Archival Documents of the Intelligence on the Ukrainian Autocephalous and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Churches' Activities Abroad
11/9/2023
Branch State Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service (hereinafter referred to as the BSA of the SZRU) purposefully and systematically searches, declassifies and studies documentary materials of historical value in the funds, and subsequently publishes them on the website of the SZRU for everyone to read.
Some materials on the work of the ogpu/nkvd/mgb/kgb of the ussr in spying on Ukrainian church figures, their communities and believers abroad, collecting information about their places of residence, movement, preferences, holding various events, as well as planning special operations to compromise them have been selected for the next thematic collection.
For the most part, this publication includes individual information, reports, and memoranda of the ussr state security services, which, on the basis of operational information, constantly prepared generalized reviews of the situation in the Ukrainian religious environment abroad. First of all, of interest is the information about Ukrainian religious communities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, the USA, Canada, as well as information about the composition of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and other denominations, their place and role in the life of Ukrainian emigration. The collection contains documents on the activities of leaders of religious communities and individual church figures, their biographical information. At different times, chekists opened cases against them, established constant surveillance and control, and collected information about their religious and political activities.
Of particular interest are the documents on how soviet special services were actively engaged in the destruction of Ukrainian Orthodoxy not only on the territory of the ussr, but also abroad. These are the measures of the mgb/kgb directed against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and their clergymen, who were prominent representatives of the national liberation movement.
After the Second World War, when the UAOC and the UGCC were liquidated by the stalinist regime, the mgb of the ukrainian ssr actively opened separate intelligence and surveillance cases against Ukrainian activists and church organizations that operated underground, as well as against those who emigrated abroad and continued to build the Ukrainian church there and fight for the restoration of Ukrainian statehood.
In total, 86 documents are chronologically included in the collection. Each document has a title and the numbers of the fund, the case, the volume and the page of the BSA of the SZRU.
The declassified documents are further evidence of how the kremlin leadership and its subordinate state security services interfered in the activities of the Ukrainian church in the diaspora, trying to discredit and distort not only the Ukrainian church, but the entire Ukrainian national liberation movement.
UNVEILED HISTORY
