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previous: Chapter 19 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 21

 p186  XX

The Religious Development of Ukraine

The last thirty years have witnessed the same upheavals in the religious life of the Ukrainians as in all other fields. Each conqueror has tried to use religion as a means of breaking Ukrainian national consciousness.

At the outbreak of World War I, when Ukraine was divided between the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary, the people were divided between the Orthodox and the Catholics of the Byzantine Rite. This line did not exactly coincide with the boundaries of the two empires, for in Bukovina and to a lesser extent in the Carpathian region under Hungarian rule there were numbers of Orthodox. In Eastern Galicia the prevailing religion was Catholicism of the Eastern Rite and in Russia there was only Orthodoxy. As a result of this geographical division, there was the same difference in development that we have seen in other fields.

Let us look first at the situation on the ruins of the Russian Empire. The original Christian see was that of the metropolitanate of Kiev and of all Rus. It was in Kiev that Yaroslav the Wise had in the eleventh century founded the great Church of St. Sophia, one of the glories of Kiev architecture. Then at the time of the great sacking of Kiev in 1169 by Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky the person of the metropolitan was one of his greatest conquests. For all practical purposes the seat of the  p187 ecclesiastical authority was moved to Suzdal and then to Moscow and the metropolitan became a creature of the Moscow princes and tsars. The manners of the Muscovite regime were impressed upon the church and long before the fall of Constantinople, all feeling of ecclesiastical dependence upon the patriarch of Constantinople was swallowed up in the pride of Muscovy.

In Kiev the metropolitanate was finally restored, after the region had passed under the control of Lithuania. The Orthodox of Kiev were not received favorably at Moscow and it was not until the revolt of Khmelnytsky in 1649 that the northern capital attempted to renew friendly relations with them. Then, after the Treaty of Pereyaslav, the patriarch of Moscow demanded that the Orthodox of Kiev submit to his jurisdiction and by political pressure the patriarch of Constantinople was forced to acknowledge this in 1685. Immediately all the rights of the Kiev metropolitan were abolished and the sterner system of Moscow was introduced, with strict censor­ship over all books that appeared in Kiev.

When the Ukrainian independence movement started in 1917, demands were immediately put forward for the separation of the Russian and the Ukrainian Orthodox churches and the resumption by the metropolitan of Kiev of his position as the head of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church, exactly as the churches of Serbia and Greece had won their independence from the patriarch of Constantinople in the nineteenth century. It goes without saying that the liberal Russian Provisional Government and all the Russian ecclesiastics, including the Patriarch Tikhon, refused the request, if they deigned to notice it at all. This was naturally the case also after the triumph of the Communists. Patriarch Tikhon was not in a position to take any action and most of the Russian bishops in the Ukrainian dioceses in 1918 and 1919 sympathized with the efforts of the White armies to restore the unity of Russia.

This left the Ukrainians in a difficult position. They appealed  p188  to the patriarch of Constantinople but at this moment the Greeks in Constantinople were anxious about the attempts of the Turks under Mustapha Kemal to re-establish Turkish sovereignty and they had no desire to take any action which might involve them in a clash with the representatives of the Western or Eastern powers. The West had, as we have seen, tried to avoid action on the form of Russian governmental organization, and as a result the Ukrainian Orthodox found their hopes thwarted. They discussed possible solutions, some indeed rather fantastic, but the fall of the Ukrainian National Republic put an end to efforts to secure their own episcopate and the Ukrainians like the Great Russians were subjected to the fury of the Communist anti-religious persecutions.

Meanwhile in 1924 the patriarch of Constantinople did answer an appeal of the Polish government to set up an Orthodox church in their country and take it under his protection. This was for the Orthodox living within the boundaries of the Polish Republic as worked out after 1920 — primarily Ukrainians and Byelorussians.⁠1 It was never recognized by any official or unofficial body of the Russians in the Soviet Union or by the émigrés.

