After the Great Terror: Soviet Repressive Policies Against Religious Denominations in Kharkiv Region, 1939–1941

Abstract

The article examines Soviet persecution of religious groups in Kharkiv region on the eve and at the outset of the German-Soviet war. The author reviews the state of research on this subject in national historiography and argues that, despite the appearance in recent decades of a number of works on the repressive policies of the Soviet totalitarian state against religion and the church in the 1930s, the regional aspects of this subject are still not well understood. This fully applies to Kharkiv region, especially in the immediate prewar period. Attention to the Bolsheviks’ repressive policies against the clergy and believers of the region is usually limited to the 1920s and 1930s, while religious persecution in the last years before the war remains mostly neglected, even though the source base for its study is not lacking. This makes the present work particularly relevant. The article shows that, despite the termination of the Great Terror at the end of 1938, repressions against clergy and believers did not stop, although their scale sharply decreased compared to the period of 1937–1938, which created the illusion of their complete (or almost complete) cessation. It is argued that the main reason for such persistence was the conceptual continuity of the political course of the Soviet totalitarian state regarding religion and the church as a social institution. The programmatic goal of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), with its monopoly on power, remained unchanged: the creation of a religionfree society. Based on both published and newly-discovered archival sources, the author finds that the repressions of 1939–1941 extended to almost all religious denominations of Kharkiv region still active at the time – congregations of the ‘Sergian’ Russian Orthodox Church, Renovated Church, Old Believers, Baptists, and others. The state security apparatus de facto fully controlled and directed the activities of religious organizations while simultaneously carrying out repressions against them. It is shown that during this period both clergymen, including high-placed hierarchs, and ordinary believers were subject to persecution. It is also noted that in the immediate pre-war period the NKVD significantly intensified its campaign against the ‘Jewish clerical underground’ in Kharkiv (and throughout Ukraine), persecuting the most active members of the Hasidic community.