www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Russian Orthodox Met. approves Stalin's liquidation of UGCC

I don't want to wade into this fight but I always wondered what the MP thinks of the fact that the Kievan Metropolia voluntarily entered communion with Rome at one point. The Vatican archives contain documents that represent the Act of Canonical Communion. My Ukrainian friends tell me that the UGCC successors to that metropolitan have as much claim to be the successor of the Kievan Metropolia as the MP. It appears some of those who opposed the move headed to Moscow and from there we have opposing views of the same history.

Bob

Moscow was the Kievan Metropolia and was approached by the white clergy, laity and monastics of Little Russia for unity. It was called the Khmelnitsky uprising. Not to mention, the Patriarchs of the Eastern churches courageously supported the Russian Brotherhoods with confessors and martyrs and maintained Orthodoxy to that point in the Little Russian Metropolia.

Then again, Brest wasn't even agreed to by all of its exclusively hierarchical participants (They shut the white clergy, monastics and laity out and held an episcopal quorum and specifically ignored the Russian Brotherhoods). For one, Metropolitan Gideon (Balaban), RUSSIAN ORTHODOX Metropolitan of Lvov and all Galicia, rejected Brest, sermonized against it as a Robber Synod, and fought tooth and nail to preserve Galicia from it.

And a final fact being missed is that Recz Pospolita ABOLISHED the Brest Union with the Treaty of Hadiach when it created the Principality of Russia and placed Hetman Vygovsky as its ruler.

In the Vatican archives it also says that the Vatican entered union with Russian Orthodox Bishops

You're confusing your history. The Kyivan Metropolitanate was NOT Moscow. The Kyivan Orthodox Metropolitanate was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople until 1686 when the Muscovite Tsar bribed the Patriarch of Constantinople to transfer it to Moscow. Please note that that state was called Muscovy, not Russia per se. You are conflating Kyivan Rus' and the Hetmanate with modern-day Russia which is what imperial Russian and Soviet historians did and do. It is more propaganda than history. Hetman Ivan Samoylovych died in the Tsar's prisons - the Tsar ruled what was then called Muscovy. The Hetmans of Ukraine called the people who inhabited those lands in today's Russia "Moskali" not Russians. It was only later when Peter the Great came around that Russia was really adopted by the Muscovites.

There was no "Russian" brotherhood in Lviv. It was Ruthenian, or Rus', or Ruteny, as it was called then and these terms were not the same as the Duchy of Muscovy which existed then. The terms used (and used by people like Khmelnytsky) were Rus' and Ruthenians for the people of Ukraine. The people of Muscovy were not called "Russians" by Khmelnytsky or the Hetmans of Ukraine. They were called "Moskali". Muscovy was a different entity.

You quote Shevchenko. The person Shevchenko despised most in his poetry was the Russian Tsar and what Russia had done to "his" Ukraine.

People read of Ruthenia and Kyivan-Rus' and erroneously assume these are Russians when in fact these were the people of Ukraine at the time. Khmelnytsky died a thoroughly disenchanted man when he saw what troops and oversight the Muscovite Tsar was sending to Ukraine after Pereiaslav.

Heck, to this day, the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa is still anathema to today's Russian Orthodox Church because he fought for Ukraine's independence from Tsarist Autocracy. And Mazepa was Orthodox of course.

Ukrainian history is not Russian history. The two nations had two different trajectories as Hrushevsky's works make clear. And as I stated in my first post, Lviv and all these areas which concerned Stalin's coerced 1946 Synod had NEVER been under the rule of Moscow or Tsarist Russia or the Soviets until 1945. Your statement as to the KGB synod not having bad circumstances until Khrushchev is patently false.

I ask you again Hetman: were the Ukrainian Catholic bishops and priests tortured by Stalin's Secret Police after the pseudo-synod Martyrs for Christ for refusing to do the bidding of an atheist communist state or not? Do you take Stalin's side?

We know the answer to that: that was Met. Isidore of Kiev, who resided at Moscow and who signed at Florence. And like all the other Orthodox bishops who signed, he was duly deposed when he returned to Moscow and proclaimed the union. The Holy Synod of the Rus' at Moscow elected his successor, Met. St. Jonas, the first autocephalous primate of Moscow. That, and that the career of "Patriarch" Ignatius of Moscow is not recognized by the MP adequately expresses the MP's thoughts on the matter.

