Do Not Avenge Us by Monk Moise is a beautifully tragic collection of six memoirs from the persecutions of the late Stalin years in what is now the Republic of Moldova. Historically known as Bessarabia, this region has always culturally and ethnically been part of the Romanian people, and it included small parts of modern Ukraine. It was the eastern half of historic Moldavia and the easternmost part of the Romanian ethnic region. It was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1812, which sought a radical deracination of the region to make it Russian. After the Communist Revolution, Bessarabia was reintegrated back into Romania, but the Soviets took it back briefly at the beginning of World War II and then again at the end of the war. Immediately the Soviets began their reign of terror and a similar campaign of deracination.
What is abundantly clear in the book is that the Soviet occupation was a mafia/cartel turf war and not the working class rising up for freedom. The Moldavians very much did not want the Russians, but there is nothing they could do to resist. The Russians rolled in and started their crime spree with the simple diplomacy of having more tanks. The communists took whatever they wanted and beat whomever they wanted. They could demand you feed them steak and wine regularly, and you had no choice but to obey, even if it was far above your standard of living. It was much more of gangland terrorism than the romanticization of revolution we often have in the West.
A close approximation of real communism
A Jewish fairy tale
Anyone who seemed financially well-off – which meant not living in absolute poverty – would be declared an extortioner of the proletariat and deported – sometimes to the Gulag but often to work-villages in Siberia in a kind of semi-slavery. Because there was apparently no major poverty in pre-war Bessarabia, everyone was therefore bourgeoise and subject to brutal repression. The only escape was to join the gang by declaring yourself a communist and an atheist, and then you were free to terrorize the locals. Often these were the anti-social drifters and grifters who had sold whatever land they had, did not work and did not go to church. The Soviets took the scum of society and gave them positions of authority.
Pre-war Bessarabia did not have “equality” in the math sense of the term, nor did the people have most modern conveniences. Even so, no one starved. Most people had a house and several livestock. They had food stores from things they grew and preserved. The whole village life centered around the Church. There was a strong social stigma on holding grudges, getting divorced or being stingy with money.
All of this changed with the communists. Now everyone was starving, no one could trust one another, families were ripped apart, and atheism became fashionable. Like in Ukraine, the Soviets manufactured a famine by over-seizing grain in order to force the people into giving up their farms to the collective. Often the grain was put into a big pile in the open air, where it would be rained on and ruined with mold. That is to say, the communists stole from starving peasants in order to overthrow the bourgeoise and live lavishly themselves.
And yet it really seems like the communists were true believers. In their warped satanic minds, they really believed that this was best for the working class and that they were making the world a better place. All of their terrorism was justified with ideology, but it seems like it was more than a flimsy excuse. The religion of Marxism-Leninism was something that they had internalized, like a fat white girl with a BLM facemask.
This is best seen in the book when Stalin dies. The communist party officials are in mourning. When they solemnly announce it to their prisoners in the Gulag, or the Romanian children at the Siberian school, all of them start cheering. The party officials are stunned that the Romanian captives hate Stalin, as though it is blasphemy. They assumed that deporting the Romanians, making them starve and work, would re-educate them into realizing the wonders of communism. It never occurred to them that oppressing your enemies makes them hate you, just as our own elites can’t understand why young white men aren’t signing up for the military or voting Democrat.
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Our word “crisis” is the Greek word for judgement. It is in times of crisis that we have to make a judgement, and that we ourselves are judged. Communism was a great time of crisis for Bessarabia and all of northern Orthodoxy, and people had to make hard choices about what they believe. In the book, we see people slowly lose their faith in God, being unable to understand why He would allow this suffering. One woman on a deportation train drowns her newborn so that he will not have to suffer.
But we also see everyday saints in the simple village people. The first story is about a little girl whose grandmother was saintly to the point of possibly being clairvoyant. The father, two children and grandmother are all deported to a work-village in Siberia. Gradually they all lose their faith and leave. The boy and father are both imprisoned for stealing. Only the girl and grandmother remain and nearly starve.
The girl is sent to an orphanage, and the grandmother warns her to keep her faith in God no matter what. But slowly the girl is broken down by peer pressure. She becomes an atheist and even forgets how to speak Romanian. As much as she hates the Russians, she adopts their language and beliefs anyway, not realizing that it was these beliefs that destroyed her family and ruined her childhood. Only many years later does her son help her come back to Christ.
The grandmother constantly prayed to be able to return to her village for three days before her death so that she can confess, commune and die with a candle. God granted her three months. She was able to return and have the closure she needed, and she received a proper Christian burial. She even died on the front porch of her old house, which had been turned into a medical clinic.
Another grandmother in the story fled to Romania when the communists invaded so that she could help her daughter reunite with her new husband. But when she returned to the border of Bessarabia, which is the Prut River, the Russians had closed the border. For three days she wept and shouted to them in Romanian to let her go home, but the Russians threatened to kill her. Neither could understand what the other was saying. Finally someone was able to translate, and so she went back to her daughter. After sixteen years she was finally able to return home, but her husband had taken a new wife, her other daughter had died without her knowledge, and her son ran her out of the house.
