The Clergy of Kharkiv Region in a Time of Persecution and Hardship, 1931–1933

Abstract

The paper considers the situation of the clergy and religious communities of Kharkiv region during the violent collectivization campaign and the Holodomor. A review of the existing scholarship leads to the conclusion that, while numerous studies addressing various aspects of this subject have appeared in recent decades, the regional dimension of events, including in Kharkiv Oblast, remains insufficiently and largely superficially treated in the historiography. Further research in this area is both timely and necessary. The paper’s source base encompasses periodical publications, published thematic document collections, and, most importantly, a wide range of unpublished archival materials. The violent wholesale collectivization of agriculture was accompanied by an atheist assault on society, forcible secularization, and a sharp deterioration in the position of the clergy and religious communities of all confessions. In its campaign against religion and the clergy, the Bolshevik regime deployed, amid conditions of hunger and famine, a wide arsenal of methods: tax pressure, crushing requisitions of agricultural produce, obstruction of priests’ collection of donations, forced buying of government bonds, frivolous fines, “labor mobilizations”, repression, dekulakization and deportation, prohibition of religious services, refusal to register clergy, the creation of intolerable conditions for their residence in villages, and the closure of houses of worship. Outright brutality and humiliation of clergymen and church activists became routine for local administrators – including often ostentatious mockery of clergy and church officials, contempt for the religious feelings of believers, and flagrant violations of the law, including the right to freedom of conscience and other fundamental civil rights and freedoms.