Galician Catholics into Soviet Orthodox: religion and postwar Ukraine

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.