The primate of the Kievan metropolia had left Kiev in 1299 for Vladimir in Russia, and in 1325 for Moscow, where the Metropolitinate of All Rus' remained until 1589-1593, when it was elevated to the Patriarchate of Moscow.

Once deposed for his acceptance of Florence, the former EP Gregory III fled to Rome with the support of the remaining Crusaders in the East, for whom he was appointed Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, although he was a Greek. When he died in 1458 the deposed Met. Isidore, also Greek but now a Latin cardinal and also in exile in Rome, succeeded him as Latin patriarch of Constantinople, and appointed a Bulgarian, Gregory II, to succeed him as titular metropolitan of Kiev, Galicia and All Rus' (including Russia), residing at Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had possession of Kiev at the time. Once Met. Jona of Kiev and All Rus' fell asleep, followed by Gregory, the bishop of Smolensk Misael/Michael asserted the title Metropolitan of Kiev and All "Rosiae" in correspondance with the Vatican and the EP consecrated Spyridon of Tver' as Bishop of Kiev and All Rus' in Constantinople: arrested on his arrival in the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Constantinople sent Simeon Bishop of Polatsk as Metropolitan of Kiev and Rus'. AFter that, all claimants to Kiev-except for the Polish Latin Bishop-commemorated Orthodox primates, until 1596. The masses of the faithful in Kiev and All Ukraine remained throught the period Orthodox.

I am sorry but Stalin "liberated" western Ukraine? Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the Gulag, and this is liberation? To me, such words have the same moral value as those of apologists for Hitler. Hitler was not a liberator; nor was Stalin. They were two of the biggest monsters of the 20th Century.

I think I now understand you to be one of those Russian Orthodox who look kindly on Stalin but bemoan Khrushchev. I am getting to understand your worldview but Stalin was a butcher, a totalitarian, who in 1932-33, starved some 4-5 million Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor as the recently released Stalin-Kaganovich correspondence by Yale University Press and studies by Stanislav Kulchytsky and Andrea Graziosi of the University of Naples make clear. After Ukrainian "korenizatsiya" in the 1920s, Stalin had the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia shot (rozstriliane vidrodzhennia) and Skrypnyk and Khvylovy killed themselves and the UAOC liquidated. Some friend of Ukrainians.

Your use of the letter "g" for "h" in common historical terms shows you misunderstand the Ukrainian language from the Russian language and from old Church Slavonic and Ruthenian.

The Haydamaky called themselves Haydamaky not your Russianized Gaydamaky. The modern Russian language has no "h" letter pronounced h but only "g"; hence why you mistakenly call Vyhovsky Vygovsky and Haydamaky Gaydamaky. The funny thing is these would never have called themselves with a g as you do. Indeed, Stalin tried to russify the Ukrainian language by removing the letter for h in Ukrainian to bring it closer to Russian, the effects of which we see in your posts.

I never thought I would see an apologist for Stalin on a Christian internet board! Quite astounding!

I wasn't apologizing for Stalin, but simply stating that IF you cant really denounce him for anything when your own "Ukrainian" ideology and "Ukrainian" territory and "ethnography" was subsidized and supported and brought into being by him.

Yes. Stalin liberated Galicia, for it had been under foreign oppression for over 700 years and it was finally reunited with Rus', albeit in Soviet times, and incorporated into the "ethnographic" territory of the Ukraine you so support after over 700 years of being considered a Polish province. To wit, had Stalin not liberated it, it would still be part of Poland today. Right?

Actually Stalin DID try to remove the letter "g" or any other some such thing, and, truthfully, in the Kiev region "g" is actually a medial "gh." No, in Polish, the name is Vygovsky and thats how he was known, and no, the hard "i" is not present in the word "Gaidamaki" who were by THEIR OWN WORDS Russian Orthodox patriots. Finally, modern literary Russian has as one of its parents the Middle Ruthenian of the Kiev Brotherhood. Thus to speak of "russifying" or any other type of colonialism defies all logic and understanding. No, NO ONE had any problems with a Slavic gamma being used, for the Southern Slavs who also were active on Little Russian soil, did not know the SOUTHERN RUSSIAN soft "gh." It actually is a medial "gh" and not a "h."

