Life on the Margins: The Clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholic Clergy in the Soviet Union (1946–89)

Abstract

During the Second World War, the West Ukrainian region of Eastern Galicia came under Soviet rule. In 1946, the Stalinist regime banned the church of most Ukrainians in the region, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), by ‘reuniting’ it with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Whereas most Greek Catholic clergymen joined the ROC under state pressure, the opponents of ‘reunion’ endured arrests and other forms of persecution. The church of several million believers became a persecuted religious minority on the margins of Soviet society. Upon their return from the Gulag in the mid-1950s, the ‘non-reunited’ Greek Catholic priests usually encountered numerous bureaucratic obstacles when trying to settle down and secure their livelihoods. Based on archival and oral history material, this article focuses on the clandestine clergy’s experiences of social marginalization.

In January 1980, a group of Ukrainian Greek Catholics from the village of Mshana in Western Ukraine wrote a document entitled ‘The Life of the Ukrainian Catholic Church’, which eventually reached its intended audience in the West. ¹ The letter began with a brief description of how the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had been banned in the Soviet Union, from the arrests of the hierarchy in April 1945 to the illegal ‘L’viv sobor’ in March 1946. ² By declaring the ‘reunification’ of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church, the Lviv pseudo-council signified the official liquidation of the UGCC. ³ Despite the fact that this pseudo-council declared ‘the return of the Ukrainian people to the bosom of the Orthodox Church’, wrote the authors of the document, some of the married clergy refused to repudiate the pope and endured state persecution as a result. ⁴ The document then outlined the situation of the recalcitrant clergy at the time when it was written:

The priests of the Ukrainian Catholic Church – both those who returned from exile and the newly ordained, who acquired the necessary knowledge and wisdom in conspiratorial conditions, all of them, to this day, have no official registration to carry out pastoral work. However, all are ‘registered’ for persecution. For carrying out any aspect of pastoral work – confession, burial, etc., a priest is fined 50 roubles every time (at a time when the average monthly wage is approximately 70–90 roubles), and he is threatened with a prison sentence of seven years for carrying out pastoral work. For example, a priest named Dydych was fined 50 roubles three times for conducting burials. From time to time every priest is called to the office of religious affairs … and is ordered to sign a document stating that he will not carry out any pastoral work. Of course such a priest will never sign, but because of this he is punished: some lose their residence permits, some are fined or dismissed from work. Moreover, all priests who are not of pensionable age have to work somewhere in a government institution. The majority work as watchmen, stokers, yard-keepers or odd-job men. ⁵

Indeed, after March 1946, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church became a persecuted religious minority, with no legal status. The believers from Mshana captured this marginalization in their collective letter: ‘We, Ukrainian Catholics have no rights. We do not exist in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that article 52 of the new Constitution of the USSR guarantees citizens of the USSR the right to profess any religion and to perform religious worship.’ ⁶

This article explores how the clergy of this supposedly ‘non-existent’ church described their experiences of social marginalization, that is, state discrimination based on their refusal to ‘reunite’, and navigated the challenges of life in Soviet society. It draws on both official Soviet documents and sources produced by the members of the Greek Catholic underground. Often contradicting each other, these two types of historical evidence contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of what it meant to be a clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest in the Soviet Union.

The Liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Galicia

The idea of a ‘return’ to Orthodoxy, declared by the Lviv pseudo-council in March 1946, referred to the foundation of the Greek Catholic Church at the Union of Brest in 1596. At that time, some Orthodox bishops of the Kyiv metropolis in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth switched allegiance from Constantinople to Rome. The Uniate Church, as it was then known, accepted Catholic dogmas but retained the specifics of the Eastern church, such as the Byzantine (‘Greek’) rite, married clergy and the Julian calendar.

