COURAGE

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This collection focuses on the case of Gheorghe Muruziuc, a person of working-class background who expressed his opposition to the Soviet regime by raising the Romanian flag on the factory where he worked, in June 1966. This was the first instance when the Romanian flag was displayed in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) after June 1940. 

This ad-hoc collection was separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Gheorghe Zgherea, a person of peasant background who was a member of the Inochentist religious community, a millenarian and eschatological movement active in Bessarabia and Transnistria mostly during the first half of the twentieth century. The collection materials are revealing for the repressive policy of the Soviet regime in the religious sphere, showing the Soviet authorities’ hostile attitude toward non-mainstream and marginal denominations, which were perceived as a particularly serious threat. Zgherea, a preacher within his community starting from late 1950, was accused of “roaming the villages” of the Moldavian SSR and spreading “anti-Soviet ideas” among the local populace by “using their religious prejudices.” Arrested on 2 May 1953, he received a harsh sentence of twenty-five years of hard labour. His sentence was reduced to five years of hard labour in June 1955, when he was also amnestied according to a special decree of March 1953. Zgherea’s case thus points to the changing strategies of the regime applied after Stalin’s death, but also to the continuity of repression and to the shifting practices of stifling dissent in post-Stalinist Soviet society.

The Goma Movement Ad-Hoc Collection at CNSAS reflects the activity of an ephemeral collective protest for human rights, which emerged under the influence of Charter 77, gathered rapidly about the same number of supporters, but unlike its model, succumbed only a few months later. It bears the name of the main proponent of this movement because this corresponds not only to its canonisation in post-1989 historical writings, but also to the pre-1989 interpretation of the secret police, which focused on identifying the network linking Goma to the other supporters and collecting complex data about all these individuals.