone to the royal palace to bless the royal couple with holy water, invoking the divine grace over the monarch for the new year. But, of course, the communists were not interested in any religious ceremonials which might associate them with the ‘bourgeois’ values of the past. On the contrary, the spirit of the new regime was to find new materialistic forms and to praise the force of the working class.²