While the whole issue of the golodomor was not contained to the Ukraine but also affected Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. It was an artificial famine orchestrated to liquidate NEP as bourgeois capitalism and NOT as an "anti Ukrainian" action. For one, both Kaganovich and Filiw were both ethnic "Ukrainians" who supported "ukrainization" and the "Ukrainian" schools which continued to function during this era while the UAOC during this era had open state support according to Bociurkiw and other sources.

One need not mention that during the famine of the early 1920s intentionally orchestrated by Lenin to uproot "counter revolutionary tendencies in the former Cossack territories and on the Volga," that the govt. Petlura found no problem with the policy. Neither did any of the "Ukrainian" revolutionaries. While in 1913, during the famines in Austrian Galicia and Carpatho Russia, the "Ukrainian" party had tried to have relief from the Imperial Russian govt. stopped to prevent "russophile agitation": thus, "ukrainianism" and famine at best a controversial history.

The Imperial government of Tsar Martyr Nicholas II specifically created a grain bank to store grain in times of famine which was and is recurrent in Southern Russia (and the Ukraine). While his actions in aid of relief to the starving Russian populations of Galicia earned him the title "kormilets" from the Rusin populations. That means "he who feeds us." While the party you align yourself with worked to prevent that.

Here we have yet another revisionist history which primary sources DO NOT support. The Lvov, Kiev and Ostrogh Brotherhoods all used the name Russian and indeed the modern term "Russian" originates from them as well as the All Russian idea.

Further, no, St. Peter of Vohlynia existed. He canonically transferred the title of the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' to the North. This was recognized by ALL Orthodox churches. Byzantium at the instigation of the Lithuanian Russian state created a separate Kievan Metropolia decades afterwards which was an entirely NEW Metropolia. Constantinople called the Moscovite Metropolia the GREAT RUSSIAN METROPOLIA while the new one was called the LITTLE RUSSIAN METROPOLIA. This is the origin of the terminologies. Indeed the word "Ruthenian" is simply a variant of the term "Russian" which the Brotherhoods rejected, for it was associated with unia so they were among the first to use the word "Russian" in its place. While the old RUSSIAN Brotherhood in Lvov was quite russophile. That's why it was suppressed and closed. All the brotherhoods were. During the period in question whether in Moscow or in Kiev or in Lvov the term "russky" was used and meant the same thing, "Russian" without any sort of differences in region.

Now after Perejaslavl (and even before) a Kievan influx of scholars migrated north and came to occupy the upper echelons of the emergent All Russian empire, which, in many respects, was their brainchild. As a result of the Nikonian reforms, the Great Russian clergy were dispossessed (along with Great Russian culture eventually) and the Little Russians occupied the upper echelons within the Moscow Patriarchate and the subsequent "synodal church" into the 1850s.

Now, after the Brest Unia, the RUSSIAN Orthodox Metropolia of Kiev was totally dispossessed and was an illicit structure which was only survived due to the activities of the Russian Brotherhoods, the Kiev Caves Lavra, and aid from the Eastern Patriarchs and from Moscow Patriarchate. There many martyrdoms of Orthodox Christians during this period and that is why Khmelnitsky rose up. No, he did not die dejected, but,rather, a free man who never once regretted his eternal oath of unity with the rest of Rus' in Orthodoxy. Indeed, the reason why Hetman Vygovsky rebelled is because by diplomatic pact, the Western Ukraine, Vohlynia and Galicia were ceded back to Poland. That is why he insisted on the creation of the Principality in the Treaty of Hadiach.

No, Mazeppa, who never wrote in mova but in Literary Russian, and was a toadie of Peter I until he got a better offer from Sweden ended up being an oath breaker who warred against an Orthodox sovereign and thus earned the anathema he bears and it will never be lifted.