As a result of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, the territories with a Uniate presence were divided between the Roman Catholic Austrian empire and the Orthodox Russian empire. The church thrived under the Habsburgs, but was abolished by the Romanovs. The Russian tsars liquidated the Uniate Church in three steps: in 1795, 1839 and 1875. ⁷ Most notably, the Council of Polotsk (1839) under Tsar Nicholas I declared the ‘reunification’ of the Uniate Church with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Following the demise of Austria-Hungary and a short period of Ukrainian statehood in 1918–19, the Council of Ambassadors of the Entente officially recognized Polish claims to the territory of Eastern Galicia in March 1923. During the inter-war period, the region constituted the easternmost part of the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, the Red Army entered Eastern Galicia under the slogan of ‘liberation’. A period of German occupation followed, from 1941 to 1944, during which the church was allowed to operate and received back the property confiscated earlier by the Soviets. In summer 1944, however, the Soviets regained control of the region, which remained a part of the USSR until 1991. Soon after their return to power, the Soviet authorities started the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church that united most Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia. As of 1938, the UGCC in Galicia, which consisted of the Lviv archeparchy, Stanyslaviv eparchy, Peremyshl eparchy and the apostolic administration of Lemkivshchyna, had 2,387 parishes, 2,352 eparchial and 143 monastic clergy, namely Basilians, Redemptorists and Studites. ⁸ In 1943, the number of believers was estimated at 3.6 million. ⁹

The UGCC presented a hindrance to Soviet plans for the smooth integration of the newly annexed territories: Kathryn David views the abolition of the church as ‘part of the process of making Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians’. ¹⁰ In Soviet Ukraine, the church was liquidated through the forced merger with the Russian Orthodox Church, first in Eastern Galicia (1946) and then in Transcarpathia (1949). ¹¹ Greek Catholics were also forced into Orthodoxy in such Eastern bloc countries as Romania (1948) and Czechoslovakia (1950).

The abolition of the UGCC in Galicia, which culminated in the Lviv pseudo-council of March 1946, was thoroughly planned. In April 1945, the Soviets launched a defamation campaign against the UGCC in Galicia, arresting the head of the church, Metropolitan Iosyf Slipyi, and other hierarchs who had remained in Soviet territory. A Greek Catholic priest, Havryil Kostelnyk, who was known for his anti-Vatican views, became the head of the newly created Initiative Group for the reunification of the Greek Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church. In cooperation with the Soviet security organs, Fr Kostelnyk conducted a ‘reunion’ campaign, convincing many clergy to join the Initiative Group. As of March 1946, 997 out of 1,270 Greek Catholic priests present in Galicia had joined the group. ¹² At the same time, in early September 1946, 191 priests remained in opposition. ¹³ The Greek Catholic priests who refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church often endured long sentences in the Soviet labour camps.

The process of the liquidation of the UGCC has received a significant amount of scholarly attention, with a major focus on the Soviet state’s repressive policy towards the church. ¹⁴ Some scholars have also dealt with the personal experiences of Greek Catholic clergy during the period of the post-war abolition of the UGCC. Thus, historian Svitlana Hurkina studied the fates of the Greek Catholic clergy of the Lviv archeparchy, looking at their convictions and their attitudes towards the Soviet state. ¹⁵ Nataliia Dmytryshyn compared the strategies of survival in Soviet society of four generations of underground Greek Catholic clergy. ¹⁶ This article explores the social marginalization of the ‘non-reunited’ Greek Catholic clergy compared to the pre-Soviet era. It demonstrates that a key reason why the Soviet regime specifically targeted clandestine clergy lay in their refusal to follow the state scenario of forced Orthodoxization. Convinced that they had made the right choice, many clandestine clergy endured state pressure and learned to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles that complicated both their pastoral work and their personal lives. Paradoxically, the illegal status of the clandestine clergy often allowed them to evade the control of the Soviet authorities, even if only for a short period of time. The fact that Greek Catholics consistently protested against the ban of the UGCC in the Soviet Union ensured the church’s survival underground for more than four decades, until its legalization in 1989–90.

Obtaining a Residence Permit

As shown by David Shearer, under Stalin, passport and residency laws, which had initially aimed at controlling migration, were used ‘to identify and exclude from strategic regions large numbers of populations considered socially or ethnically dangerous’. ¹⁷ In the five years that followed the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953, four million Gulag detainees were released, so that by 1960 the number of inmates was around one fifth of that in the time before the death of the Soviet leader. ¹⁸ As pointed out by Miriam Dobson, all former Gulag prisoners experienced problems in terms of accommodation and employment, with many being ‘forced into a nomadic existence’. ¹⁹