On the other hand the legal establishment of this church did not relieve pressure upon the Ukrainians living under Polish rule. The civil government and a part at least of the Roman Catholic clergy were bitterly opposed to anything that might lead to a Ukrainian organization and found all kinds of excuses to annoy them and subject them to legal disabilities. In 1938 they went so far as to close a number of Orthodox churches on the ground that they had at one time or another been the property of Catholics of the Eastern Rite.⁠2 This led to disturbances and in some cases even the Polish courts refused to countenance the charges drawn against the Ukrainian Orthodox.

The chief result of these attempts was an improvement in the relations of the Orthodox and the Catholics of the Eastern Rite. The leader of the latter, Archbishop Andrew Sheptytsky,  p189 openly protested on behalf of the Orthodox.

During nearly half a century the progress that was made by the Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia was greatly aided by the work of Archbishop Sheptytsky, metropolitan of the Catholic church of the Eastern Rite. He was in every sense a great religious and cultural leader. His benefactions were limitless; he was a wise administrator of the church and he engaged in the most diverse religious and secular activities. There was hardly any aspect of Ukrainian life in which his influence was not felt. As a result he was bitterly hated by all the foes of his people. When the Russians entered Lviv in 1914, they at once deported him to Russia, from which he was not able to return until 1920, and even then the Poles did not allow him to return to his diocese. A little later, when he returned from a visit to the Ukrainians in the New World, he was interned for some months by the Polish government. This persecution by the two enemies of the Ukrainian movement only enhanced his prestige and his following and until his death in 1944 he was the very incarnation of Ukrainian hopes and aspirations.⁠3

There is less to be said about the situation in Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina. In the case of the Orthodox under Czecho­slovak rule, the patriarch of Constantinople exercised a nebulous control as in the past, despite efforts to establish an independent Czecho­slovak Orthodox church. In Bukovina the Orthodox Ukrainians were brought under the control of the Romanian Orthodox church. In neither case were there any remarkable movements, although among the Ukrainian Orthodox of Carpatho-Ukraine the Russianizing tendency was very strong. In both cases the Catholics of the Eastern Rite led an un­event­ful existence without any strong leader­ship.

The equilibrium which had been attained in the religious life of Ukraine was rudely upset when Hitler and Stalin made their alliance in 1941 and the Red army invaded Poland and occupied Lviv. Almost at once there were signs that it would repeat the actions of the Russian army of 1914 and move against the Catholics of the Eastern Rite. Some of the clergy were  p190 forced to join the Orthodox church and a number of Catholic churches were seized. No direct action was taken against Archbishop Sheptytsky. He was forced into practical retirement but he continued to serve his people and his church until the German advance on Lviv in 1941.⁠4

Then he threw his energy into the attempts to reorganize a Ukrainian government. As we have seen, these were promptly blocked. In 1944 the Archbishop passed away and was succeeded by Archbishop Joseph Slipy, who was head of the Ukrainian Catholic church when the Soviet forces re-occupied the city and the area. This time they had come to stay and they acted accordingly.

On their arrival in both Carpatho-Ukraine and Western Ukraine, the Communists demanded that the Catholic church of the Eastern Rite formally join the Russian church under Patriarch Alexis. When they found no support among either the clergy or the laity, they resorted to force and trickery. All of the bishops were arrested and disappeared, including the archbishop.⁠5 Then the Soviets formed a "Committee of Initiative for the Transference of the Greek Catholic Church to Orthodoxy." This committee consisted of three priests, Rev. Dr. Havriil Kostelnyk, Rev. M. Melnyk and Rev. A. Pelvetsky. These men shortly appealed to the other Greek Catholic priests for support on the ground that the Soviet government would recognize no other body as competent to speak for them. A favorable response was soon forthcoming from the representative of the Council of People's Commissars for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox church on the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian S. S. R.

Despite protests by most of the clergy, the Committee of Initiative arranged a synod in Lviv on March 8, 1946. It was attended by some 116 priests and was of course thoroughly uncanonical. The "synod" requested that it be admitted to the Russian Orthodox church; of course the request was granted and the three leaders were consecrated Orthodox bishops.⁠6 The full resources of the Soviet machine were  p191  applied to the task of deporting or executing any priests who refused to act in accordance with their orders.

