UKRAINIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT OF 1940–1950’S IN MODERN HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHIC RESEARCHES

Abstract

The role of the Ukrainian diaspora in popularizing the national church history is unquestionable. In the Soviet era, diaspora become the voice of the Ukrainian people in the international arena. However, it was not just a presentation of the ethnos, its uniqueness and riches. In the twentieth century, the national scientific diaspora unveiled to the world the horrors of great terror against the Ukrainian people, which was systematically introduced by the Soviet political nomenclature. Actually, it was outside the USSR for the first time that the scale of repressions against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR was presented for the first time, which was legally banned from March 1946 in Galicia, and since 1949 and in Transcarpathia. In essence, until 1989, the church continued the process of its survival outside the law, the struggle for the right to life of its clergy, monasticism, the struggle of believers for freedom of speech, religion, expression of will, etc. It was in the context of Ukrainian scholarly emigration that the Greek Catholic «catacomb» life was first introduced as a global phenomenon with which Soviet historical science fought through the falsification of facts and their censorship. A characteristic feature of special studies was the disclosure of information about the brutal persecution of the church in the USSR. The article emphasizes that the first attempts made by the native diaspora on the path of academic and scientific study of the history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Soviet era were extremely important. As early as the early 1990’s, the historiography of Ukrainian scholars abroad became the foundation for the revival of Ukrainian post-Soviet historiography.