CONFERENCE PAPER: Religion and national identity in 20th century Ukraine (06/20/99)

CONFERENCE PAPER: Religion and national identity in 20th century Ukraine

Dr. Serhii Plokhy is the first director of the Church Studies Program at the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta-Edmonton. The Church Studies Program was established in 1994. This paper, titled "Religion and National Identity in 20th Century Ukraine: Re-evaluating the Soviet Period," was presented at the panel "Church and Nation in Ukraine," held on April 17 at the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in New York City. The panel was dedicated to the memory of renowned Ukrainian Church historian and scholar, Prof. Bohdan Bociurkiw.

With the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd in November 1917, the competition between Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy that began with the events of the 1905 revolution was abruptly interrupted. The atheistic state effectively removed religion from public life, but, unable to eliminate it completely, tended to exploit Russian-Ukrainian religious rivalry for its own political ends.

The major issue addressed here is the impact of Soviet religious policy on the process of formation of Ukrainian national identity and specifically on the nature and character of the Russian-Ukrainian religious encounter. In an attempt to provide at least partial answer to these questions, I shall discuss not only the "Soviet" history of the different Orthodox jurisdictions in Ukraine, but also the history of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was forcibly "reunited" with Moscow in 1946 and then re-established itself in the period of Gorbachev's glasnost.

The first massive encounter of Ukrainian (Kyivan) and Russian (Muscovite) Christianity took place after the Pereiaslav Council of 1654. Although Moscow succeeded in subordinating the Kyivan Metropolitanate to its own patriarchate by the end of the century, the Kyivan clergy struck back with the "Ukrainization" of the entire Church during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The role of the Ukrainian element, symbolized by the names and writings of Petro Mohyla, Teofan Prokopovych and St. Dymytrii Rostovsky (Tuptalo), in the shaping of Russian Orthodoxy before and after Patriarch Nikon's reform, was so important and the Ukrainian impact on the theological doctrine of the Church so strong that the Russian Orthodox Church in its synodal period was considered as much the product of the Ukrainian religious tradition as of the Great Russian one.

In the course of the 19th century the stronger Russian Church consolidated its hold on Ukraine, hence the revolution of 1917 found Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy in different starting positions. In the second half of the 19th century the Russian Orthodox Church emerged as a powerful instrument of official Russification. The movement for Church reform that began with the outbreak of the 1905 revolution did not challenge the basis of ecclesiastical nationality policy. The government controlled the Holy Synod - the highest authority in the Church - continued to regard Ukrainians (Little Russians), along with Belarusians, as branches of an "all-Russian" people and rejected any attempts by non-Russian clergy to distinguish themselves in national terms.

The Ukrainian national movement, which first openly manifested itself within the Church at the beginning of the 20th century, was very weak and indecisive. Most of the Ukrainian-born Orthodox clergy shared the Little Russian identity and strengthened the "all-Russian" element within the Church. The Ukrainian national ideology spread first among the lower married clergy, which had little influence in Church affairs, and among seminarians. Although it is true that the Orthodox seminaries in Ukraine educated a number of prominent leaders of the Ukrainian national movement, including Symon Petliura and Volodymyr Chekhivsky, most of the alumni joined, not the religious, but the secular national movement. In this regard Ukraine was no exception to the general rule, as all the seminaries of imperial Russia produced secular revolutionaries on a massive scale.

In December 1917 a small group of Ukrainian-oriented clergy in Kyiv, led by Archbishop Oleksii Dorodnitsyn and military chaplain Oleksander Marychiv, founded the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council, which managed to get permission from Moscow to convoke the first All-Ukrainian Church Sobor. This was a major achievement for the young movement for the autocephaly (independence) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but, contrary to the expectations of its initiators, the All-Ukrainian Church Sobor was dominated by proponents of the "all-Russian" idea. It was only the intervention of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky that forced the Sobor to ask Moscow to grant autonomous status to the Ukrainian Church. This request was approved by Patriarch Tikhon in a matter of months, but subsequent attempts of the Hetman government to obtain autocephalous status for the Church were in vain.

