This exemplary monograph is divided into three parts. The first (p. 37-130) concerns the situation of the Russian Orthodox church (ROC) as a whole from late Stalinism, through Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign, to the normalization of the early Brezhnev era. The second (p. 131-250) narrows the focus to the ROC’s Ukrainian exarchate; and the third (p. 251-382) narrows it even more, to the formerly Greek Catholic, as of 1946 “reunified” church – what Natalja Šlihta calls the “church within th..

Himka, John-Paul

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Cahiers du monde russe
Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États
indépendants 
53/4 | 2012
Varia
Natalja Šlihta, Cerkva tyh, hto vyžyv
John-Paul Himka
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/7871
DOI: 10.4000/monderusse.7871
ISSN: 1777-5388
Publisher
Éditions de l’EHESS
Printed version
Date of publication: 15 December 2012
ISSN: 1252-6576
 
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John-Paul Himka, « Natalja Šlihta, Cerkva tyh, hto vyžyv », Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 53/4 | 2012,
Online since 08 October 2013, Connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://
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© École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Natalja Šlihta, Cerkva tyh, hto vyžyv
John-Paul Himka
REFERENCES
Natalja ŠLIHTA, Cerkva tyh, hto vyžyv. Radjans´ka Ukrajina, seredyna 1940-h – poč
atok 1970-h rr. [The church of those who survived: Soviet Ukraine, mid-1940s –
beginning of the 1970s]. Harkiv : Akta, 2011, 467 p.
1 This exemplary monograph is divided into three parts. The first (p. 37-130) concerns
the situation of the Russian Orthodox church (ROC) as a whole from late Stalinism,
through  Khrushchev’s  antireligious  campaign,  to  the  normalization  of  the  early
Brezhnev  era.  The  second  (p. 131-250)  narrows  the  focus  to  the  ROC’s  Ukrainian
exarchate;  and  the  third  (p. 251-382)  narrows  it  even  more,  to  the  formerly  Greek
Catholic, as of 1946 “reunified” church – what Natalja Šlihta calls the “church within
the church” – based in the three Galician oblasts and Transcarpathia. The research base
is extensive: archival documents (particularly the papers of the Council that acted as
intermediary between church and state), official church publications, interviews, and
all the relevant secondary literature in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. The emphasis
is  on  the  sociology  and  anthropology  of  the  churches  rather  than  on  politics  or
religious studies, although it sheds light on both those topics as well. The author sees
her  work  as  a  study  of  postwar  Soviet  everyday  life,  Soviet  social  history,  an
anthropology of Soviet society.
2 The circumstances of the ROC after its partial restoration in 1943 are portrayed from a
fresh perspective. Although now ready to tolerate a church, the postwar Soviet state
wished as much as possible to isolate it from society. The measures it took to do so
included banning the  study of  homiletics  and logic  in  seminaries  in  order  to  limit
priests’ potential to influence. The state tried to make clerical education into narrow
vocational training, while bishops and church educators constantly sought to expand
courses in history and even in Marxist thought. Sometimes central and local authorities
had different attitudes toward the social activities of the ROC. The center wanted to
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keep the church out of the public sphere altogether, but the local levels were happy
when  the  church  took  responsibility  for  the  maintaining  cemeteries  or  dispatched
priests to encourage collective farmers to fulfill their obligations on time. The church
wanted to integrate into Soviet society and create for itself a Soviet identity. But the
party and state distrusted what they considered to be opportunism and adaptation. As
Šlihta points out, it has been fairly normal for churches to adapt to political and social
circumstances, but adaptation to a hostile, atheist state was particularly challenging.
Several factors aided the church in working out a modus vivendi with the regime. The
ROC and the Soviet  state could find common ground in Russocentrism and Russian
patriotism. Also, the ROC was a ritually oriented, liturgical church that expended much
of its energy on the provision and performance of various church services. And finally,
the  church  (like  most  Soviet  citizens  and  institutions,  Šlihta  argues)  made  use  of
“doublethink,” i.e. holding two sets of contradictory beliefs and acting in accordance
with them, but selectively in different contexts.  Overall,  Šlihta paints a convincing,
modelled portrait of the outlook of the ROC in the decades following World War II.
