Ieremia Cecan

Ieremia Teodor Cecan (first name also Jeremia, Eremia or Irimia, last name also Ciocan; Russian: Иеремия Федорович Чекан, Yeremya Fedorovich Chekan; 1867 or 1868 – June 27, 1941) was a Bessarabian-born Romanian journalist, Bessarabian Orthodox priest, and far-right political figure. During the first part of his life, he was active in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, putting out the pioneering church magazine Nashe Obyedineniye. His opposition to Russification and his advocacy of social improvement led to a public scandal and then to is demotion by church officials, and pushed Cecan into independent journalism. However, his sympathies remained with the conservative-antisemitic Union of the Russian People, down to World War I.

Following the union of Bessarabia with Romania, Cecan bridged the distance between the Romanians and the White émigrés, publishing daily newspapers in Russian. Much of his work focused on attempts at dialogue and reunification between the Orthodox and the Catholics, sparking controversy among his colleagues in the Romanian Orthodox Church, but earning notoriety in Western circles. He maintained to his death the vision of a "world church" centered on anti-communism and anti-Masonry, which, in Cecan's opinion, were intertwined.

In 1933, retired from active priesthood and finally defrocked, Cecan veered toward Nazism. He served for as regional president of the Romanian National Socialist Party, and put out its Russian-language newspaper, Telegraf. When the party fell apart, Cecan attempted to resume his political career with the Iron Guard and the National Renaissance Front. Increasingly isolated during the final stages of his life, he was captured by the Soviets during the 1940 occupation of Bessarabia, then sentenced to death. He was ultimately shot in Tiraspol during the 1941 retreat.

In the Russian Empire

Cecan was born among the Romanians of Novoselitsa (Noua Suliță or Novoselytsia) or Beleuța village, Hotin County. Both were located in the northern tip of the Bessarabia Governorate, Russia (now in Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine). His native area had been split from ancient Moldavia; Western Moldavia remained in Romania, whereas the Moldavian sub-region of Bukovina, just west of Novoselitsa, was administered by Austria-Hungary. Ieremia Teodor's original surname was Ciocan ("hammer"), which was approximated into Russian as Chekan, then mutated back into Romanian as Cecan. He went on to study in Kishinev (Chișinău), training at the Theological Seminary (in 1889) and then being assigned the central Bessarabian parish of Nișcani. Later on, he furthered his studies in theology at Kiev Academy. He became a passionate reader and follower of Vladimir Solovyov, as well as a speaker for the reunification of Orthodoxy and Catholicism. In his later articles on the subject, Cecan favored leniency toward the use of Filioque in the Nicene Creed and accepted the doctrine of papal infallibility.

After 1905, Cecan began building up the opposition to Archbishop Seraphim Chichagov, who was an advocate of Russification. On the archbishop's orders, the Eparchy of Kishinev and Khotin began putting out journals with increasingly Russified content, and also with shows of support for the Tsarist autocracy. From 1909, Cecan and his wife Eugenia began putting out Nashe Obyedineniye ("Our Association" or "Our Union"), presumably "the only private-owned church magazine" in early 20th-century Russia. Although mostly in Russian, this publication was mainly aimed at the Bessarabian–Moldavian priests and other Romanian-speaking intellectuals. Its Romanian-language content was directed at the peasants and the schoolteachers, focusing on ideals of social improvement and education. These were regarded as independent and progressive stances—for such reasons, it came to be indexed by Okhrana agents. Criticized by Seraphim and by the conservative Russian press (the journals Besarabskaya Zhizn' and Drug), it closed down formally in August 1911 and reemerged instantly as Obyedineniye, with Eugenia Cecan for its editor.

Despite being identified as anti-conservative dissenters, the Cecans generally took up the cause of far-right Russian nationalism. In its pages, Obyedineniye expressed full support for the Union of the Russian People (of which Cecan was a member), and in particular for the antisemitic agitator Pavel Krushevan. In preparation for the legislative election of September 1912, Cecan and Alexandru Baltaga founded some 29 electoral committees of Eparchy grounds. This led them into open conflict with Archbishop Seraphim, who had ordered his clergy not to interfere with politics. After signing their names to a letter of protest against Seraphim's "absolutism", Cecan and Baltaga were demoted and stripped of their parishes.

