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.