3 She  then uses  the  Ukrainian  exarchate  as  the  basis  for  an  exploration  of  how the
church actually functioned in the Soviet polity. In what she characterizes as a tactic of
“small deeds,” the Ukrainian episcopate struggled to provide sufficient and sufficiently
qualified priests to minister to the liturgical and sacramental needs of the population.
Owing  to  the  intervention  of  the  state,  the  seminaries  did  not  produce  enough
candidates  for  the  priesthood,  and  many  of  those  they  did  produce  were  poorly
educated.  Bishops  tried  to  make  up  for  the  educational  deficits  by  organizing
supplementary  courses  and  workshops  for  the  clergy.  To  make  up  for  the  sheer
shortage, the hierarchs ordained deacons who had not finished seminary, psalmists,
and  even  lay  activists.  They  circulated  priests  from  parish  to  parish  to  maximize
opportunities for provision of the sacraments. (Of course, this had deleterious results
for pastoral care.) Bishops also used every excuse to offer archhierarchical services,
which thousands would attend. Every one of these measures was fought by the Council,
but bishops learned how to get  around restrictions.  It  was not by open opposition.
Šlihta  wrote  an  illuminating  section  (p. 154-171)  contrasting  the  methods  and
achievements of two bishops: the oppositional Bishop Feodosij (Kovernyns´kyj) and the
“doublethinking”  Archbishop  Palladij  (Kamins´kyj).  The  former,  who  expressed  his
outright  opposition  to  the  atheistic  regime,  served  only  for  a  short  time  as  an
administrator of eparchies, accomplished almost nothing, and eventually had to obtain
special permission even to celebrate the liturgy in private. The latter acted as much as
possible as a traditional bishop, considering his authority over the clergy to be higher
than  that  of  the  Council  officials.  But  he  was  markedly  pro-Soviet  in  his  public
pronouncements. He was able to accomplish a good deal for the faithful under his care,
by various methods expanding pastoral services, finding candidates to ordain to the
priesthood, and improving his clergy’s education.
4 Another interesting section in the second part of the monograph concerns baptisms.
The state was not overly worried by the baptism of infants, which it regarded more as a
traditional  rite  than  a  religious  statement,  but  it  was  disturbed  by  the  baptism  of
children and adults. Yet such baptisms were a predictable occurrence in the aftermath
of antireligious campaigns. Even more disturbing to the state were the mass baptisms
that  emerged  in  the  mid-1950s.  These  were  primarily  urban  phenomena,  and  one
attraction of them for the participants was that they could become anonymous within
the collectivity. Mass baptisms were held not only on Christmas and Easter, but also on
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2
1 January, 1 May, and 7 November. “Such baptisms did not simply serve to meet the
religious needs of the population. They were an alarming sign for a regime that sought
to completely isolate the church. The timing of the rite of baptism simultaneously with
a  Soviet  holiday  in  order  to  give  more  solemnity  to  this  family  event  testified
eloquently  that  the  antiquated religious  rite  remained  important  for  the  secularized
population.  Such  timing  helped  to  maintain  the  symbolic  connection  between  the
church and Soviet society. It is significant that there are testimonies to the particular
popularity of this ceremony among the intelligentsia and the working population of
Kyiv and of the great industrial centers of the East and South of Ukraine.” (p. 183)
5 The third part of the monograph concerns the church within the church that resulted
from the “reunification” of the Greek Catholic church in Galicia and Transcarpathia
with the ROC in 1946. This constituted a disproportionately large part of the Ukrainian
exarchate.  In  1950,  40 percent  of  the  exarchate’s  churches  were  formerly  Greek
Catholic as was a fifth of its clergy (p. 375). After Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign
managed to close down many parishes in the rest  of  Ukraine,  the disproportionate
weight of the church in the western oblasts increased. Although this church within the
church had many specific features, the same patterns of behavior identified for the ROC
as a whole and for the Ukrainian exarchate as a whole were also at work here.