The consequences have been appalling. Churches, including the Cathedral of St. George at Lviv, have been seized by the agents of the patriarch. There is yet no complete list of the priests and other clergy and laity who have died as martyrs to their faith. The entire property, printing houses, etc., of the church have been turned over to the Russian Orthodox. In a word the Soviets are carrying out the traditional policy of the Russian tsars and the Holy Synod which forbade the reading of the Liturgy in Russian-dominated territory in any other form than that ordered by the Russian church. Thus another dark chapter has been added to the bloody proceedings which went on as each new Ukrainian province was added to the Russian Empire and the people were forcibly converted from their centuries-old devotion to the Catholic church of the Byzantine Rite.

The Orthodox fared little better. At the first appearance of the Germans the Ukrainian Orthodox renewed their attempts to establish a Ukrainian Orthodox church. The Germans were, however, opposed to the development of any institutions to help the Ukrainians or any of the Slavs. Later some of the bishops who had served in the Polish Orthodox church consented to take part in the movement and consecrate Ukrainian bishops for the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church, and on the whole the church flourished in the regions which came under the control of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Army. The Germans tried to prevent all these developments by encouraging the Autonomous Ukrainian church, which stood in some sort of relation­ship to the patriarch of Moscow. When success­ful attempts were made to unite these two groups, the German authorities interfered lest the movement be able to accomplish something for the Ukrainian national spirit. Under German pressure the Autonomous church soon withdrew from the union and then passed into insignificance because of its surrender to the enemy. After this flurry the Germans turned  p192 against the church authorities and arrested or imprisoned many of the clergy.⁠7

When the Soviets returned, they speedily turned against all the Orthodox clergy who had aided in the movement and they asserted their own control over the Ukrainian Orthodox. Deportation and liquidation followed and once again the hopes for the establishment of a Ukrainian Orthodox church were doomed.

At the present time the patriarch in Moscow in his reorganization of the church has remained true to the old Russian principle. The sees in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic are held by men who are loyal to Moscow and no concessions are made to the feelings of the Ukrainians. For religious purposes the Ukrainian Soviet Republic does not exist and the Orthodox church in Ukraine is as closely⁠8 dependent upon the patriarch of Moscow as it had formerly been under the Holy Synod of St. Petersburg.⁠9

All this is merely another sign of the fictitious quality which the Soviet Union attaches to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Just as in the economic, intellectual and political fields, Ukraine is felt by them as an integral part of Russia but without any of those possibly mitigating provisions which would come into effect if the republic were formally annexed. Moscow now claims precedence over all the Eastern Slavs and refuses them even those scanty privileges which are enjoyed by the citizens or the Russian Soviet Republic. At the same time it constantly harps upon the nationalistic desires of the Ukrainians and liquidates right and left.

The Author's Notes:

1 The number of Russian refugees in Poland was small. The Orthodox were chiefly centered in the so‑called eastern provinces inhabited by the minorities and of this population again, few were Russian.

2 See Buell, op. cit., p279.

3 Clarence A. Manning, Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky, Review of Religion, IX, pp282 ff.

4 Walter Dushnyck, Martyrdom in Ukraine (New York, 1946), p15.

5 Dushnyck, op. cit., p21.

6 Dushnyck, op. cit., pp25 ff. It was reported in the Ukrainska Pravda, September 26, 1948, that Bishop Kostelnik had been murdered, Patriarch Alexis claimed that it was the work of Ukrainian agents but there is also a suspicion that he was liquidated for some reason by the MVD. The Ukrainian Quarterly, IV, 375.

7 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, pp881 ff.

8 [There is a footnote number 8 in the text, but there is no endnote 8: they only go thru 7. See my comment above]

9 [There is a footnote number 9 in the text, but there is no endnote 9: they only go thru 7. See my comment above]

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