In the waters of Salamis: on Russia’s kulturkampf in Romania

Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest. Photo: Takashi images / Shutterstock

Albert Camus’ writing at its most poetic is anchored in a strong sense of Homeric sensitivity and sensuality, on full display in his “Nuptials at Tipasa” essay. Camus paints a vivid landscape adorned with the echoes of Olympian gods, sunlight, the silver-armoured sea and azure sky, flower-crowned ruins, and the lush scents of the earth. Yet where similar seaside serenity once veiled other ancient sites of the Greco-Roman world, such as Olbia in Ukraine or Histria in Romania, nowadays the sky above Olbia is darkened by Russian rockets and drones, and the sky above Histria reverberates when they explode.

As Ukraine defiantly battles Putin’s Russia in the field, Romania is locked in its own struggle against the same bleak tyranny. Having studied and understood Romania’s sociocultural vulnerabilities, the Kremlin has committed to a strategy of cultural warfare through which it seeks to bolster the country’s far-right movement and ensure it occupies positions of political power, pursuing the reinstatement of a subservient pro-Russian elite. In turn, this elite is to conduct the dislocation of Romania from its European roots and to transform it into a vassal of Russia.

The death cult and the dictator

The favourite contemporary political thinker among the Romanian far-right’s leading personalities is the top Kremlin ideologue Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin himself is particularly concerned with Romania in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics. A “constant obstacle” to his illusions of a Eurasian empire of Moscow, Romania’s Latin culture and pro-European orientation naturally flowing from it are deemed as complicating Russia’s expansion into South-Eastern Europe. It is seen as a barrier in the way of a territorial linkage between Russia and Serbia, the latter state being regarded as “Eurasia’s outpost in the Balkans”. Consequently, turning Romania into a Eurasian vassal would require Russia to invest in and support an ultra-Orthodox and nationalist political environment, with servitude to Russia being justified through its position as “the cradle of Eastern Orthodoxy.”

The combination of ultra-Orthodoxy and nationalism as a political platform in Romania emerged in the interwar period, serving as the ideological foundation for both the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael, and the communist regime that followed. One of its main theorists was Nichifor Crainic, a far-right extremist and virulent antisemite. According to Crainic, the Orthodox village was the birthplace of Romanian culture and its ultimate spiritual guardian. As a result, there was no Romanian culture without Eastern Orthodoxy and foreigners had no place in his ethnic Orthodox theocracy, which he described as an “ethnocracy” and defined as “implicitly xenophobic and antisemitic, since its domination in culture, state life, and social life postulates the reduction of foreign influence.” Crainic saw in Russia an enforcer of the Orthodox way of life against a decadent Europe, writing in an essay titled “Parsifal” that “the entire Russian resistance towards the West has a strong Orthodox flavour. Russia’s issue with European civilization is one that concerns all the patriarchal peoples within Orthodoxy.” As the Legion of the Archangel Michael and other fascist parties gained in popularity, so did Crainic’s ethnocracy. The Romanian Orthodox Church proved highly receptive to his writings as well. As leader of the fascist National Christian Party, minister of propaganda, and state secretary in the ministry of culture during 1940-41 in Legionary and fascist Romania, Crainic was instrumental in designing and facilitating the Holocaust in Romania. After the Second World War, he was sentenced to prison for war crimes, but rehabilitated once he began writing propaganda for the communist regime. In 2017, on a visit in Romania, Dugin acknowledged having been inspired by Romania’s interwar ultra-Orthodox theocrats like Crainic.