Among those released were several hundred Greek Catholic priests. ²⁰ Upon their return to Ukraine, these clergymen faced numerous bureaucratic obstacles, particularly with regard to obtaining a residence permit and employment. Thus, Fr Vasyl Kulynych (1893–1981), who was released in 1954, lived for several years in various settlements of Lviv Oblast. However, in January 1957, he was ordered to leave Western Ukraine. The priest stayed for some time in Zaporizhzhia Oblast in south-eastern Ukraine, before moving in August 1958 to Khmelnytskyi Oblast in the west, where his daughter Lidia was working after graduating from a medical university. Then, in 1959, Fr Vasyl was able to return to Galicia with his daughter, having received a residence permit in Zhovkva (Lviv Oblast) through an acquaintance. ²¹

Upon their return from exile in 1959, Fr Ivan Hrynchyshyn’s family also experienced multiple problems with accommodation. Fr Ivan and his wife, Sofia, were not given back their house and were denied residence permits in Lviv; consequently, they moved in with Sofia’s parents in Drohobych (Lviv Oblast). Although Sofia’s father granted her the ownership of the house, she nonetheless did not receive the desired registration. Despite Sofia’s numerous appeals to the Soviet authorities, including the militia and the first secretary of the city’s executive committee, the Hrynchyshyns were forced to pay regular fines for not having residence permits. After they were evicted in the early 1960s, Fr Ivan Hrynchyshyn left for Vinnytsia Oblast, while his wife went to the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow, where she managed to arrange an appointment with General Barsukov. However, even the latter’s intervention did not bring the desired result, which Sofia Hrynchyshyn attributed to the prejudice of the USSR Prosecutor General Roman Rudenko against her as a priest’s wife. Eventually, she managed to obtain a residence permit thanks to the intervention of the ‘chief of the KGB’. ²²

Many other former detainees experienced problems with residence permits and, consequently, with employment throughout the Soviet period. As shown by a 1978 document entitled ‘The denial of the right to work and the right to housing on political grounds’, compiled by the Moscow human rights activists of the Helsinki group, prisoners of conscience, among others, commonly faced this type of discrimination upon their release. ²³ The clandestine Greek Catholic priests were no exception. For example, the 1984 issue of the samizdat ‘Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine’ informed readers about the imminent danger of Fr Mykhailo Vynnytskyi’s fourth arrest. Having returned to Lviv in early 1983, the priest, who together with a group of monks co-owned a house in the city, was denied a residence permit in June 1984. As a result, he lost his job as a stoker at the children’s home where he had worked for more than a year. ²⁴ Eventually, Fr Vynnytskyi was once again arrested. Over the course of his life, Fr Mykhailo Vynnytskyi (1926–2006), who had joined the Redemptorists in 1944 and been ordained priest in 1956, spent in total about twenty years in different places of detention: 1950–6, 1964–6, 1975–83 and 1985–7. ²⁵

It was not only former detainees who had difficulties with their registration, however. Fr Iosaphat Kavatsiv (1934–2010) attributed his numerous discharges from his place of residence to his active priestly work in the underground. In order to resolve the issue of his residence permit, the priest travelled to Moscow seven times and wrote twenty-four complaints to different levels of the Soviet authorities. However, it was only after Fr Kavatsiv’s article appeared in the newspaper Izvestia that the prosecutor of the Horodok Raion (that is, district) of Lviv Oblast considered his case. The priest then managed to obtain a residence permit through informal networks. ²⁶

Like former detainees and dissidents in general, the Greek Catholic clergy thus found it difficult to settle in Galicia, especially in the cities. Yet they often managed to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the Soviet state by petitioning the political authorities or through resorting to informal networks.

The Economic Situation of the Clergy

In December 1956, the plenipotentiary of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs (CROCA) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Hryhorii Korchevyi, reported that 426 Greek Catholic priests were present in Western Ukraine and Transcarpathia, 267 of whom had spent time in detention. In the four Western Ukrainian oblasts, those of Lviv, Stanislav, Drohobych and Ternopil, there were 308 ‘non-reunited’ priests, among them 177 former detainees. ²⁷ In his report, Korchevyi provided an evaluation of the situation of the Greek Catholic clergy:

