Memories of Living Orthodoxy in Soviet Ukraine

• In Event: Religious Piety in the U.S.S.R. after World War Two

Abstract

This paper is based largely on interviews conducted by a scholarly-led team in Ukraine between 2012 and 2015. It examines the ways in which members of religious communities in six oblast' centers in central and eastern Ukraine remembered Orthodox religious practices among family and extended kin in the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, the varying ages of the informants tend to reflect changing state atheistic policies with regard to formal religion. At the same time, the interviews reveal religious practices that may have been dramatically altered by the various assaults of militant atheism but not completely erased as believers accommodated themselves to political realities. The marking of major Orthodox calendrical celebrations as well as the preservation of Christian baptisms and insistence upon the marking of death and the Christian afterlife by way of religious funeral elements and regular commemorations at grave sites (however surreptitious their nature and water-downed their content) remained important among various generations. Not all family members may have actively participated but did tend to be observers. Voicing a nostalgia for what appeared to them to have been a simpler morality of Soviet times (that probably never existed) and holding on to their cherished memories of religious practices, a majority of the informants denied the fact that the Soviet Union was an atheist state.

Author

• Christine Diane Worobec, Northern Illinois U