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The Underground Religious Life of Greek Catholics in Soviet Central Asia: A Conversation with Roman Kruk, Interviewed by Ivan Fukalov

After the seminar on March 25, 2025, held at the IFEAC, Roman Kruk shares with us four topics that his colleague Ivan Fukalov highlighted.

Roman Kruk, Associate Researcher at IFEAC, PhD in history, presented in the form of a report the results of his research ‘Preservation of Ethno-Cultural Memory of Ukrainian Special Resettlers in the Conditions of the Underground Activities of the Greek Catholic Church in Soviet Central Asia’, which took place in 2023-2025 with the support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation. A combination of historical and ethnographic methods, archival research and the investigation of living cultural memory allowed him to reconstruct at a systematic level the existence of underground structures of the Greek Catholic Church that emerged in the region due to Stalin’s repressions and deportations. Below are the responses to questions submitted to the author by Ivan Fukalov, PhD in History and Associate Researcher at IFEAC.

 

Ivan Fukalov: What difficulties did you encounter during the research?

The religious panel embroidered by Karlag prisoner Maria Matulyak. She made it secretly while she was imprisoned. The embroidery was provided for publication by her daughter Olga Stasyuk. Karaganda, early 1950s. Photo credit: Roman Kruk

Roman Kruk: If we talk about historical memory and family narratives, the main difficulty here, we can say, is of an objective nature: very few representatives of the generation of special resettlers and victims of Stalinist repressions, those people who were directly evicted to Kazakhstan or were in the Gulag camps and then lived in exile on a special settlement, are still alive. Firstly, many families left for their historical homeland in the 1990s. Greek Catholics, respectively, to Ukraine, Germans to Germany, Poles to Poland, etc. Secondly, due to their age, only a few witnesses and participants of the events of the 1940s have survived to the present time. It should also be said that not all families saved their home archives, photo albums, documents, letters. Some of them transferred such things to the Apostolic Administration for Catholics of the Byzantine Rite of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, others simply liquidated them. What has survived is very interesting material both in terms of history and visual anthropology. I mean photographs. If we talk about state archives, it is difficult to work with the archives of Soviet authorities, courts and special services, because some of them are closed, some documents are given only to relatives.

Now, it should be said, there is an active process of declassification of documents in Kazakhstan, but even the declassified ones are not so easy to get to. For example, if you are a foreign researcher, you cannot get access to them, you cannot work with them in the reading room. In the post-Soviet space, only Ukraine and the Baltic States have fully opened archives related to repressions. There were other difficulties, but these difficulties are normal for any field research: not all informants are ready to talk about themselves and their families. Some are still afraid to publicise information about the persecution. Some are afraid of being hurt by sensitive statements, because we are in an era of memory wars, when collective memory has become a very politicised issue. People are very aware of that. And, of course, there are issues – for example, the issue of ideological disagreements within families, intra-family feuds – that few people would want to discuss. People report some things on condition of anonymity, some things we can only guess about. But for the most part, the informants are quite open and willing to contribute to the research in any way they can. People themselves are interested in remembering and telling about their lives, about their ancestors and relatives, about underground priests who are connected with their families. So I would not say that there were many difficulties. On the contrary, I was lucky to find very interesting informants and many documents in the church archives.

 

I.F.: Are there active parishes now and what is the average number of parishioners?

R.K.: Of course, there are officially active parishes. The largest parish is in Karaganda, the Church of the Protection of Our Most Holy Lady. There are also parishes in Astana, in Pavlodar, in Satpayev, in Almaty. The parish in Almaty does not have its own temple, so Greek Catholics there are still conducting services in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.

As for the number of parishioners, it is not an unambiguous question. I do not have official information, but I can proceed from observations and available data. The ambiguity of the question is who is considered parishioners and who is considered Greek Catholics in general, because there are more people who have a confessional identity than there are people who go to church. Some appear in churches rarely, on major holidays, while others go faithfully every Sunday. Still others know that their families are Greek Catholic, and may even perform home rituals and observe, for example, Christmas traditions, but do not attend church. If people live in remote settlements, they may identify themselves as Greek Catholics, but attend an Orthodox church (or a Roman Catholic church) because they do not have their own.

In June 1993, a Roman Catholic priest from Karaganda, Johannes Boersch, sent a letter to Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky (Мирослав Іван Любачівський) in Lviv, asking him to send a Greek Catholic priest. In this letter he noted that there are more than 100,000 Ukrainians living in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, and more than half of them are Greek Catholics. But these are, of course, offhand figures. It should be taken into account that by the 1990s, not all of them came from Greek Catholic families, but rather a minority of them retained their ethno-cultural and religious identity, as some of them were assimilated, some of them simply moved away from religion. We also have data from a Roman Catholic priest Zbigniew Grygorcewicz who served also in the Oriental rite, i.e. for the Greek Catholics of Karaganda, in the period 1993-1996. According to him, the parish community then numbered about 500-750 people. It is about those people who go to church regularly. Now, after the departure of the previous, very religious generations and after repatriations, it is much smaller, maybe by half, but many people still gather for the big holidays in Karaganda. The parishes in other cities are much smaller. At the same time, I will repeat that there are more people who identify themselves as Greek Catholics, but there are no such statistics.