In their general education and religious training, almost all of these priests are fairly well-educated people and enjoy influence among a part of the believers in the Western Oblasts. In Lviv Oblast, almost half the Uniate priests live in Lviv without any particular occupation. In Stanislav oblast, most of the Uniate priests live in the cities of Stanislav and Kolomyia. About half of the Uniate priests are employed. Half of them live with relatives and work nowhere. According to the data of the Council’s plenipotentiaries, a significant part of the employed and almost all the unemployed Uniate priests live well, are well-dressed and well-nourished. The source of their livelihood is the money received for performing services for the believing population both in the cities and in the periphery, as well as from the donations of believers. ²⁸

Korchevyi’s description gives the impression that the ‘non-reunited’ clergy were well-educated urban residents who enjoyed a respectable lifestyle, with good food and nice clothes. Moreover, the Soviet official’s account suggests that half the priests did not need Soviet jobs in order to sustain a proper standard of living. Apart from the numbers of former detainees provided in the table, the republican plenipotentiary made no mention of the priests’ recent experience in the Gulag. Nor did Korchevyi’s narrative relate the high level of unemployment among the priests to their ‘criminal’ past.

In reality, however, it was generally difficult for priests to find a job in the 1950s, for example, in Lviv, due to new documentation requirements, such as passport and proof of registration. These apparently aimed to reduce the flow of rural population to the cities. ²⁹ However, it also meant that priests who had previously been convicted and who struggled to obtain a residence permit had little chance of being employed in Soviet institutions. As highlighted by the regional CROCA plenipotentiary, P. Bibik, in his report for the second half of 1956, only twelve out of eighty-three ‘non-reunited’ Greek Catholic priests in Stanislav Oblast worked ‘in institutions, organizations, and enterprises’; the rest lived from conducting religious services in unregistered churches, houses and elsewhere. ³⁰ It is particularly revealing that none of the twelve employed clergymen had been prosecuted or detained. ³¹

The economic well-being of the Greek Catholic clergy in the Soviet Union differed significantly from their situation in the pre-Soviet era. In the inter-war Second Polish Republic, Greek Catholic priests usually relied on several sources of income. They received a salary from the Polish state, which was also regulated by the Concordat of 1925. ³² Even though a Catholic priest’s salary was typically lower than that of a teacher, the clergy had additional sources of income at their disposal. For example, a Greek Catholic parish priest had on average fifty-two hectares of benefice lands. ³³ Moreover, the clergyman received sacramental fees from the faithful, even though in the aftermath of the First World War these did not amount to much. ³⁴ Additional sources of income in inter-war Poland could include, among others, state payments for teaching catechism and income from the lease of parish land. ³⁵

The arrival and seizure of power by the Soviets in September 1939 changed this status quo. A professor of theology who contributed to Milena Rudnytska’s compilation of testimonies about Soviet rule in Western Ukraine during 1939–41, reveals in his memoir that Greek Catholic priests were evicted from their parish houses and that church lands were first divided among the peasants and then collectivized. ³⁶ Regarded as a ‘non-working element’, the clergy also had to pay disproportionately high levels of tax. Greek Catholic believers often helped to relieve the clergy’s tax burden by contributing money to pay a church tax or providing a priest with a share of their crops. The anti-religious drive of the new regime also resulted in arrests, deportations and death sentences for priests. ³⁷

During the so-called ‘reunion’ campaign of 1945–6, in contrast to the first Soviet occupation of Galicia, the Soviets did not treat all clergy as enemies of the regime. Specifically, those Greek Catholic clergy who agreed to join the Russian Orthodox Church were considered loyal, at least initially. These ‘reunited’ priests retained their former parishes, thus securing their livelihoods. However, in the mid-1950s, the economic status of the ‘reunited’ clergy was undermined by the ‘non-reunited’ clergy who returned from the Gulag. This caused numerous conflicts on a local level, for many religious communities preferred ‘non-reunited’ priests, who had an aura of martyrdom, to ‘reunited’ ones. ³⁸ According to the CROCA plenipotentiary in Stanislav Oblast, Bibik, ‘non-reunited’ clergy conducted religious services ‘at believers’ houses and sometimes near the churches or even in unregistered churches’. ³⁹