Still prevented from priestly work, Cecan dedicated himself to his journalistic activity, founding, in 1914, the newspaper Bessarabets. He was moderating his stances: although still representing the "right-wing section of the Eparchy", he opened up to former adversaries on the right and the left, together with whom he put out Bessarabya (1914), then Bessarabaskaya Pochta and Nash Dolg (both 1915).

Church unionism

During or after the union of Bessarabia with Romania, Cecan married his daughter off to a Transylvanian Romanian lawyer, Octavian Vasu. In February 1914, Vasu held an executive's position inside the Romanian National Party of Austria-Hungary. Noted for his excellent command of Russian, he was taken prisoner in Bessarabia during World War I, when he helped set up the Romanian Volunteer Corps in Russia. During the subsequent creation of Greater Romania, he became the first Prefect of Făgăraș County.

Cecan's status was improved by these political developments, seeing him ordained as a Protoiereus of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He returned to his Nișcani parish, where he built a church, and continued to involve himself in political and religious disputes. By 1925–1926, he was putting out the magazine Unirea (or Yedineniye), which was a continuation of Obyedineniye. Here and in his propaganda brochures, Cecan took a strongly anti-communist and anti-Soviet position, describing communism as being intertwined with Pan-Slavism and Russian Orthodoxy. He looked into ways of emancipating Romanian Orthodoxy from its Slavic counterparts, looking into the precedent set by the Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic. However, Cecan now defended worship in Russian against official Romanianization.

In the 1920s, he returned to his old ecumenical goals, working closely with the Catholic Bishopric of Iași and Monsignor Anton Gabor, setting up a Christian institute in Bessarabia. He was also in touch with Nicolae Brînzeu, the Greek-Catholic priest, who regarded Cecan as a "most courageous" intellectual. His ideas on reunification were circulated by liberal Catholic papers in the West, including, in 1924, La Paix. The latter newspaper also gave exposure to Cecan's take on the Immaculate Conception, on which topic he did not "foresee insuperable difficulty".

Such activities, and Cecan's stance on papal infallibility, were openly criticized by conservative bishops—in particular, by Roman Ciorogariu of Oradea. In his polemic with Bishop Roman, made public in early 1933, Cecan insisted that a unified church would naturally be led by the popes. During that interval, he lamented the decline of Orthodoxy, concluding that: "Our Church no longer wields any influence upon society, upon the institutions of the State, or upon the life of the nation. It neither enlightens nor warms the souls of the faithful." In rendering his verdict, The Tablet saluted Cecan as an "earnest man and acute thinker". The letter to Bishop Roman also included a critique of atheism, which Cecan associated with Masonry, claiming that they acted under a "unified command". Also according to Cecan, Pope Pius XI was the herald of anti-Masonry resistance, much more powerful in this respect than the Orthodox bishops. He expanded on such topics in the March 3 issue of Viața Basarabiei, where he responded to the attacks of an unnamed Ortodox journalist. In this piece, he announced that he and other supporters of the "world united church" met and prayed weekly at Chișinău City Hall.

Cecan had retired from priesthood by April 11, complaining to Brînzeu that he was being formally investigated by the Romanian Synod for "Catholicizing" Bessarabia, but also noting that he had gained many followers. With assistance from his son-in-law Vasu, by then a former Senator of Romania, and with contributions from the public, he intended to set up a daily newspaper. Reportedly, some 300 priests, or a third of the Bessarabian clergy, had signed up his pro-Catholic platform.

