Bolshevik Baptists: A Case Study of Romanian Interwar Imagined Identities
Bolshevik Baptists: A Case Study of Romanian Interwar Imagined Identities

Summary/Abstract: The study examines the mistaken identification of religious minorities, such as Baptists, with bolshevism in interwar Romania by Romanian police, statesmen, and Orthodox religious authorities. It reveals how state administrations within newly created post-World War I nation-states constructed identities of people in the annexed territories, particularly of religious minorities. An increased number of ethnic and religious minorities, civil war in the Soviet Union, the refugee crisis, violent incursions on Romanian soil, and soviet propaganda influenced poorly trained police officers from the local level to construct the image of Baptists as Bolshevik agents in Bessarabia. Foreign aid workers, Orthodox religious leaders, secret police agents, the Romanian and Soviet presses, and Baptists all engaged in this discourse and perpetuated it in different ways.

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