The Soviet-backed communist regime installed in 1946 continued the trend of relying on ultra-Orthodoxy and nationalism as means of repression and suppression. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church, the second largest Christian church after the Orthodox one, was abolished in 1948 and its members forcibly converted to the Orthodox Church. Connected to the leading learning circles of Vienna, Trnava and Rome, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church had facilitated Transylvanian Romanian intellectuals’ access to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, contributing to Transylvania becoming the locus of the Romanian Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, the Greek Catholic Church was generally less dogmatic than its Orthodox counterpart, as a consequence of important clergymen embracing the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason and science. With its close ties to Rome and the prestige of having positively contributed to major historical developments between the 18th and 20th centuries, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church represented an alternative to the sycophantic, Soviet-aligned Orthodox Church. It was also a reminder of Romania’s rightful place in Europe, which the communists were eager to do away with as they abducted Romania behind the Iron Curtain. In his Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin praises the communist regime for having abolished the Greek Catholic Church, bemoaning the return of the “Uniate and pro-Catholic lobby” after the 1989 revolution, which he singles out as the lone “bearer of anti-Moscow sentiments and Latin tendencies” in Romania and Moldova.

The defining feature of nationalism in Romania is its pathological anti-Europeanism, which feeds directly into Russian narratives about the country’s proper position as an “independent” Orthodox nation in the Eurasian anti-western crusade. Organized anti-Europeanism can be traced back to the fascist Christian theocrats of the interwar period and continued to be developed by the communist regime that followed. For the first group, Europe was synonymous with an undesirable tradition of democracy, the rule of law, and cosmopolitanism. Zelea Codreanu, the founder and leader of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, until his execution in 1938, denounced democracy in For My Legionaries as a Jewish tool meant to break up the homogeneity of the Romanian people, dividing and subjugating them for profit. The country had to be cleansed of democracy, the rule of law, and cosmopolitanism. It would then be racially purified and turned into a totalitarian Orthodox death cult: “The ultimate goal is not life. It is Resurrection. The Resurrection of nations in the name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This final moment, the ‘Resurrection from the dead’, is the highest and most sublime goal to which a nation can aspire.” Nae Ionescu, one of the principal shapers of Legionary thought, rejected democracy in his 1938 series of prison lectures, The Legionary Phenomenon, as a monstrous, alien, European and western concept, incompatible with Romania and its totalitarian Orthodox national ideals.

The communists sought the same decoupling from Europe but this time in order to turn Romania into an isolated one-party dictatorship similar to North Korea. They maintained the Legionary conception of a Romania mutually exclusive with regards to cultural, spiritual and political belonging to Europe and the West. Totalitarian state capture and the protection provided by the Iron Curtain allowed them to further expand upon this conception unhindered. The preservation of the national communist state was mandated to be the ultimate and highest purpose of the Romanian people, with the Party shepherding the people serving it into a sort of atemporal Carpathian Eden, ever foreign to, and ever besieged by, the surrounding Europeans and westerners.

Reading between the lines

In essence, the ideological grundnorm of Romania’s contemporary far right constitutes the negation of Europeanness through ultra-Orthodoxy and nationalism. This also explains why, alongside Russia, the MAGA administration threw its support behind the far right during the 2025 presidential election. As the recently released US National Security Strategy reveals, boosting nationalist parties opposed to European integration is part of the MAGA strategy of preventing European federalization. Federalization and the emergence of a European demos is what causes alarm in Russia too, since the Kremlin’s expansionist policy relies on utilizing the tribalism inherent in nationalism to insulate European countries and obstruct common defensive efforts. Permitting the chauvinist far right to entrench itself in positions of political power would not only doom Romania’s prospects of European integration and sabotage those of Moldova and Ukraine, but also be disastrous for liberty, democracy, and the rule of law.

