Russian Orthodoxy used by the Soviet, Moscow-Kremlin authorities to destroy Ukrainian religion and culture

Abstract

The greatest tragedy for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church occurred under the totalitarian Stalinist regime. Using the nineteenth-century proven scenarios of the tsarist autocratic Orthodox authorities' massacres of Uniates and Roman Catholics, the Soviet authorities used this historical experience to abolish the Union of Brest, sever the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's ties with the Vatican, and “reunite the Uniates” (Greek Catholics), as they said in Moscow at the time, “with their mother, the Russian Orthodox Church” (1946).