Dear Sir:
We appreciate the invitation extended to the Philadelphia Center of the St. Clement Pope Ukrainian Catholic University to submit written testimony concerning the issue of religious rights. As requested in your letter of May 30, 1980, our testimony will focus on events in the Ukrainian SSR which have taken place after 1977. We would like to begin by quoting two brief excerpts from a letter written by a Ukrainian Catholic to Pope Paul VI. The letter is dated March 6, 1977; its author is YOSYF TERELIA. We are presenting these excerpts because, in our opinion, they describe acurately the Catholics (also known as Greek Catholics or Uniates) in the Soviet Union.
«Bitter times have come upon the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine. We.the faithful of the Church, are forced to christen, marry, confess, and bury in secrecy. Our priests are in camps, psychiatric wards, or physically destroyed….! Live in a state where to be a Christian is a crime. Never before have the faithful of the Church of Christ been subjected to such persecution as here and now. Ukrainian Catholics have been deprived of everything — normal family life, freedom of speech, the celebration of the Liturgy of our Church, we live in the catacombs….Out of my 34 years of life, I have spent 14 in jails, concentration camps, and psychiatric wards….»
And further on in the letter Terelia states:
An end to the crimes in this godless world cannot be expected without a countermeasure of all the Christian forces in the world….The only road for my family and myself is the illegal crossing of the border. For the USSR the Helsinki Agreement is a pure fiction under which the Stalinists have hidden themselves….My only hope is that the Apostolic Catholic Church and Your Holiness will help us to leave this terrible State» (Ref.: Visti z Rymu, Rome, December 10, 1978, pp. 21-22).
As stated before, Y. Terelia’s words accurately reflect the situation of religious rights in Ukraine today. If anything, the persecution of believers has been intensified recently. The antireligious activities include vandalism of churches, synagogues, and cemetaries, harassment of believers, and persecutions or even murder of priests. It appears that the Soviet authorities, particularly in recent months, have been cracking down on believers in Ukraine, and especially on the members of the outlawed Ukrainian Catholic Church. While our testimony deals primarily with the Ukrainian Catholics, instances of violation of religious rights of other denominations are also included. Our sources are published materials (indicated in the text), private letters on file at the Center or at the St. Clement Catholic University in Rome, and samvydav (samizdat) documents collected at the Center. All these cases of violation of religious rights of Soviet citizens contrast incongruously with Article 52 of the Soviet Constitution which we quote below:
«Citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed Freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda. Incitement of hostility or hatred on religious grounds is prohibited.»
March 1980, Fr. Anatol Omelian Gorgula, a Ukrainian Catholic priest who refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church, was burned alive in the village of Tomashivtsi, Voynyliv Region. His body and that of his wife were found tied together; they had been doused with gasoline and set aflame. According to local people, Father Gorgula was murdered because he remained faithful to his Church. «He did not join Russian Orthodoxy, remained true to his calling, celebrated the Holy Liturgy and that was the reason for this act of revenge on the part of those who are the open enemies of God» reads the letter which informed us of his tragic death.
May 10, 1980, Fr.lvan Kotyk, a 60-year old Catholic priest who had been working in a factory, was found dead in the town of Zymna Voda, near Lviv. According to our sources, Fr. Kotyk had been beaten to death. His entire face was beaten blue, his nose was smashed, his teeth were knocked out and a piece of bread had been placed between his lips. The faithful of Zymna Voda arranged for a solemn funeral sevices for Fr.Kotyk during which they sang Ukrainian religious songs.
February 27, 1980, Fr. Myron M. Sas-Zhurakovsky, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, was arrested in Vinnytsia. Fr. Sas-Zhurakovsky had been detained several times before by the authorities while meeting with human rights activists in Moscow during February of 1980. At that time the police confiscated from him documents concerning the status of believers in Ukraine, but they did not arrest him. Fr. Sas-Zhurakovsky is over 50 years old, and he has served a previous sentence in labor camps as a political prisoner. In recent times he had been suspended from priesthood by the authorities, but continued to work in the church as a handyman. He is now awaiting charges in Vinnytsia prison.
According to Smoioskyp, Spring 1980, Mykola I. Kinash, a Baptist, born in 1946, was sentenced on January 3, 1980, in Horlivka, Donetsk Region, to one year of imprisonment on charges of «parasitism.» The same publication also lists the following persons who were recently arrested in Ukraine. No charges have as yet been filed against them but all these arrests are religiously motivated.
January 5, 1980, In Chernivtsi — Mykhailo H. Kushnir, born in 1938, a Baptist, married with seven children.
January 5, 1980, in Chernivtsi — Volodymyr Y. Kosteniuk and Viktor Y. Kosteniuk, both Baptist.
January 19, 1980, in the village of Krupsk, Dnipropetrovsk Region — Mykola I. Kabysh, from Zhovti Vody, and Konstantyn Ya. Smyrnsky, both Baptist presbyters.
