of Bessarabia (Bălți, Soroca, Orhei and Chișinău) each had a group of Inochentists, and that their priests were among the "most reactionary and backward". This memorandum resulted in a repression of the Inochentists, which started only a few months later. In January 1947, ten Inochenist leaders were sentenced to terms between six and ten years in the "corrective labor camps". On April 6, 1949, Operation South began, as a mass deportation to Siberia of people (and their families) who were suspected of anti-Soviet feelings. This included 35,000 people, not just wealthy peasants and former landowners, but also members of sects deemed illegal, including Inochentists. Two years later, on March 3, 1951, another wave of deportations began, as Operation North, which also deported all members of the Jehovah's Witnesses. The deportees were allowed to return home only after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous De-Stalinization speech of 1956. According to a 1957 report, 150 Inochentists were back in the Moldavian SSR. In April and May 1957, another group of Inochentist leaders were arrested. The main local newspaper, Sovetskaya Moldaviya, ran attacks on the Inochenitists and a negative propaganda film was made in reference to them. The persecutions were intensified during Khrushchev's campaign of religious persecutions, which lasted between 1959 and 1964. By the end of the campaign, 20 illegal churches and all the monasteries that supported to the movement from its very beginning had been closed, all of them in the Moldavian SSR. Internal memos of the Soviet administration show that the campaign was relatively successful: in 1960, a report had it that the number of Inochenitists dropped from 2,000 to just 250. Nevertheless, their religious group survived and the Soviet authorities continued publishing pamphlets even in the 1980s. In 1987, it was reported that an Inochentist community still existed near the ruins of Inochenție's monastery in Balta, Ukrainian SSR. Meanwhile, the location where Inochenție began his mission had been turned into a gym. Inside Romania, itself under a communist government from 1948 to 1989, the Inochentists continued to be explicitly banned alongside Jehovah's Witnesses, Bible students and the other groups listed in 1930s bans. The basic legislation was Government Decree 243, passed in September 1948. It resulted in a circular letter of the Internal Affairs Ministry, which included the listed Inochentists and other Orthodox splinter groups among the lesser threats by comparison with foreign-born new