The Ukrainian secular movement in the Russian Empire was strongly influenced by socialist ideology. Anticlerical sentiments among the leaders of the Central Rada and other Ukrainian governments, shared by such prominent politicians as Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, certainly played a negative role in the history of the autocephalist movement in Ukraine. To be sure, this was not the only reason for the weakness of the movement. Before the revolution of 1917, no Ukrainian translation of the Bible had been published in the Russian Empire, and, owing to the lack of translations of liturgical texts, the first Ukrainian liturgy was served in Kyiv by Archpriest Vasyl Lypkivsky only in the summer of 1919.

The autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was first proclaimed by a decree of the Ukrainian Directory in January 1919 and only then by the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council in May 1920. Both proclamations had a mainly symbolic character, as the overwhelming majority of the Orthodox parishes in Ukraine remained faithful to Moscow. During the revolution the Ukrainian Orthodox felt themselves more or less secure only on territory controlled by successive Ukrainian governments. The White governments, for their part, supported the Russian Orthodox Church, which used every seizure of power by the Whites to attack its opponents. Only in the case of the Soviets was a compromise with a non-Ukrainian government theoretically possible, and it was, in fact, temporarily achieved by the autocephalist movement.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy, unlike the Russian, initially benefited from Soviet religious policy. First of all, the official ideology of the new rulers was proclaimed to be "proletarian internationalism," not Russian nationalism as under the old regime. Secondly, the Bolsheviks not only eliminated state support for the Russian Orthodox Church, but also considered it their major enemy on the religious front. Lenin's decree on the separation of Church and state, issued in January 1918, was aimed first of all at the Russian Orthodox Church and was welcomed by all other Churches and religious denominations of the former empire.

The Bolsheviks not only registered the Ukrainian parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church as independent (including the parish at St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv), but also allowed the re-emergence of the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council, banned by the Whites. It was also under Soviet rule that in May 1920 the council proclaimed the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; in October 1921 the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UOAC) held its first Sobor in Kyiv.

The Soviets openly exploited the rival minor Churches to undermine the strength of Russian Orthodoxy, which was their most dangerous ideological enemy because of its close association with the tsarist regime and its anti-Bolshevik policies during the revolution. The Bolsheviks' main instrument in their attack on the Russian Orthodox (Patriarchal) Church was the small group of the leftist, reform-minded clergy that became known as the Living Church.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, as constituted at its first Sobor in 1921, was almost as leftist and "renovationist" as the Living and Renovationist Churches in Russia. It adopted many of the ideas initially promoted by the all-Russian movement for Church reform, including the most controversial one: the concept of a married episcopate. The active participation of laymen in the government of the Church and the prominent role played in its leadership by the former socialist premier of the Directory, Volodymyr Chekhivsky, resulted in the dominance in Church doctrine of the Ukrainian variant of Christian socialism.

Initially, in order to destroy the Patriarchal Church, the Bolsheviks supported as many schisms and autocephalies as possible. Once the Russian Orthodox Church had been weakened sufficiently to make the patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Sergii, announce complete surrender to the state in 1927, Soviet policy toward the autocephalous Churches changed dramatically. Now that the most powerful Church had become an obedient subject and tool of government policy, schisms and autocephalies were no longer considered useful, and the repressive organs of the state turned with utter brutality against its former allies.

In many respects the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church shared the fate of the Renovationist Church in Russia, the difference being that its clergy was persecuted more severely, not only on charges of religious, but also of nationalist propaganda.

Both Ukrainian national communism and Ukrainian Orthodoxy were tolerated by the regime in Moscow as long as Stalin needed their support or neutrality in the struggle with his main enemies - political rivals in the Central Party apparatus and the Patriarchal Church. Once the struggle on both fronts was over, the former allies and "fellow travelers" were ruthlessly eliminated. In Church policy, the new agenda was to bring under the control of the loyal Russian Orthodox leadership all its former flock, thereby establishing effective control over Orthodox believers throughout the country. The same tactics were used at the beginning of World War II in western Ukraine and western Belarus, where the autocephalous Orthodox eparchies were forcibly brought under Moscow's control.

The attack on the autocephalist movement in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s was so strong and effective that even during the German occupation of Ukraine, when the remnants of the persecuted Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church joined forces with the adherents of the autocephalist movement of western Ukraine, they were unable to gain control over the majority of Orthodox parishes in Ukraine. Instead, they became involved in rivalry with the Autonomous Orthodox Church, which remained faithful to the Moscow Patriarchate. This was in part the result of German policy [during the occupation], whose goal was to limit the activity of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church to select areas of Ukraine.

