Turning the pages back... October 25, 1949 (10/21/01)

Turning the pages back...

October 25, 1949

Fifty-two years ago, as Stalin's regime reasserted control over western Ukraine, prior to the death of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky in November 1944, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church saw a few months of nervous truce with the returned occupiers. Later that month, its new primate, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, issued a pastoral letter condemning inter-ethnic and fratricidal assassinations carried out by the nationalist underground.

Until March 1945, it appeared that the Soviets still sought to neutralize opposition to their occupation via the Church, but when negotiations with the OUN-UPA produced little other than nationalist reprisals against the clergy (and, more importantly, after the Yalta Conference in February ratified Soviet seizure of territories claimed by the Polish government-in-exile), Moscow decided that the way to direct action was now fully open.

Yaroslav Halan was a Galician-born (on July 27, 1902) pro-Soviet scribe who, when not writing socialist-realist plays and short stories, had been defaming Ukrainians of differing political stripe since the mid 1920s. When the Nazis invaded in June 1941, Halan was vacationing in Crimea. By August he was in Moscow begging off service at the front ("the pains in my leg grow ever worse"), and then spent the war as a radio and press propagandist.

He returned to Lviv in the spring of 1945, and on April 5 of that year, under the pseudonym Volodymyr Rosovych, he fired the first salvo in the Stalinist media's war against the UGCC, an article titled "Z Khrestom Chy z Nozhem" (With Cross or Knife?), smearing Sheptytsky and the clergy of his Church as Nazi collaborators. Within a week virtually the entire UGCC hierarchy, Slipyj included, had been imprisoned. In November Halan travelled to Nuremberg to cover the war crimes trials.

When he returned to Lviv, he wrote plays with such sunny titles as "Pid Zolotym Orlom" (Under the Golden Eagle) and "Liubov na Svitanni" (Love at Dawn), but kept up his journalistic polemics with contributions such as "Shcho take Uniya?" (What is the Uniate Church?), "Na Sluzhbi u Satany" (In the Service of Satan) and "Pliuyu na Papu" (I Spit on the Pope).

On the morning of October 25, 1949, Ilariy Lukashevych, son of a UGCC priest who had gone along with the "reunification" of the Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Churches, and Mykhailo Stakhur, a rank-and-filed OUN member, came to Halan's apartment, on the pretext that Halan would help Lukashevych gain admission to a forestry college. Stakhur hit Halan 11 times with an axe, and the pair fled.

According to the late Prof. Bohdan Bociurkiw, a political scentist among whose fields of specialty was Soviet religious policy, "It took the NKGB until June 1951 to uncover and arrest the assassins using a locally recruited agent who had infiltrated the underground [as it turns out - Bohdan Stashynsky, who later himself assassinated Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet]. During a major show trial presided over by the procurator general of the Ukrainian SSR, Roman Rudenko... [the killers] were both presented as being inspired by the Vatican." They were both sentenced to death and executed. Lukashevych's father was fingered as the mastermind of the plot and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor.

Sources: Bohdan Bociurkiw, "The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the Soviet State" (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996); "Halan, Yaroslav," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Yaroslav Halan, "Lest the People Forget" (Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1986); Hryhoriy Kulinych, "Yaroslav Halan" (Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1977).

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