 

I.F.: How possible is a renaissance of the Greek Catholic Church in today’s post-Soviet space? And how do you think the future of the Greek Catholic Church in Central Asia will develop?

R.K.: I think the renaissance has already taken place. It occurred in the 1990s, when the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo came out of hiding. This happened actually in 1989. Soon communities were registered, church structures were restored, new monasteries came out of the underground and opened, old churches were returned and new ones were built, seminaries were established. Naturally, the main activity took place on the territory of Ukraine, especially in its western regions. The communities in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, which emerged underground in the 1950s, in places of special settlement, experienced legalisation and a period of rapid development. As for Central Asia, such catacomb communities appeared in 1954-1955, when after Stalin’s death Greek Catholic priests began to leave the camps. For a while there were even two underground administrators – Blessed Oleksa Zaritsky (Олекса Зарицький) in Karaganda and Bishop Josaphat Fedoryk (Йосафат Федорик) in Bishkek, then Frunze. In Karaganda, priests Mykolai Shaban (Миколай Шабан), Stefan Pryshlyak (Стефан Пришляк), Omelyan Myts’ko (Омелян Мицько), and Bishop Alexander Khira (Олександр Хiра) worked underground. Even before this wave, the Greek Catholic Father Volodymyr Prokopiv (Володимир Прокопив), who served Roman masses for Poles and Germans, worked in Astana, then Akmolinsk. It should be said that there were communities of believers even before the emergence of underground structures, but these communities were without priests. Deported people gathered in their homes and sometimes in cemeteries, without priests, and prayed there. This was also the case with Roman Catholics.

 

Greek Catholics in the courtyard of the Church of St. Joseph near the tomb of Bishop Alexander Khira, decorated with embroidered towels and flowers as part of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Karaganda, early 1990s. Photo credit: Archives of the Apostolic Administration for Byzantine Rite Catholics in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

 

I.F.: So there were Greek Catholics in Kyrgyzstan in Soviet times, too?

Priests from Ukraine in Central Asia. Bottom row (left to right): Alexander Ben (Roman Catholic, Kostanay), Mikhail Keller (Roman Catholic, Frunze), Yuriy Potereyko (Greek Catholic, Almaty). Top row (left to right): Joseph Svidnitsky (Roman Catholic, Dushanbe), Bogdan Todavcic (Greek Catholic, Frunze). The photo was taken in the spring of 1978 during M. Keller’s visit to Dushanbe, the capital of the Tajik SSR. Photo credit: Archives of the Apostolic Administration for Byzantine Rite Catholics in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

R.K.: Yes, there were. But a separate underground community did not emerge, because the main destination of mass deportations from Western Ukraine was Kazakhstan. I mean in the Central Asian region. Even more people were taken to Siberia and the Far East of the RSFSR. We can also find Greek Catholics in Uzbekistan, as part of the interned soldiers of the Polish Anders Army, in which there were mainly Poles, but also Ukrainians. Two interesting Greek Catholic priests are associated with Kyrgyzstan. The first is pater Bogdan Todavcic (Богдан Тодавчич), a hieromonk of the Basilian order (the Order of Saint Basil the Great), ascetic, exorcist and mystic, who for many years, from 1974 to 1990, worked quite legally here as a vicar of the Roman Catholic community. He knew German very well, so he became a native priest for our Kyrgyz Catholic Germans. The second was also a member of the Basilian order, Markian Kogut (Маркіян Когут). He travelled to Kyrgyzstan in the early 1960s. Pater Markian was in Kyrgyzstan only on visits, and at that time he was living in forced exile in Karaganda. Kogut wrote a great philosophical and theological poem ‘Conversations over Lake Issyk-Kul’, in which he also touches upon the history of Kyrgyzstan and the whole region.

Returning to the question of renaissance and prospects, it should be said that in Karaganda Greek Catholics openly held their liturgies in the Roman Catholic Church of St Joseph between 1980 and 1985, and then they were sent back underground. The first church was officially registered in 1993. Thirty years of free existence shows that the prospects are good and that people have an interest and enquiry. In addition to their spiritual role, the Greek Catholics of our region have a historical mission, the task of preserving the historical memory of the repressions. They fulfil this task well, as they are actively engaged in maintaining memorials and burial sites, participating in commemorative events, etc. Among other things, many people from deported families have donated photographs, embroideries, documents to the Museum of the Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions in Dolinka village (Karlag Museum), thus making a great contribution to the preservation of history. Currently, there is a new surge of interest in roots and identity. Many people remember who their ancestors were, what their life path was, look for the faith of their ancestors, and some join the Greek Catholic Church. It is also of interest to those Christians who appreciate the Byzantine rite, but do not find themselves in the Orthodox Church for one reason or another.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
ifeac (11 avril 2025). The Underground Religious Life of Greek Catholics in Soviet Central Asia: A Conversation with Roman Kruk, Interviewed by Ivan Fukalov. IFEAC. Consulté le 16 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13q5c