Authors

Kateryna Budz¹;  ¹ University of Edinburgh, UK

Discussion

Eastern Galicia, a region in the West of Ukraine, used to be a periphery of different political entities. Constituting the eastern borderland of the Habsburg monarchy between 1772-1918 and of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period, it became the western borderland of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. As a result of the war, Eastern Galicia, once populated by Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, lost its multicultural character and became predominantly Ukrainian. The Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia was presented as a national, social and religious ‘liberation’ from the ‘Polish yoke’. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), a Byzantine-rite Church in union with Rome, was also declared to be a remnant of the alleged colonial past. At the pseudo-council of Lviv (1946), the Soviet regime outlawed the UGCC in the region by forcefully merging her with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The scholars usually view the abolition of the UGCC in the context of the Soviet religious and nationalities policies. Yet many contemporaries, both among the Ukrainian nationalists and the Greek Catholic clergy, viewed the Soviet attempt to bring the Ukrainian Church under Moscow as an act of colonialism. Interestingly enough, Fr Havryil Kostelnyk, a Greek Catholic priest who officially led the ‘reunion’ campaign, nonetheless viewed the Russian Orthodoxy through the oriental lens, perceiving it as backward. So, colonial framework may serve as an important tool to study the religious landscape in the Soviet-ruled Galicia. Similar to the Russian tsarist regime, the Soviets used the ROC as an instrument of colonial power to homogenise the religious life in the newly annexed territories. However, despite several decades of the official ban, the UGCC re-emerged from the ‘catacombs’ in 1989-1990.