6 Šlihta engages in a careful analysis of the role of the ROC in the “reunification” itself,
identifying and avoiding two oversimplifications present in the existing literature: that
the ROC worked closely and willingly with the regime to abolish the Greek Catholic
church and that the ROC engaged in this project only with reluctance. What she shows
instead is that the ROC exploited the situation – its usefulness for “Orthodoxizing” and
hence helping to integrate Western Ukrainian society – in order to gain concessions
from the state for its religous mission.
7 Šlihta considers that in the given situation the choice of most Greek Catholics to enter
the ROC was the natural one. As she puts it: “The church in the Soviet state had to
choose between institutional survival  and refusal  to compromise.  The choice of  the
latter afforded the opportunity to feel like ‘martyrs for the faith.’ But in circumstances
when the primary task was to secure provision for the religious needs of a flock of
millions...,  this  was  hardly  a  viable  alternative”  (p. 285-286).  She  demonstrates
convincingly that the movement to Orthodoxy was a deliberate choice made by clergy
and faithful to save what could be saved of Greek Catholic religious life. Greek Catholic
priests who went over to Orthodoxy feared that Orthodox priests coming to Western
Ukraine from the East  would so alienate the local  population that  they would stop
attending church altogether. This was not an unreasonable fear. Eastern Ukrainians
who came as teachers and officials to Western Ukraine were often despised by the local
population, which resented Soviet rule and the importation of the Russian language.
The “reunified” priests and hierarchy used the sensitivities of the local population as a
justification for retaining Greek Catholic practices and devotions, such as liturgies that
were read rather than sung and the cult of the Sacred Heart. Šlihta shows that the first
bishops of this “church within the church,” Myhajil (Mel´nyk) and Antonij (Pel´vec´kyj)
were both “Uniates in disguise”; and she feels that it is not surprising that both of them
were killed (as was the most prominent initiator of the move to Orthodoxy, Fr. Gavryjil
Kostel´nyk) by the security organs.
8 In the mid-1950s the so-called “catacomb” church emerged in the western oblasts, as
clergy who had refused to sign a declaration of Orthodoxy returned from exile and
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Cahiers du monde russe, 53/4 | 2012
3
imprisonment. Šlihta shows that whatever tensions existed between the church within
the church and the catacomb church, the primary element of their relationship was
mutual  support.  The  church  within  the  church  provided  necessary  liturgical  and
sacramental  services  to  a  larger  population,  and  its  clergy  often  helped  out  the
underground Greek Catholic clergy. As of the mid-1960s, the hierarchy of the catacomb
church accepted clergy from the church within the church into the Greek Catholic
church, and some priests functioned under the double jurisdiction of the ROC and of
the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. For its part, the hierarchy of the church within
the  church  used  the  activization  of  the  underground  Greek  Catholic  church  as  an
instrument to increase its importance in the eyes of the state, now threatened by an
underground religious movement. In the 1960s, after the release of the exiled Greek
Catholic metropolitan Josyf (Slipyj) to the West and as a result of the sessions of the
Second  Vatican  Council,  the  hierarchs  of  the  church  within  the  church  claimed
increased  competition  from  the  Greek  Catholics,  which  they  could  only  win  by
expanding  their  pastoral  network  and  further  Ukrainianizing  the  church.  They
magnified  the  Greek  Catholic  threat  in  order  to  lobby  for  such  things  as  the
reestablishment  of  local  seminaries  in  Western  Ukraine  and  the  publication  of
Ukrainian-language Gospel books and church calendars.
9 After coming to the end of this fascinating text, one finds valuable appendices and, of
course, a bibliography and personal and place name indexes. What one also finds – and
this is rare for Ukrainian publications – is a subject index.
10 All  in all,  this  is  a  well  researched and innovative book,  to be recommended to all
interested  in  Soviet  history  of  the  postwar  period,  in  Russian  Orthodoxy,  and  in
Ukrainian religion. 
Natalja Šlihta, Cerkva tyh, hto vyžyv
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