A grandfather had fought in the Tsar’s army. He loved the Tsar and kept his portrait and some of the old money. He was vaguely aware that some ruffians had murdered the Tsar, but he did not know what that meant for Russia broadly. When he learned that the Russians were coming in 1940, he put up the portrait of the Tsar with the bag of old money and prepared the best food. He went out to greet the Russians and brought them back to his house. After the Russians declared their lack of belief in God, insulted his wine, threatened to take him to Siberia and smashed his picture of the Tsar, the grandfather realized that these were not the same kind of Russians as those he had fought with for the Tsar. From that day the cheerfulness went out from him, and he began saying Our Father in Romanian instead of Russian. He also began sleeping outside of the house, in fear that they would take him in the night. His simple peasant mind, with his insulated background, could not understand what had changed in Russia. He felt deeply betrayed by the Russians he had loved so much.
It’s important to read these kinds of stories to prepare ourselves. There are all kinds of historical and philosophical analyses about how our present system has the same foundations as the Bolsheviks’. You do not have to be Scooby-Doo to figure out that our government is preparing a similar repression. COVID was a test-run, and it worked quite well. So we need to read these stories about communist repression, especially the prison camps, to know how to react when the time comes for us.
And yet it will not quite be the same thing. We do not have a unified culture centered around a common values set and cultural identity. We do not have practical domestic skills to feed a family of four on a few potatoes or a bag of corn meal. We do not know how to milk a cow or make clothing. We do not know how to suffer the deprivation of modern conveniences, and most of us will simply lay down and die.
We also do not have real assets anymore. The Bessarabians had livestock, orchards and stores of grain that the communists wanted to eat. But for us, food comes from the grocery store, and it comes there from a mysterious source that no one really knows anything about. Even if you own chickens, the DHS doesn’t want to skin and cook them. We might have houses, but few of us have farm land, and the megacorporations have already bought up agrarian Middle America. Probably all of the material things you own are worthless to the regime, and you have no practical skills that would be useful in a work-village.
Furthermore, we have this bizarre psycho-sexual dysfunctional side to the current ideology in a way that wasn’t really present with the Bolsheviks. They promoted free love, but you did not have child transexuals or naked men in parades. Whatever kind of torture will be in the FEMA camps will probably involve something sexual. You need to be aware that, if you go with the police officer to the detention center, there is some chance that the torture in coming months will be something much more degrading than starvation, beatings and interrogations. These people are obsessed with sodomy and genital mutilation – what do you think they will do to you to convert you to their ideology?
So although we need to read these stories, we also need to realize that the persecution we suffer will be very different. Our society is very different than pre-war Bessarabia.
And most of us will buckle at the first slight pressure. Most people, including most Orthodox Christians (even most Orthodox Christian clergy and monastics), do not believe in anything beyond their check books and their television sets. When the repression comes, people will do anything to keep a semblance of their air-conditioned Babylonian lifestyle of endless distraction and pleasure. We learned that during COVID.
During the orphanage episode in the first story, the girl was mercilessly ridiculed for believing in God and not joining the youth organization. A teacher told her to go through the motions of not believing, but to hold faith in her mind and thoughts. This makes some theoretical sense, and it’s what most Orthodox Christians will do. They will rationalize taking the rainbow triangle tattoo by saying that God just cares about the heart and the intentions, or that it’s for the greater good, or that they do not want to appear hateful, or whatever. They will say, “I am a member of ROCOR, and ROCOR cannot possibly apostatize, and my bishop told me that it’s a ‘personal decision’ whether or not to take the tattoo. Therefore I need to be obedient.” And then like the girl in the story, they will soon lose their faith altogether, because you cannot build faith based on cowardice.
The greatest lesson of this book is that ultimately you alone are responsible for maintaining your faith. Other people can do all kinds of terrible things to you, but only you can abandon God. The only thing that no one can steal from you is your integrity. And as the saintly grandmother said, as long as you do not forget God, then he will not forget you.
If you want to read a book that will make you weep like a child, or if you want an image of Orthodoxy in its natural habitat before the horrors of modernity and Americanization, read Do Not Avenge Us. You can buy it on Amazon.
Historical Maps of Bessarabia. Mouse over image to see caption. Click image to load full size.
I feel some nihilisim out of this. Maybe it’s just me but that’s what it feels like when reading this, especially with the mention of most Orthodox people conforming to American persecution (in future tense of course). Correct me if I’m wrong.
(Edit) I probably shouldn’t “feel” anything when reading this article. I’m still too new to Orthodoxy to understand I guess, being the comfortable American that I am. Judge me if you please.
Some left that land in matter of hours escaping to Romania. That happened before the brave Russian army invaded Bessarabia. After that, for anyone it was a tragedy. Even nowadays they are oppressed as much as whose Romanians in former Transnistria that it is part of the Ukraine.
During the Afghan war, Brezhnev drafted a lot of their young people who died in Afghanistan. In any village were many women in black mourning their kids or husbands.
In the 90’s, they tried hard to obtain the reunification with the Romanian land, but one of those who opposed the most was the former patriarch Alexei.
Going back hundreds of years, being an outpost of Romania, that was the population facing all the miserable invaders, Tartars, Mongols, Turks. Cossacks. Despite the brutality of their history they are fighting hard to maintain the language, Orthodox faith, and the culture.
Excellent analogy, my husband and I have seen this coming for a long time, now more than ever! I just pray to God for the strength to resist and never comply, We would rather die than be involved in a world without the love of God .