On September 14, 1920, the monastery was forcefully closed by the Bolsheviks, while Inochenție's family and the leaders of the Inochentists being either killed or arrested and tried in Odessa. The Rai establishment continued to function in the 1920s, when Ananiv was included in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The new Soviet administration tried to transform it into a kolkhoz named "From Darkness to Light". However, in 1930, the Soviet anti-religious newspaper Bezbozhnik announced that Inochentism had been stamped out of Soviet Moldavia, noting that the sect was still active in Romanian Bessarabia. According to one Romanian account of the mid 1920s, the Inochentists were even making converts in the west and south, among peasants from the "Old Kingdom". By the 1940s, the estimated total of Romanian Inochentists was 2,000. The surviving Inochentist sections in Soviet lands suffered during the Great Purge: all the Inochentist nuns still living at Rai were put to death by the NKVD. In Romanian territories, the movement became the subject of renewed media and political interest, while coming into conflict with the prevalent Romanian Orthodox Church. The new keepers of Inochentist doctrines, described as by "charlatans" by Clark, were self-appointed patriarchs, deemed incarnations of the Holy Spirit or Second Comings of Christ. The government perceived the movement as "harmful" for Romanian society and in contradiction with public order, so, in 1925, the Inochentist church was officially banned. In 1926, a church leader was arrested by Romanian authorities as he tried to set up a new congregation in Budești. Romanian state repression During mid 1930, the surviving branches were investigated by the authorities, who took with them field reporters from Dimineața daily. The resulting reports were compiled and analyzed by Romanian scholar and racialist Henric Sanielevici, who focused on their allegations about the Inochentists' sexual promiscuity. At the time, the congregations had resorted to holding mass in Bessarabia's caves, forests and catacombs; from 1928, the church was presided upon by the 35-year-old Neculai Barbă Roșie ("Red Beard"), formerly a Gendarme in Cetatea Albă County, and two "eunuchs" (Ion Antiminiuc, Ivan Strugarin). Successive Romanian governments continued to issue anti-sectarian directives targeting the church. One such act, passed in 1937 by the Gheorghe Tătărescu cabinet, prohibited the activities of Inochentists, whom it grouped together with the Old Calendar Orthodox, the Pentecostals, the Nazarenes, the Apostolic Faith Church of God, Jehovah's Witnesses and Bible societies. Official Christian propaganda