Between May and November 1933, Protoiereus Cecan published in Chișinău the Russian-language Telegraf (also Bessarabsky Telegraf or Khristiansky Telegraf). This was an openly antisemitic tribune, with editorials in which Cecan himself called for "destroying the Jewish press", referring to Bessarabian Jews in particular as "leeches". The stance was praised by Irénée Merloz of the Romanian Assumptionists. According to Merloz: "the press was entirely Jewish and of a marked communist tendency, and so Father Jérémie Cecan's review, then his newspaper, also have roles in social defense and in the workers' and peasants' organization, as well as in the religious unification with Rome."

Nazism and final years

Although styled "independent national-Christian" in its original format, Telegraf was identifiable as a tribune of an openly Nazi group, the Romanian National Socialist Party (PNSR). The merger of platforms began in August 1933, when Cecan and an associate, Major Rotaru, wrote a piece favoring a "Singular Nationalist Front" comprising the PNSR, the National-Christian Defense League, and the Iron Guard. This alliance, they argued, would follow the model of the German Nazi Party by uniting Romanians "around the national Christian flag", "uproot[ing] the old, Jewified, rot of politicking". In September, he was also elected honorary president of the PNSR's Bessarabian branch. In October, he spoke at the PNSR Congress in Chișinău, alleging that Bessarabia was suffering under "the vampiresque exploitation of Judaism". Elected to the party's executive leadership structure on that occasion, Cecan also served as leader of the PNSR cell in Chișinău, alongside V. Leidenius, publisher of Voskresenie newspaper.

Over the following years, the party broke apart; most Bessarabian Nazis joined up with the Iron Guard, the more successful fascist movement. By June 1934, Cecan was cited before the Metropolis of Bessarabia, to answer for his "propaganda against the Orthodox Church." A 1968 letter by Greek-Catholic bishop Ioan Ploscaru notes that Cecan was ultimately defrocked in 1935. According to Ploscaru, Cecan had by then also alienated his Catholic backers upon revelations about his past: "Our bishops sent one of our priests to Cecan's home, to learn about him. Once there, they discovered that the pro-unionist was a priest defrocked for his immoral lifestyle, that he was missing an eye, that he had wrestled the sacristan over some money, and that all of Bessarabia detested him. As soon as this report came out, we put a stop on all propaganda."

Cecan was also attracted into the Iron Guard, but later defected to Carol II's National Renaissance Front. He had by then moved with his family to a small house in Chișinău, where he reportedly lived in poverty and relative isolation, his son-in-law having died in early March 1935. The Catholic convert Teodosie Bonteanu, who visited him in 1938, noted that Cecan had stopped putting out Unirea Noastră, his final magazine, and had become an avid agriculturist. However, he had also been drawn into the Confraternity of Saint Benedict, and international ecumenist body founded by Serge Bolshakoff. By 1939, upon the resignation of Tikhon Lyashchenko, Orthodox Bishop of Berlin, Cecan became that group's president.

In late June 1940, Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union, and the NKVD swiftly arrested Cecan. His antisemitic articles and his PNSR membership were brought up against him by the government of the Moldavian SSR. On March 13, 1941, Kishinev Tribunal sentenced him to death as a "counterrevolutionary". His execution was postponed while his activity as a Russophile was being reconsidered; some political figures intervened on his behalf with Lavrentiy Beria, the then-Deputy Premier. However, his cause became indefensible in June 1941, with a coordinated German–Romanian attack on the Soviet Union. On June 27, five days after the start of war, Cecan was secretly shot by the NKVD. Though some works suggest that this took place in Kishinev prison, NKVD files record his place of death as Tiraspol.

Cecan's fate was the subject of confusion in Romania: while some simply noted that he had gone missing, others acknowledged that "somewhere in Bessarabia, under a simple cross", he was "awaiting his resurrection". In August 1941, news of his killing were featured in Universul daily. By September, responding to praise of Cecan in the Greek-Catholic press, Orthodox scholar Grigorie T. Marcu argued that none of the quotes from Cecan showed that he asked for submission to the pope. According to Marcu, Cecan was spuriously reinvented as a Catholic martyr. His fate was only revisited after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, by the authorities of the new Republic of Moldova. On December 21, 2001, its Supreme Court of Justice overturned the Soviet verdict.