Resurrecting Fascists as Orthodox Saints

This paper retells the postwar history of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in order to understand how the political realities of the Cold War transformed Romanian neo-fascism from a story about fascists as perpetrators into one about fascists as victims. During the 1940s, high school and university students, who had been children when the Legion was led by the charismatic Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, formed “legionary” groups of their own. They adapted the vocabulary, ideology, and organizational structure of the old movement to the conditions of anti-communist guerrilla warfare. For many of them, the first contact they had with veteran legionaries was in communist prisons. I focus on how these young dissidents embraced legionarism through what Marianne Hirsch calls “post-memory”. Hirsch studies the “memories” of family members of Holocaust survivors to show how second and third generations appropriate the memory of events that they did not participate in. Arrested as members of what they understood as a spiritual movement, these young legionaries developed their prayer lives while in prison. Many had remarkable religious experiences behind bars, and their testimonies inspired a large body of hagiographical writings in post-Socialist Romania and abroad. Stories about the suffering and holiness of these political prisoners added legitimacy to the exilic interpretations of Romanian fascism as a movement based around anti-communism and Orthodox spirituality.