Bessarabia, the Imperial Context and Religious Aspect of the Annexation Crisis – The Biblical Movement (1812–1827)

Bessarabia, part of the tsarist empire (after the seizure of the territory in 1812), was pushed gradually towards a forced assimilation/integration to Russia’s social-political life. The immediate impact of the annexation was marked by the social-political and ecclesiastical crisis of the 19th century’s first three decades: migrations of the population, plague and cholera epidemics, shortages and poverty. The phenomenon was later compared to “la Grande Peur” of 1789 during the French Revolution because the local population’s fear from the sudden changes were as great as in France. The later development of the province was a tormenting process of adaptation by which the Bessarabian Romanian society tried to conform to the conditions of the foreign social, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical environment of the empire. Political division was followed arbitrarily by an administrative-religious rupture by the creation of a new eparchy in the annexed territory – the Eparchy of Chişinǎu and Hotin, subordinated canonically/anti-canonically to a foreign Church. Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni (1813–1821) who led the newly created eparchy in the annexed territory had to look for a compromise to reconcile the Russian political and ecclesiastical domination with the spiritual life of the Bessarabian people. The scholarly activity of the Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni was situated “between tradition and the tsarist policy”. Against the background of these phenomena of social and political crisis in the new province incorporated into the Russian Empire, the Bessarabian Branch of the Bible Society was initiated in 1817. The Bessarabian Branch of the Russian Bible Society was created and the distribution of the books of the Holy Scripture with missionary aims was made in accordance with a model directed by the Bible Committee of Saint Petersburg, which means that it followed a structure identical with the central one which, in turn, functioned according to a foreign model (the British and Foreign Bible Society).

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