Since the UGCC had been banned under Stalin, many hoped that following his death the church would be restored. Greek Catholics also closely observed international political developments. In 1956, a clandestine priest called Iakiv Biloskurskyi from Mshana (Ivano-Frankivskyi Raion, Lviv Oblast) abandoned his initial plan to get a job at a shoe factory, allegedly arguing before the ‘reunited’ priest Vanchytskyi that ‘events in Hungary and Egypt would help to resolve the question about the Greek Catholic Church more quickly’. ⁴⁰ A 1950 state security document had mentioned Fr Biloskurskyi’s arrest. ⁴¹ Thus, in 1956, the priest must have been considering a job after his recent release. In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), the release of Metropolitan Slipyi in 1963 and the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 all raised new expectations. However, Greek Catholics’ hopes for legalization of their church remained unfulfilled until the late 1980s. Clandestine priests therefore had to resort to a broad array of survival strategies, including support from relatives, donations and state employment.

In his 1993 interview, Fr Volodymyr Senkivskyi (1908–2002) noted a slow improvement in his family’s financial well-being after his release in 1956: ‘When I came from Siberia, it was very hard at first. We had no money, we struggled for a long time. And later, the material situation improved a little bit, and we were living the way we do now’. ⁴²

Donations from other clergy and from believers seem to have played a crucial role, especially during the initial phase after the release of the Gulag returnees. The CROCA plenipotentiary of the Ukrainian SSR, Hryhorii Pinchuk, reported in August 1958 that in the regions of Transcarpathia, Drohobych and Lviv, the Roman Catholic clergy provided ‘moral and material support’ to their Greek Catholic counterparts. ⁴³ Latin-rite clergy supported clandestine priests in Ukraine by giving them intention cards: believers’ requests, typically accompanied by small donations, to celebrate a liturgy for a particular intention. ⁴⁴ Due to this support, Fr Mykola Simkailo (b. 1952) was able to pay his colleagues at a fire station to cover his shifts, allowing the priest more time for his religious activities. ⁴⁵

Direct donations from believers were also common. According to Fr Damian (Hryhorii) Bohun, the number of intention cards was so great that some of them had to be sent abroad. While the clergy who received the cards said the masses, the clandestine priests kept the donations which came with those cards. ⁴⁶ An interesting donation was reported by the CRA in 1981: S. Bartkiv from the village of Pyliava (Buchach Raion, Ternopil Oblast) handed over to M. Simkailo the Niva car which she had received in 1979 for being a ‘leading worker on a collective farm’. ⁴⁷ Siegelbaum’s study shows that, even though the number of car owners increased during the Brezhnev era (1964–82), in 1980, only ten per cent of Soviet households owned a private car. ⁴⁸ A 1983 survey showed a disproportionately high number of car owners among the intelligentsia (fifty-eight per cent) compared to workers (thirty-five per cent), especially given that the former constituted only fifteen per cent of the 1979 Soviet population. ⁴⁹ Moreover, to purchase a car required on average eight years of savings. ⁵⁰ Due to this generous donation, Fr Simkailo joined the small group of car owners in the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, a priest of the outlawed church thus drove a car that had been presented by the state to someone for their great contribution to the socialist economy.

As a priest of the younger generation, Fr Simkailo had a secular job. Overall, however, some state reports suggest that less than half of the ‘non-reunited’ clergy were officially employed. According to the CRA information, as of 1971, fifty-eight Greek Catholic priests lived in Ivano-Frankivsk (formerly Stanislav) Oblast. Of these, twenty-three were employed, twenty-six were not working ‘due to old age and illness’, four lived off their pensions, and the remaining five relied on the support of their ‘relatives and children’. ⁵¹ As these data suggest, only a few ‘non-reunited’ priests had state pensions. The report provides no information on how the twenty-six priests who were too old or too ill to work survived.