The pre-eminent far-right political formation in Romania is the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), which sits at 18 per cent support following the 2024 parliamentary election. It also scores between 35 to 40 per cent in polls. In the present parliament, the AUR and other far-right splinter groups sit at 30 per cent. However, the current de facto leader of the far right is not the AUR’s president, George Simion, but Călin Georgescu. This figure became world famous in December 2024 after fraudulently causing an upset in the 2024 cancelled presidential election and being barred from running again in 2025 by the Constitutional Court. In his 2016 manifest book Romania’s Crossroad, Georgescu states: “It is a fortunate circumstance that both the Romanian and Russian people share the waters of the great river of Christian Orthodox spirituality, which will flow eternally […] The solid Berlin-Moscow axis is an undeniable reality, providing important reflection themes for those who understand the grand diplomatic and economic chess game. Russia […] finds itself on a pathway of development, in conjunction with the vast Eurasian space. I am convinced that Russia does not want conflict of any kind, but rather development. It offers an area of economic opportunity for everyone […] The West dealt it a harsh blow just when it was on the right track. The condemnation of President Putin shows us that the traditional nationalist direction of today’s Russia is not favourably viewed by the neoliberal New World Order.”

This idea of a “Berlin-Moscow axis” is taken straight out of Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics, in which the Kremlin ideologue specifies how Germany must be turned pro-Russian in order for Moscow to achieve absolute control over Europe. Georgescu and the far right’s vitriolic hate for a united, democratic and free Europe reveal his vision for Romania: a country divided by tyranny and autocratic gluttony, where democratic freedom is abolished for threatening the Orthodox national sovereignty, and freedom a memory of a past dream in a nightmare of oppression. Indeed, Georgescu’s 2024 presidential programme introduces the so-called “Christian sovereigntist-distributist” system as a political, social and economic system of governance, which is to mark the beginning of the “Great National Resurrection”. In this system, “the national interest” replaces the “struggle between left and right”, while the “common interest” replaces “political confrontations and electoral cycles”. Part of the hardline pro-KGB wing in the Directorate for Foreign Intelligence of communist Romania’s secret police, Georgescu is domestically backed by an apparatus of reservist officers from unreformed intelligence, army and police services; nationalist pseudointellectuals from the Romanian Academy; corrupt businessmen and would-be oligarchs; mercenaries; and pro-Moscow Orthodox priests.

The counter-revolution has arrived

The pro-Russian apparatus in Romania has managed to construct a parallel cognitive universe, in which its supporters are fed constant disinformation and propaganda. An entire media environment dedicated to mass brainwashing, composed of TV stations, websites, radio and YouTube shows, TikTok influencers, social media bots, AI slop, podcasts, and obscure publishing houses keeps the voters of the sovereigntist bloc segregated from the rest of the society and actual reality. This echo chamber pursues the normalization of Russian narratives and the demonization of the European Union and the West, alongside the rehabilitation of the National Legionary State and the communist regime.

Successful counter-revolutions against democratic political orders rely on three pillars: the disgraced elite of the previous autocratic order, a certain measure of support among the populace, and external support from autocracies for that disgraced elite. Counter-revolutions in democracies need not be violent in their initial stage. Autocratic counter-revolutionaries can abuse democratic procedures and rights in order to gain power via elections and proceed to dismantle the young democratic constitutional order from inside the state machinery, with terror and the persecution of democrats following once the dismantling has been completed. Since Russia is pinned down in eastern Ukraine and unable to reach Romania’s border, the only forms of support it can lend to the far right coalesced around the former Chekist elite of the communist regime are financial and informational. Russia’s culture war on Romania is thus aimed at boosting acceptance among the populace for the ultra-Orthodox and nationalist rhetoric of the far right, facilitating the popular backing of pro-Russian forces for positions of power during elections. So far, the Chekist counter-revolution has been held at bay, both by the cancellation of the vitiated presidential election in December 2024, and by the victory of the pro-democratic candidate in the May 2025 presidential election. The darkness that has descended upon this part of the Greco-Roman world will be broken and made to fade away, but only if democratic Romania resists, Ukraine beasts Russia back, and the European Union federalizes.

Radu Cornea holds a bachelor’s degree in international and European law from the University of Groningen and a master’s degree in European law from Maastricht University. He has worked as a policy researcher regarding the rule of law in the European Union and as a democracy rapporteur on Romania.

nationalism, Orthodox Church, Romania, Romanian Orthodox Church, Romanian politics, Russian influence