Father Vasile Țepordei – a suffering-bearer in the Russian gulag

Father Vasile Țepordei was born in Bessarabia, Cârpești commune, Cahul county. A family of Russians, from the time of Stephen the Great.

After graduating from the seminary in Chișinău, he graduated from the Faculty of Theology in the same city, but did not immediately become a priest, but became a missionary in the Gazetteer, keeping the flame of Romanianism alive in the face of Moscow’s intentions to denationalise the Romanians of Bessarabia. After the seizure of Bessarabia in 1941, the priest Țepordei took refuge with his family in Bucharest, where he was later arrested and passed through all the departments of the Bucharest Communist Security Service.

He was finally handed over to the Russians and taken to Constanța. Here the investigators tried to strip him of his Romanian citizenship by force and threats, but to no avail. Finally, they brought him a bundle of newspapers, “Basarabia” and “Raza”, belonging to the priest Țepordei, with all the articles he had written defaming Stalin’s personality. Believing that this evidence would weaken his own convictions, the investigators offered him, in exchange for his release, to be a witness for the prosecution in a case containing some three hundred names, including former deputies of the “Land Council” who had voted for the Union in 1918. Refusing even this last attempt at compromise, he was sentenced in June 1949 to 25 years’ hard labour in the Soviet camps. In October 1949, all those arrested by the NKVD in the city of Constanța were put on goods wagons and taken to Ungheni, from where they set off for Siberia. (…)

Here the star of his life came to his aid in the form of a Russian doctor, the daughter of a priest, who, seeing him dressed in a priest’s habit, first made him swear not to reveal the secret and then confessed to him that she had passed through many towns in Romania with the Soviet army, with whom she had fallen deeply in love.

For these reasons, she told him that she wanted to save his life by admitting him to the prison infirmary and giving him medical care. This doctor also urged him to write from prison to Bessarabia, if he had any knowledge, and to ask for parcels to be sent to him, which he received. This saved his life. Father Țepordei remained in prison until 1 March 1950, when he was transferred to Sferdlovsk, beyond the Urals, to the town of Azanca, where another tragic chapter of his life began.

Here he was introduced to the largest forest in the world, the Siberian taiga. In this camp, as in other camps in the USSR, people worked in inhumane, exterminatory conditions, cutting down trees according to rules that were difficult to enforce.

After some time in the camp, a brigadier, who had checked him out without his knowledge, trusted him and took him out one day, deep into the forest, through places that were difficult to access. He showed him a mass grave, covered with a thin layer of rotting leaves, containing the skeletons of five hundred Ukrainians who had refused to be collectivised. (…)

Father Țepordei lived in this camp until June 1950, when he was dressed from head to toe in completely new clothes for repatriation. Only the train had deliberately taken the wrong address, and instead of arriving in Romania, he ended up in Vorkuta, in the coal mine camp No. 29. Here, in temperatures of -35 degrees Celsius, he used his experience and, as soon as he entered the camp gate, asked if there were any Romanians in the camp.

(Nicu Popescu Vorkuta – Crez și adevăr, Bucharest, 2009, pp. 216-218)