The number of employed clergymen decreased over time. According to CRA information, in 1977, forty out of forty-nine ‘non-reunited’ Greek Catholic priests in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast were sixty-one years old or older, that is, of pensionable age, which was sixty for men. Of these forty-nine, eleven were employed and eleven received pensions, while the remaining twenty-seven were ‘dependent on relatives’. ⁵² The comparison of data on age and employment suggests that, as of 1977, less than one third of Greek Catholic priests aged above sixty received state pensions, with at least two priests of retirement age still working. The very low number of priests relying on state pensions may suggest that they had not had access to stable state jobs, and this may, in turn, have been related to earlier periods of detention. Indeed, just over half of the priests of which CRA was aware in 1977 (twenty-five out of forty-nine) had experienced a period of imprisonment and were consequently deemed to have a criminal record. ⁵³ Even if their age and health allowed them to work, these priests often struggled to find jobs and were thus dependent on their relatives’ support. Moreover, not all priests had children: ten of them – just over one fifth – were monks. ⁵⁴ As evidence from an earlier period suggests, ordained monks could receive much-needed support from clandestine nuns. Thus, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate in Kalush (Stanislav Oblast) cared for a Basilian monk, Fr Metodii Boletskyi (1910–53), after his release from Stanislav prison due to health problems, and until his premature death. ⁵⁵ They then hosted another Basilian priest for about a year, a Gulag returnee, Fr Demian Bohun (1910–2008), who arrived in Kalush a few days after Fr Boletskyi died. ⁵⁶

State-Employment of Clandestine Priests

Overall, the Soviet authorities wanted priests to leave their pastoral activities and to embrace civil jobs. However, secular employment did not necessarily help the Greek Catholic priests to avoid repression. Before his arrest in October 1949, Hryhorii Balahurak, a Basilian monk who also acted as a clandestine bishop, worked as a mechanic at an industrial cooperative or artel in Stanislav. ⁵⁷ Frs Ivan Valnytskyi and Avksentii Kinashchuk, who were arrested at about the same time, also had secular jobs in Stanislav: the former worked as an accountant at the city communal enterprise (gorkommunkhoz), while the latter was employed as a security guard at a tuberculosis sanatorium. ⁵⁸

During the post-Stalin era, Greek Catholic priests of working age who did not wish to serve in official Orthodox parishes also had to look for civil jobs. According to Soviet legislation, people who were unemployed for more than three months were considered ‘parasites’. ⁵⁹ As a punishment, they could be banished or assigned correctional labour for a period of two to five years. ⁶⁰ In order to avoid possible accusations of ‘parasitism’, the ‘non-reunited’ clergy of working age had to look for state jobs. Despite being highly educated, clandestine bishops and active priests usually occupied low-qualified positions in Soviet institutions. Fr Volodymyr Sterniuk (a clandestine bishop from 1964) completed training to work as a paramedic on an ambulance in Lviv. ⁶¹ These studies lasted for about four years, between 1955 and 1959. ⁶² He retired from this job in 1967 and became head of the underground UGCC in 1972. ⁶³ According to Fr Pavlo Vasylyk, who became a clandestine bishop on 1 May 1974, the new dignity did not grant him any privileges. ⁶⁴ Having been employed as a collector of medicinal herbs for twenty-three years, Bishop Vasylyk used his work as an excuse to travel and to serve Greek Catholic communities all over Galicia and beyond. ⁶⁵ Similarly, Fr Mykhailo Sabryha, a priest since 1974 and a bishop since 1986, worked at a bookshop for fifteen years, until he left this job in late 1989. ⁶⁶ In Bishop Mykhailo Sabryha’s words, it was ‘God’s mercy’ that he was able to work in one place for such a long period. ⁶⁷ As pointed out by Fr Kavatsiv, Greek Catholic priests often faced dismissals from work. ⁶⁸

Fr Mykhailo Havryliv’s story illustrates how difficult it was for a Greek Catholic priest to find and keep a stable state job. A native of Galicia, Mykhailo Havryliv (b. 1949) studied at the Orthodox theological academy in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and became an Orthodox priest in 1975. In December 1979, after serving for two years in Orthodox parishes in Galicia, Fr Havryliv left the Orthodox Church to join the clandestine UGCC. He then struggled to find a secular job. After two months, he was able, through personal connections, to find work as a disinfection technician. He stayed in that job for one year, later working as an electrician (for six months), a janitor (for three years), a hospital attendant (for six months), a manual labourer (for one month), a locksmith (for six months) and, finally, as a boiler operator or stoker. ⁶⁹

On the one hand, civil employment helped the priests to avoid arrests for ‘parasitism’. On the other hand, state jobs left them with less time for pastoral activities. Overall, combining pastoral duties and full employment was a burdensome task. Fr Kavatsiv, for example, would usually hear confessions, conduct burials, baptize and perform other services nocturnally: ‘This was done at night, and at 9 o’clock in the morning, wherever you were, you had to be at work’. ⁷⁰ Leading a double life, as a clandestine priest by night and as a Soviet employee by day, required the utmost secrecy and measures of concealment.