While Taras Grigorovich Schevchenko DID NOT hate the Tsar. He even wrote a poem in his honor. During the days of the Polish revolution, he happened to be in Warsaw and rather than rebel against the Tsar, he preferred to be imprisoned by the Poles. Thus, he was by no means an "anti Tsarist." In his personal journals, which were not privy to any censor, he wrote in Literary Russian and not in Kotliarevsky's mova. Nor did he ever recognize any type of "Ukrainian" nationality. In his circle of friends, he termed himself a "Rusin," "Little Russian" or simply "Russian" depending on the company and time. His issue was that the imperial govt. had forgotten the plight of the common Russian in foreign captivity and under foreign aristocrats (He was born on a Polish owned estate whose master treated his Russian peasants cruelly). While the Gaidamak NEVER, NOT ONE, affirmed any type of "Ukrainianism" but rather saw itself a RUSSIAN ORTHODOX militant movement struggling for liberation and for unity with Russia. That is the pathos of his ode to Gonta. Thus, what Schevchenko was writing about was a disaffection with a imperial identity which had forgotten the reason why came into existence and its history at the expense of Russians oppressed by foreigners and totally dispossessed of their territory, freedom and religious longings. That is why he sympathized with the Gaidamaks. During this period, Schevchenko AVOIDED the "Ukrainian" ideologists Dragomanov and Kostamarov, for they were 1). illicit revolutionaries whose ideas he never heard of heretofore and 2). They were Great Russians and saw the game they were playing. The irony in all this is that the Russian imperial society Schevchenko witnessed was one in which the upper echelons of Kiev and Little Russia had come to play a prominent role (even be the engines behind) at the expense, in his time of both the Southwestern Russian peoples and the old Great Russian cultures of a then defunct Moscow Tsardom.

St. Alexander Nevsky existed. So too Novgorod. Novgorod was the first city of Rus' and it became the nucleus of the recovery of Rus' after the Mongol pogrom. Looking at a map, one sees, that more of the territories of Kievan Rus' were in what came to be Great Russia than in the Ukraine, White and the Ruthenias combined. Russian culture, letters, religion have existed without interruption and developed freely in the North, what is today Russia, from the very beginning. It is only here that Kievan Rus' WAS PRESERVED without foreign domination, and, thus, Rus' and Russia are one and so is their history uninterrupted. That is why Russia became the empire that it is and was and why the Russian Brotherhoods of Little Russia and the Ruthenias rallied to it and that empire an All Russian achievement.

Again, so that this is plain, they were not "Christian martyrs" but political martyrs who were given the choice between becoming ROMAN CATHOLIC prelates or returning to the ancestral Orthodox Faith, and they chose NEITHER out of political convictions.

I love a good game of "Let's Ensure Our Church Remains Ever a Nationalist, Ethnic Rump".

Well, I see you are a Roman Catholic and we are talking of modern martyrs for the Church here, which was the original point of my post, before it got hijacked into some historical thread on nationality in the middle ages. The late Pope John Paul II beatified many of the Ukrainian Catholic martyrs in Ukraine back in 2001. They might become saints and their biographies and their personal Golgothas are here for all to see. Please read their biographies if you are interested:

http://www.ugcc.org.ua/35.0.html?&L=2

I think that to be fair that IF the "Ukrainians" of Galicia, historically Chervonaya Rus' ie RED RUSSIA, wanted to have full Communion with Rome and function as a Ukrainian Roman Catholic Latin rite community while allowing for the population of Galicia to choose that or ancestral Russian Orthodoxy (and historical R-U-S-I-N and not "Ukrainian" identity) that that would be an amicable solution both Moscow and Rome could entertain just as long as there was evenhandedness in the deliberations and distribution of the church properties. If anything, it would finally end the ethnic tensions and all the other nonsense and allow Rus' to function without all the quakeries so that indeed an autocephalous Orthodox Kievan church could come into being without all the pseudo nationalist and ahistorical baggage. This nonsense has gone on far too long. And as soon as Rome and Moscow can iron this out, then we can move on to real dialogue and perhaps come to some sort of formula of eventual intercommunion in affirmation of a common Catholic and Orthodox Faith.

I would go one further, if Eastern rite communities wish to continue to solely exist in diaspora that that would probably be a possibility where the Orthodox could finally even cultivate them as friends and dialogue with them in honesty along with Roman Catholics, working toward common cause and possible unity. We need to concentrate on doctrine and ecclesiology, not this mismash of simply fringe historiography.

