Galician Catholics into Soviet Orthodox: religion and postwar Ukraine^†

† This article is a result of dissertation research conducted in the early stages of my PhD program at New York University’s Department of History. Some of these arguments were presented in a conference paper at the North East Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (NESEEES) held at NYU in April 2016.

Abstract

While important work has been done on what it meant to become newly “Soviet” after 1917, or during the era of “High Stalinism,” it is less clear what it meant to become Soviet for the first time after World War II. For the residents of the new Soviet Baltics, each prewar state received its own republic. In the case of the existing Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, territories that had not experienced Soviet power or the war on the same timeline were put into existing republics and thus existing Soviet structures. How did this process work? For Western Ukraine, one event in this process was the formation of the 1946 Initiative Committee, a joint project of the Central Committee and the newly formed Plenipotentiary for the Matters of the Russian Orthodox Church that presided over a forced conversion of Uniates to the Russian Orthodox Church. This paper examines how the mass religious conversion of Uniates was part of the process of making Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians, a postwar renewal of Soviet nationalities policy. Yet this decision, much like 1917 or 1939, was imagined as only the beginning. Turning “disloyal” Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians was a project of both re-writing the separate histories of Galicia and Soviet Ukrainians to emphasize their unity and teaching Galicians to imagine themselves as Ukrainian in the Soviet sense. In contrast to a new Soviet order with an emphasis on the secular, Western Ukraine’s Sovietization was brought about through religious terms and an emphasis on Russian Orthodoxy.

Keywords:

• Soviet Union
• Ukraine
• Uniate Church
• Russian Orthodox Church
• World War II
• religion
• nationalism
• Galicia
• Western Ukraine

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Brigid O’Keeffe for serving as the discussant on my panel and giving me extremely helpful comments on the early version of these ideas. I would also like to thank the conference participants for their thoughtful questions and comments. I extend my gratitude to my NYU advisers, Jane Burbank, Yanni Kotsonis, Larry Wolff, and Bruce Grant, who have helped me develop my preliminary arguments for this and further research, as well as being excellent mentors. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who provided insight and expertise that shaped this article immensely. The arguments and conclusions of this article are my own.

Notes

† This article is a result of dissertation research conducted in the early stages of my PhD program at New York University’s Department of History. Some of these arguments were presented in a conference paper at the North East Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (NESEEES) held at NYU in April 2016.

1 After helpful suggestions from the anonymous reviewers, I understand the need to use “conversion” with caution in describing this process. In many cases, “conversion” has an implication that a religious rite has been performed and theological beliefs changed. In this case, however, “conversions” were done in secular spaces using Soviet secular practices, such as denunciations, signed testimonials, and property registration. The major theological change asked of priests and congregants was the disavowal of the pope, since Orthodox and Uniate theology are essentially similar except on that point. However, mass religious transfers throughout history have often taken place using secular practices and through state institutions, with little concern for theology. Therefore, when I use “conversion” I mean in the state-sponsored sense, as opposed to a personal decision that must be ratified through religious rites.

2 The Uniate Church can also be referred to as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, Eastern Rite Catholicism, and other names. I use Uniate in this paper because that was the name of the church most used in Soviet Ukraine at the time.

3 The most comprehensive account of the Initiative Committee is Bohdan Bociurkiw’s The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State 1939–1950 (1996). I rely a great deal on his pioneering work and richly documented history. However, Bociurkiw presents the Initiative Committee in the context of church history, while I believe the committee should be seen as part of a broader, postwar context of the USSR. Bociurkiw’s work argues that the Initiative Committee was an example of Russification against Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian institutions in Ukraine, as well as another chapter in a history of a church with a rich history of martyrdom. Here I try to integrate policies toward the church within ideas of Ukrainian nationalism, even if it is a Ukrainian nationalism defined by Soviet authorities.

4 In his book The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv (2015), Tarik Amar argues that a concern for “the local” is an important concept to understanding the program central Soviet authorities had for the new regions of Ukraine. Amar also argues convincingly that Sovietization in Western Ukraine still sought to create a homogenous Ukrainian nation-state, albeit on terms that denied Ukraine a separate history from Russia. This framework is critical for understanding Soviet policies toward the Uniates.

5 As Tarik Amar points out, before World War II, “nationalists from western Ukraine had sought to carry eastward their version of Ukraine … [however] eastern Ukrainians in postwar Lviv helped impose a version of Ukraine that was Stalinist and subordinate to a Russian ‘elder brother.’”

6 Bociurkiw (1996) describes these previous “reunions” but argues that they should be seen as “elminat[ing] the barrier to the integration of Ukrainians and Belarusians with the Russians (5).” In contrast, Werth (2014), in describing these historical reunions, uses an approach that rejects national identification of the church and its congregants and instead focuses on associations with foreign enemy governments and monarchs, instead of nations.

7 In some cases, it was a result of rebellions in the Polish lands, in other cases it was the result of theological changes that were perceived to move the church more toward “Latin” orientations (Werth 2014, 77–79).

8 This was in fact often quite the opposite. As historians of Galicia have pointed out, “Uniates” were just as concerned about Polish Catholic religious and political hegemony in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire as they were about their Orthodox neighbors. Relations between Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics were contentious in the nineteenth century and became violent in the twentieth century. Here, it is important to emphasize “pro-Polish” had more to do with alliances within the Polish nobility than ideas about nationalism (Wolff 2002).

9 Greek Catholics and their parishes were also split among territories in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

10 The text of the “reunion” during the Lviv Sobor of 1946 summarizes the proceedings as “The sobor of the Greek Catholic clergy … decided to liquidate the Brest Union of 1596, to break away from Rome, and to reunite with one Orthodox Church of our fathers.”

11 “Dukhovenstvu i virnym, myr u Hospodi i blahoslovennia” Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine, L’viv fond 408, opys 1, sprava 50, fols. 19–20 Translated into English and quoted in Bociurkiw (1996, 87–88).

12 From the presentation of Iosyf Slypij’s memoirs http://ucu.edu.ua/eng/news/3680/.

13 See Amar (2015, 271–274) for the fate of Lviv’s synagogue.

14 See Amar (2015, 230–232) on Krypiakevych and his history.

15 In “Far Eastern Europe,” Szporluk does not acknowledge this movement when he states “The West Ukrainians … did not have the historic feeling of inferiority versus Russia that their Eastern co-nationalists had had … Russia did not impress them as a higher civilization … ” (476).

16 For discussions of the periodization of Soviet policies on nationalities, see O’Keeffe (2013), Hirsch (2005), and Martin (2001).

17 It was also the first “reunion” of many. Similar “reunions,” were undertaken in other areas of Ukraine and places deemed to have Ukrainian regions, including Sub-Carpathian Rus, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. These reunions and how they resemble and differ from the original Galician project will be the subject of my continuing research.