In the western territories, the Soviet government faced a serious rival, the Catholic Church. It was not only an ideological enemy of “the Godless rulers” in the Kremlin but also a political one, as the Vatican had the political and financial support of the West. The Soviet negative attitude to the Catholic Church was also augmented in March 1939, when Cardinal Pacelli, famous for his anticommunism, became the next Roman Pope under the name Pius XII. In the beginning, the new leader of the Catholic world regarded Hitler as a lesser evil and hoped to use him in the struggle against communisM.83 THe Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, however, diminished the meaning of the 1933 concordat with Germany. This act limited the Vatican’s ability to use Germany as an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union as well as to rescue Catholic Poland from the expansionist plans of Hitler and Stalin.
In the autumn of 1939, the Pope ceased his criticism of the communists as followers of anti-Christ and as enemies of Western civilization. The Vatican also changed its tactics in an attempt to provoke tensions in Soviet-German relations. Its press-release services paid special attention to Soviet aggression against Finland, while keeping silent about that of Germany in Poland.8 4 ONly in the second part of1940, when Soviet-German relations deteriorated, did Pius XII take an active stand against the persecution of Catholics in the former Polish territories that had fallen under Soviet control.85 IN this regard, it is important to mention that the Holy See was very sensitive about the specificity of the Soviet antireligious policy in the former Polish territories. This was summarized by Cardinal Hlond in observations made in the first days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
The policy adopted is to avoid massacres and other barbaric methods in favor of others, more suitable and efficient, already tested by experience. As a consequence, the Russians seek to undermine the importance of the Church, to degrade the clergy and above all, to educate youth in atheism and communism. For this reason, there are no organized massacres of priests; the few cases so far recorded were due to local Communists. To impoverish the clergy, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs confiscated all church property and deprived priests of their revenue, forcing them to beg for their living. At the same time it disorganized the dioceses and forbade bishops to attend to their administration and to visit the parishes. The propaganda for atheism is done through slogans coming from Moscow. It is not so gross as in the early years of the Soviet regime. Atheism is preached scientifically. Repugnant blasphemy has been replaced by skillful skepticism, which is installed especially into the children. The banning of religion from schools is applied gradually. The cross is, in some cases, permitted to remain in school rooms, but must be placed between portraits of Lenin and StaliN.86
The Soviet policy toward the Catholic Church in the annexed areas, however, varied according to local conditions. In the Baltic region Catholicism was approached mostly as a confessional issue, whereas in Ukraine it was treated as a manifestation of nationalism, since the notions of Ukrainian and Uniate (a pejorative name for Greek Catholicism used in Russia) often overlapped. As a result, the Soviet authorities were relatively more tolerant toward the Baltic Catholics than to the Ukrainian ones. This specificity was not only an outcome of the later Occupation of the former and the approaching war. It was also connected with the confessional demographics of the mentioned areas: The majority of the population in Estonia and Latvia were ProtestantS.87 ALthough 80 percent of Lithuanians were CatholicS,88 tHeir confessional orientation played a less significant role in their attitude to the Soviet regime. The reason was rooted in the interwar years, when Catholic Poland was much more dangerous for their state and national sovereignty than the Soviet Union. Moreover, when Eastern Poland was taken under Soviet control, Moscow returned to Lithuanians their historical capital, the citY of Vilnius. Therefore, the Soviet policy to Catholicism in the Baltic region was less concerned with a symbiosis between Catholicism and local nationalisms than that in Galicia. On the one hand, the Kremlin annulled the 1927 concordat of Lithuania with the Vatican, extradited influential Catholic prelates, and sent many Catholic clerics to SiberiA.89 On the other hand, it allowed the Catholic Lithuanians from former Eastern Poland to leave the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Poland and to join the Catholic Church in Lithuania.90 Another peculiarity of the Baltic developments was that the Soviet authorities did not ally with the local Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities against the Catholic ones.
The Kremlin approach to Catholicism in Ukraine was quite different. After the occupation of Eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities found six Roman-Catholic dioceses, situated in Lviv, Peremyshl, Lomzha, Pinsk, Lutsk, and Vilnius, as well as three Greek-Catholic ones, whose sees were in Lviv, Peremyshl, and Stanislav.
Despite this state of things, the most severe antireligious attacks were directed against the Greek Catholic Church. Many researchers consider that the cruelty of its persecution was motivated by the special place this church had in Ukrainian society as “the carrier and defender oF the Ukrainian identity” and as its major nation-building factoR.91 Apprehensive about the destiny of his Church under Soviet rule, the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey (Sheptytsky) made an attempt to guarantee its survival by the secret appointment of four new bishops: Joseph (Slipy) for the Great Ukraine, Anton (Nemantsevich) for Belarus, Mykola (Charnetski) for Volhynia and Eastern Poland, and Clement (Sheptytsky) for Great Russia and Siberia. In this way, the imPrisonment or death of the official church leaders would not decapitate the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. Still, it is important to mention that the newly appointed bishops were confirmed by the Roman Pope but only as apostolic administrators, that is, on temporary groundS.92 The grim premonition of Metropolitan Andrey (Sheptytsky) was soon confirmed. The Soviet repression of his clergy and flock included administrative actions. In this regard it is important to note that the Soviets closed the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, but left open the Roman Catholic one, which was not associated with Ukrainian nationalism.93
In the case of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the interests of the Soviet government coincided with those of the Moscow Patriarchate. In the spring of 1940, the Latter was also engaged in the fight against Catholicism in Western Ukraine. Its envoy there, Metropolitan Nikolay (Yarushevich), was charged with the task of undermining the influence of the Uniate Church, which then had 1,267 parisheS.94 To accomplish this, he had to cooperate with NKVD officers, who succeeded in convincing the Greek Catholic priest Gavril Kostelnyk, famous for his anti-Vatican attitude, to initiate a movement for the separation of the Uniate Church in Ukraine from the Roman Pope. It is important that the Kremlin initiated these steps at a moment when the war with Finland was over and Hitler was engaged with the battle in France. The quick German victory on the western fTont, however, did not leave time for the Soviets to realize their plans for the destruction of the Greek Catholic Church in Western UkrainE.95
After the defeat of France, it was only a matter of time before Hitler would turn his troops against the Soviet Union. Therefore Stalin took measures to diminish the authority of the Catholic Church in Western Ukraine as a potential Nazi ally. On the eve of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, about fifty Catholic priests were arrested and eleven of them were killed. In November 1941, Metropolitan Andrey (Sheptytsky) announced that 400,000 Catholics had been deported fTom Western Ukraine during its Soviet occupatioN.96
World History