Here, the point was that Stalin DID NOT try to eliminate the "h" pronunciation (or any other such preposterous thing) as most of Southern Russia (non Ukraine)/And the Baltics/ has a medial "gh" pronunciation as well. Indeed, the emphasis on a hard "g" wasn't even accentuated until late in the Soviet period, 1970s or so, and then that was in regard to the All Russian Literary Language and never in regard to mova in popular culture and academia. Stalin supported the "Ukrainian" movement and "ukrainianization" and "letters." Again, this makes it tenuous at best for one of "Ukrainian" inclinations to criticize Stalin for being anti-Ukrainian. Indeed, "Ukrainian" politicos like Khruschev and Marshal Timoshenko indicate that indeed Stalin facillitated the upward mobility of "Ukrainians." In the Red Army at the time, use of the ethnic slur "khokhol" was greeted with a fine in pay and time in the stockade.

Ask any Carpatho Rusin dispossessed during Stalin's reign of his ethnic identity, tongue, and culture. Anyone will come to see how pro "Ukrainianization" Stalin's policies were, an almost "Ukrainian imperialism" was thrown against the Ruthenias. Ask any Lemko Rusins abandoned during Operation Vistula.

When I stand for the Rusins and the recovery of their historical identity in all the Ruthenias (including Galicia, Bukovina and Vohlynia), that means I reject Stalin /and Lenin and the Austrian "Ukrainians" as well as the exiled GREAT RUSSIAN "Ukrainian fathers"/ and his "ukrainianizations."

I apologize for the ommissions/misspellings of several words in many of the posts here as I was typing in haste due to familial concerns. If any clarifications are necessary, I am more than happy to make the necessary corrections to the errata with further elucidation upon request.

Lastly, the point I tried to underscore in one post was that the history of the "Ukrainian movement" and famine relief is checkered at best and disingenuously politicized beyond all historiography and reason. It is used to stoke the fires of a russophobia which is no more than the preaching of hate of one Russian population against another, and its goal is division and upheaval.

Moreover, it should be taken as the pseudo-ethnic political agitation it is with blood on its hands. The "Ukrainian" movement in Austria peopled the first European concentration camps like Talerhof with Rusins and worked to effectuate genocide upon the Rusin historical ethnic identity. Thus, consider the "moral authority of such a movement." One need not mention the NAZI collaboration and SS division as well as guards in Auschwitz in more than a cursory mention.

To wit, the "Ukrainians" would have preferred that the Rusin populations of Austria starve from famine rather than receive relief from the Tsar' Martyr in 1913. They had no problems with the artificial famines in the Kuban, Don, and Volga regions in the 1920s nor with the confiscations of church valuables which were carried out disingenuously by the Bolshevik party at the time.

And, finally in 1932 and 1933, "Ukrainian" Filiwiw and "Kaganovich" (a "Ukrainian" of Jewish ancestry) orchestrated the confiscation of crops and seed to provoke the artificial famine throughout the countryside. It was done to liquidate NEP, and it also occured throughout Southern Russia and in Kazakhstan. During this time, "ukrainianization" was carried through full stop with Soviet sponsorship and the "Ukrainian" schools never ceased functioning, but, rather, their activities and agitprop were broadened.

"Rusin" and "Little Russian" identities, however, were actively suppressed and at times even denounced as "counter Revolutionary."

While the UAOC was at the time receiving the patronage of Moscow (as did other Renovationist bodies) to uproot the Patriarchal Church and undermine Orthodoxy in Rus'. It was as much an arm of the Soviet anti-religion policies as Vvedensky's Renovationist "Holy Synod." Yes, the UAOC and "KP" of today originate under the auspices with much the SAME disingenuous purpose with almost the SAME moral defects. During this period, the UAOC protested not on the behalf of those starving of famine nor did it try to organize any sort of relief but did indeed denounce people to the authorities for "anti Soviet" and "Counter Revolutionary" agitation as well as working to uproot and suppress Catacomb and Patriarchal communities, thereby fuelling the Bolshevik machine of New Martyrdoms.