and had given assurances that he would never again repeat it." Shortly ahead of voting, Cecan signed his name as an "Iron Guard member" to a manifesto asking sympathizers to embrace the National Liberal Party-Brătianu. In April 1934, during Orthodox Easter, Cecan returned to preaching a rapprochement with the Catholics, urging his church bishops to renounce "outdated prejudice". In June, he addressed the Romanian Orthodox Church in an open letter, calling for a renewed work of religious instruction and "pastoral apostolate", which, he argued, would have prevented Romania from going the way of the Soviet Union. The letter also restated that "all the Christian world should form one unbreakable front" around the "invisible citadel" of Rome. Late that month, this polemical stance resulted in Cecan being cited before his Metropolis, to answer for his "propaganda against the Orthodox Church." His multiculturalism still found backers inside the ecclesiastical structures—in July, his associate Pavel Guciuna again attempted to raise the issue of multilingual publishing by the Union of the Bessarabian Clergy. The Greek-Catholic press also stood by Cecan when it came to his anti-Soviet politics: the official church magazine, Cuvântul Adevărului, welcomed Cecan's book Tainele și scopurile ascunse ale comunismului ("The Secrets and Covert Agenda of Communism"), published at Chișinău during the early 1930s. Final years and execution In early 1934, Cecan was collecting funds for a "truly Russian newspaper", specifically intended as a new edition of Nashe Obyedineniye. At the time, he and Telegraf were again moving away from Nazism. In his articles for the paper, Cecan decried the victories of fascism—from the rise of Japanese statism and the assassination of Alexander Karađorđević, to German rearmament and the establishment of a Reich Labor Service; he also applauded the Romanian–Soviet rapprochement as a seed of "union with Russia". He had by then moved with his family to a small house in Chișinău, where he reportedly lived in poverty and relative isolation, his son-in-law having died in early March 1935. He and Sergiu Florescu were irregularly publishing Unirea Noastră—with the exact same title as Nashe Obyedineniye, but in Romanian, as this was the only form allowed by the Romanian censors. The two men sought to evade censorship and, in June 1934, put out an issue entirely in Russian, immediately confiscated by the Siguranța; in October, agents reported that the Unirea Noastră nameplate was still partly in Russian, and, as Șornikov notes, took active