During World War II, the Soviet regime decided to formalize its new relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, allowing it to elect a patriarch and virtually transforming it into a department of the state. As under the old regime, the new deal promoted a Church-state partnership in the strengthening of Moscow's grip over the non-Russian regions of the country. In Ukraine, the most vivid example of Church-state cooperation in the post-war years was the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the subordination of its parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The act of "reunification" of the Greek Catholics with the Moscow Patriarchate was accomplished by the Lviv Church Sobor of 1946. At the Sobor the authorities once again, as in the 1920s, exploited Ukrainian nationalist ideas to be employed for the achievement of their current political goals. Participants in the Sobor praised Stalin for the "gathering" of Ukrainian lands, and the "reunification" of Ukrainian Catholics with the Orthodox Church was portrayed as a reunion of Galicians with their brothers in Dnipro Ukraine.

During World War II Stalin had managed to employ not only Russian nationalism, but also the nationalisms of the other peoples of the USSR in order to fight the Nazis. Ukraine was no exception, and the patriotic rhetoric of the Lviv Sobor was not entirely unusual for World War II Ukraine. What was unusual was that the authorities tolerated some manifestations of the Ukrainian religious tradition in western Ukraine long after the end of the war.

The constant threat from the clandestine Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church forced authorities to tolerate the distinctly Ukrainian character of the new Orthodox exarchies of western Ukraine. Manifestations of Ukrainian religious tradition in Church life were tolerated there as long as the parishes remained Orthodox. In order to please the new flock, the publication of the Church journal in the Ukrainian language was allowed in Lviv. The former archbishop of Lubny, Poltava and Myrhorod, Iosyp Oksiiuk, was allowed to serve as secretary to the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Lviv, his brother, Makarii Oksiiuk. The authorities attempted to employ the tradition of Ukrainian national Orthodoxy to keep the former Greek-Catholics in Moscow's embrace.

Although in the short run limited tolerance of the Ukrainian religious tradition in western Ukraine helped the regime achieve its goal, in the long run such tolerance resulted in the Ukrainization of a significant part of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. In the 1970s and 1980s Ukrainian Orthodox comprised approximately 60 percent of all Orthodox believers in the USSR, while some 60 percent of these resided in the five western oblasts of Ukraine. Most of the Greek-Catholic parishes that were brought under Moscow's complete control only in the late 1940s and early 1950s managed to survive Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign of the 1960s. The authorities simply feared that with the closure of Orthodox churches believers would go to the clandestine Greek-Catholic priests.

In 1989, with the Kremlin losing its grip on Ukraine and with the legalization of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the Galician parishes of the Orthodox Church gave birth to a new wave of the autocephalist movement in Ukraine. As in the 1920s and 1940s, the movement appeared unable to gain control over the majority of Orthodox parishes in Ukraine. The policy of Russification pursued by Communist Moscow in the non-Russian republics after World War II left the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church with few followers in highly Russified eastern and southern Ukraine.

Regarding Ukrainian national identity, one should recognize that while the authorities temporarily tolerated some limited manifestations of the Ukrainian religious tradition, they never allowed the Ukrainian autocephalist movement to challenge the foundations of the Moscow Patriarchate's rule in Ukraine. With the victory of Russian national communism in the USSR in the 1930s, the national liberalism of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s necessarily gave way to Russian nationalist policies.

Beginning in the late 1930s the Soviet state openly made use of the Russian Orthodox Church to combat all manifestations of the Ukrainian religious and cultural tradition. Such a policy helped the Russian Orthodox Church to preserve, through the long decades of Soviet rule, its old imperial view of Ukraine and Ukrainians as a branch of the Russian people. After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Orthodox Church appeared to be the only "all-union" institution that preserved Moscow's grip over a huge number of its non-Russian subjects. In Ukraine it also managed to split the weak autocephalist movement and to revive the Russophile traditions of its pre-revolutionary centers, such as Kyivan Monastery of the Caves, and the Pochaiv monastery in Volhynia.

The concept of "Holy Rus'," the imagined community of the Orthodox Slavic peoples based on the religious tradition of Kyiv, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and created with the active participation of Ukrainian clerics, seems alive and well today on the ruins of both the Russian Empire and the Russia-led Soviet Union.

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