December 1979, M. Baturyn, a member of the Council of Churches was arrested; he is currently held in solitary confinement in a prison located in the Cherkasy Region. According to our reports, the authorities have approached his wife with an offer to release him in exchange for testimony against other arrested Baptists.
January 1978, Fr. Mykhailo Vozniak was arrested for celebrating the Holy Liturgy on Epiphany night in a village (name not identifiable) in the Sambir Region. He was brutally beaten by the police and subsequently sentenced to 15 days imprisonment. On the third day of his incarceration he was transferred to a hospital because of his near-comatose state. However, the physician in charge refused to admit Fr. Vozniak, fearing reprisals for giving aid to a priest.
Fr. Vasyl Ivanovych Voronovsky from the village of Fena (?), Lviv Region, was sentenced to fifteen days incarceration and loss of employment for celebrating the Liturgy and baptising two children. He was charged with «hooliganism» and «inmoral behavior.»
May 1978, Eight Ukrainian priests were arrested and fined 50 rubles each for participating in burial services held for Fr. Diduch in the village of Chortkiv, Ternopol Region.
The Chronicle of Contemporary Events,Nr. 54, November 1979, reports the following case history:
On Easter Sunday, April 25, 1979, the parish church in the village of Zanosychi, Rovno Region, was wrecked by the authorities. The church wa built in 1910; it had been an object of vandalism for a long period of time. In 1977 for example, an attempt was made to wreck the church with the help of a tractor, but the village people foiled this attempt. Another attempt to destroy the church was made by the local fire company in Spring 1978. The church building was doused with gasoline, but the people prevented it from being set aflame by surrounding the building and screaming, «burn us together with the church.» In the fall of the same year, the church was converted into a grain storage place. However, a determined stand by the villagers, who went on strike, forced the authorities to return the building to the faithful. Finally, however, as indicated above, the church was entirely wrecked, and its remnants burned. Nevertheless, the place where the church bulding once stood is presently a place of pilgrimage for a large number of people from all over the region.
The same source also contains another case history of the people’s fight for their church.
In the village of Balashivka, Rovno Region, the local church building had been closed since the early 1960’s. For almost twenty years the people of the village petioned the Soviet authorities on every level (including the President of the Soviet Union L. Brezhnev and the Prime Minister A. Kosigin) to have their church restored to them as a temple of prayer. They intensified their efforts after the new constitution of the U.S.S.R. was proclaimed, but they have met with unyielding refusal. The Chronicle presents a vivid, comprehensive account of their plight.
The scope of our testimony precludes detailed analysis of cases which are already known in the west. Thus we have made no references to such tragic episodes in the recent histoy of Church life in Ukraine, as the persecutions of Fr. Vsyl Romaniuk, the writer and poest Oles’ Berdnyk, and other religious dissidents. In concluding, however, we would like to make two points concernig the people whose religious rights are currently being violated in Ukraine. First of all, cases of viiolation of religious rights in the Soviet Union in general and in the Soviet Ukraine in particular, are far more numerous than it is known in the West. Although official and unofficial (samvydav) publications contain data on new developments in the area of religion in the U.S.S.R., many violation of religious rights in the Soviet Union go unreported because of fear of reprisal and the secrecy which still pervades most areas of life in the Soviet Union. And second, we in the West have been conditioned to draw a line of demarcation between things secular and things religious. The religious consciusness of the Ukrainians, however, still perceives things in a more integral state, in which the sacred and the secular are not seen as opposite poles (See The Ukrainian Catholic Church: 1945-1975, Miroslav Labunka and Leonid Rudnytzky, editors, p. 159; a copy of the work has been sent to the Commission as background material). As a result, many Ukrainians known as human rights advocates or political activist abroad, and who are punished ostensibly for their political activities, are in effect, persecuted because of their religious beliefs. A case in point is the afore-mentioned Oles’ Berdnyk, whose opposition to the regime is primarily a religious one. Also many Ukrainian poets, such as for example the recently (May 18, 1980) re-arrested Vasyl Stus, who was charged under the Article 62 with «anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,» are in effect people who do nothing more than voice their religious or spiritual beliefs. The published works of these poets provide a clear indication of their status as religious men concerned with freedom of conscience and the ability to voice, in the broadest sense their religious convictions.
Perhaps all the violations of human rights in the Soviet Union, and especially in Ukraine, should be viewed within this broader spiritual context.
Respectfully submitted:
Leonid Rudnytzky, Ph. D., Professor of Germanic and Slavic Literatures La Salle College, Philadelphia, Pa. and Director of the Philadelphia Center St. Clement Ukrainian Catholic University
Miroslav Labunka, Ph. D., Associate Professor of History La Salle College, Philadelphia, Pa. and Associate Director of the Philadelphia Center St. Clement Ukrainian Catholic University
Philadelphia, June 23, 1980
