Organising Religious Resistance: Contingent Procedures, Material Religion and early Soviet Repression against Religion

This study deals with the emergence of organised forms of resistance to the Bolshevik policies of secularisation, and the role that documents introduced into the religious landscape in the 1920s by the Soviet regime played in it. Integral to the Bolshevik campaign of eliminating religions, the mandatory registration of religious communities transposed into the religious landscape the organisational forms and techniques of the production of documents characteristic of bureaucracy, which enhanced the capability of believers to pose an organised resistance to antireligious policies. This paper measures the consequence of these documents and bureaucratic practices, their role in the consolidation of religious organisations and the creation of antagonism between parishioners and state officials. My study is centred on the case of the Orthodox Church of our Lady of Kazan from Cioburciu (Moldavian Region of Soviet Ukraine), the construction of which was at the heart of the confrontation of Orthodox believers from this settlement with the Soviet authorities.