State Attempts to Undermine the Reputations of Clandestine Clergy

While the state apparatus had a wide array of legal measures to curtail the activities of the ‘non-reunited’ priests, including fines, arrests and deportations, they also understood the need to undermine the clandestine clergy’s moral authority. The flock admired their pastors precisely for their high moral values, so these came particularly under Soviet attack.

The representation of the Greek Catholic clergy as an ‘anti-Soviet’ element continued throughout the Soviet era. In the late 1980s, in their memorandum to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR, a group of clandestine bishops and priests pleading for legalization described the ‘bigoted propagandist war’ that had been waged against their church for the previous forty years. ⁷¹ In particular, the Greek Catholic clergy found themselves labelled as ‘“slanderers” against reality’, ‘anti-Soviet’ and ‘nationalist-extremists’. ⁷²

Active clandestine priests were frequently slandered in the Soviet press. For example, an article which appeared in the Soviet Ukrainian newspaper Vil’na Ukraina in February 1988, began with the following sentence: ‘Living in Lviv without a residence permit, Mykhailo Havryliv considers himself to be one of the holy fathers of the so-called Ukrainian Catholic Church (UCC)’. ⁷³ The article mentioned that, during the second half of 1987, Radio Liberty had broadcast a series of programmes about the priest based on a memoir he had sent to the West. ⁷⁴ The article speculated on Fr Havryliv’s motives, which they proposed might be his vanity, his wish to receive a honorarium, or his obedience to the instructions of the Basilian priests. The author also described the priest as hypocritical, since he continued to study at the Orthodox academy despite ‘being a “convinced” Catholic’. ⁷⁵

After Fr Havryliv’s autobiography was published in Rome in 1987, he became a well-known figure outside the USSR. Western observers monitored instances of state retaliation for Fr Havryliv’s priestly activities. ⁷⁶ For instance, following the Chornobyl nuclear disaster (26 April 1986), Fr Havryliv was made to dispose of radioactive waste without appropriate protective gear. ⁷⁷ Later, as reported by the Ukrainian Weekly on 4 October 1987, Fr Havryliv received a draft notice to fight in Afghanistan. ⁷⁸

Another important figure who came under press attack was the clandestine bishop Pavlo Vasylyk. Following an open-air celebration of the Greek Catholic liturgy on 17 July 1988 in Zarvanytsia, the Marian shrine in Ternopil Oblast, on 6 August the local newspaper Peremoha published a hostile article on him. A month later, on 10 September, the same article was reprinted in another local newspaper, Nadzbruchanska Pravda. The author suggested that the bishop might have had a ‘material and political interest’ in the legalization of the church, also mentioning Vasylyk’s two previous arrests ‘for nationalist and anti-Soviet activities and for violation of the legislation on religious cults’. ⁷⁹

By attacking the most active Greek Catholic clergy, Soviet propaganda sought to compromise the legalization movement as a whole. By making allegations about the priests’ supposed vanity, lust for money and hypocrisy, the Soviets tried to undermine the image of the clandestine priest as a highly moral person.

Apart from official Soviet propaganda, the state security organs tried to sow distrust among church members, both before and after the official liquidation of the UGCC. Resorting to the ancient strategy of divide and rule, security police skilfully used existing conflicts within the church. Thus, already during 1939–41, the Bolsheviks manipulated longstanding tensions amongst the Greek Catholic clergy, for example, between the adherents of Eastern and Western orientations, with an aim to ‘disintegrate’ the church. ⁸⁰ Later, through their agent Mykola Muranyi, the state security organs tried to sever links between the Greek Catholics in Transcarpathia, where Muranyi acted as a clandestine Greek Catholic bishop, and Galicia. ⁸¹ Generally, rumours about some church figure being a Soviet state security agent created an atmosphere of suspicion in the underground church. For example, when the KGB summoned some clandestine priests and not others, it automatically cast doubts on the latter. ⁸² This artificially-created distrust led to the further marginalization of the clergy, now within the clandestine community itself.

