Religion
The philosopher Karl Marx, the great exponent of the socio-economic communist vision, might have warned against religion as “flowers on the chains of the proletariat” (Marx, 1843), but both the Russian Tsars and the Communist Party that followed them made sure that Russians were holding the end of the Ukrainians’ chain-of-religion.
Russians were mockingly atheist in their rhetoric. Pragmatically, however, the Russians knew that if the state could control the religion of the masses, you could have power over its adherents. The transfer of the Ukrainian Church to the “pastoral oversight” of the metropolitan of Moscow in the middle of the 19th century had been a straightforward play for control of the Ukrainian soul.A politically conscious national church network, functioning in the language of the subjugated, provides a focal-point for national resistance. If every cupola on every little church in every little village is a proclamation of God’s delight in a Ukrainian congregation, that would be a major boost to nationalist aspirations. The Russians understood that, and they thought they had eliminated the threat. Adherence dropped to a low point of 39% in 1991.
All was not as it seemed, however. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church might be in eclipse, but it had hidden reserves of strength, as it waited for the right circumstances to roar back into life.