Making Sense of Persecution: Memories of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics about the Soviet Period

• In Event: Memory, Nostalgia, and National Identity after the Soviet and Yugoslav Collapses

Abstract

This paper explores the narratives of martyrdom and resistance in the post-1991 interviews and memoirs of the former clandestine Greek Catholics.
In 1946, the Soviet regime officially abolished the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) by forcibly merging her with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Between 1946 and 1989, the Greek Catholics who refused to join the ROC acted in the underground. The oral histories of the former members of the underground Church contain many stories about the persecutions, experiences of social marginalization, and constant KGB surveillance. Yet many respondents emphasize their agency in the struggle for the legalization of the UGCC.
After the UGCC was legalized in 1990 and Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, the experience of the clandestine Church was framed not only in religious but also in national terms. Thus, Bishop Mykola Simkailo compared the “catacomb” period with the forty years of walking of Israelite people through the desert. In his words, the fates of thousands of the Greek Catholic priests, monks, nuns and faithful were sacrificed on the altar of the nation and of the Church. It is not uncommon for the Greek Catholics to make a direct link between their suffering under the Soviets and the subsequent legalization of the UGCC and Ukraine’s independence.
Thus, the post-1991 context thus provided the former members of the clandestine UGCC with a “social frame,” to use Maurice Halbwachs’ expression, to give meaning to their suffering and struggle during the Soviet period.

Author

• Kateryna Budz, U of Edinburgh (UK)