Religious Inspiration of Resistance

Facing persecution and deprivation, clandestine Greek Catholics nonetheless believed that they were suffering for a just cause. With his pastoral letter ‘Peace in Christ to the lost priests’ (1953), Metropolitan Iosyf Slipyi rebuked the Greek Catholic clergy who had joined the Russian Orthodox Church: ‘You have lost the right of priesthood, jurisdictions, all the honours and offices that you held in the Catholic Church. You were light, salt, and today you are the dung of the Gospel (Matt 5: 13). You have become springs without water and clouds driven by a snowstorm, for whom the gloom of darkness is preserved /2 Pet 2.17/’. ⁸³ The head of the UGCC then contrasted this with the example of the ‘current sufferers’, many of whom have already received ‘a well-deserved crown of heavenly glory’. ⁸⁴ Metropolitan Slipyi concluded his letter with a plea to the ‘reunited’ priests to return to the Greek Catholic Church. ⁸⁵ Having spent about eighteen years in detention, from 1945 to 1963, Slipyi was and is generally recognized by the Ukrainian Greek Catholics as a confessor of the faith.

As Slipyi’s letter implies, the clandestine priests generally juxtaposed their status as social outcasts and their inner sense of dignity. According to Bishop Mykhailo Sabryha, the clergy of the underground UGCC ‘were mocked, [and] they were considered nothing, but they were proud to be Catholic priests’. ⁸⁶ The hierarch’s phrasing is reminiscent of the prophecy of Isaiah (53: 3):

He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

The self-perception of these Greek Catholic priests as sufferers for Christ was also shared by clandestine believers. Fr Mykhailo Havryliv, for example, contrasted the different attitudes of the Greek Catholics and the Orthodox to their clergy, arguing that Greek Catholic believers realized that a clandestine priest operating in secret faced the constant risk of arrest and thus held him in high esteem. ⁸⁷ In contrast, Orthodox parishioners allegedly viewed the priest as ‘an executor of their will’:

The priest is completely dependent on the church committee, and if he wants to break free from this power of the secular element, anonymous letters, denunciations, slander, quarrels begin; everything ends with the intervention of the village council or raion executive committee, and either the priest is expelled or the church committee is re-elected – it all depends on who has more weight with the atheists, or rather the KGB. ⁸⁸

The clergy of the underground UGCC often perceived their afflictions as a sacrifice necessary for the survival of the church and of the Ukrainian people. Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk, who endured three arrests, spending a total of fourteen years in detention and banishment, stressed how many Ukrainian Greek Catholics ‘were imprisoned for this great matter of struggle for the freedom of our people and Church’. ⁸⁹ Similarly, in his memoir, Bishop Vasylyk wrote about ‘a people who sacrificed itself for the sake of a Christian and national idea’. ⁹⁰ The hierarch referred to Ukrainians as to ‘God-loving people, chosen by the Lord for suffering’. ⁹¹ The idea of the chosen people resurfaces also in the interview with another active participant of the movement for legalization of the UGCC, Fr Mykola Simkailo. The priest compared the almost forty-four years of the church’s underground existence with the forty years spent by the Israelites in the wilderness. ⁹² During the late Soviet period, this hitherto marginal group of illegal Greek Catholics stood in the vanguard of the Ukrainian national and religious revival, paving the way to legalization of the UGCC in 1989–90.

To conclude, despite the Soviet regime’s efforts to curtail the religious activities of the ‘non-reunited’ clergy, including the imposition of fines, dismissals from work, arrests and evictions, the latter continued to serve the clandestine Greek Catholic communities. While the Soviet constitution officially declared freedom of conscience, the UGCC remained under ban from March 1946 until December 1989. During this period, the ‘non-reunited’ clergy and their followers continued to profess the Catholic faith according to the Byzantine rite. They manifested their religious beliefs both in private, resorting to the utmost secrecy, and in public, through protests and open celebrations of the liturgy. While the most active priests endured numerous arrests, they also learned to skilfully navigate the hurdles of Soviet bureaucracy by relying on personal networks and by exploiting the weaknesses of the state system. Persecuted by the Soviet state, they were nonetheless highly respected by clandestine Greek Catholics.