ORTHODOX MILITARY CHAPLAINCY IN THE PERIOD UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION 1918–1921

Abstract

The celebration at the state level of the anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 is a chance for scholars to rethink events, phenomena and processes of the past. Behind them were people who represented various social institutions, groups of people, and so on. The overwhelming majority of them have already received an appropriate assessment and a place in historiography, but perhaps not all. The least investigated problem of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 is the study of the functioning of the Chaplaincy movement in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army, which arose in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In fact, the purpose of the article is to cover the activities of priests on the fronts, their lives and the conditions of service. The study of this segment in the history of Ukraine as a whole and the events of centuries-old, in particular, will allow to broaden the understanding of the place of military priests in the ranks of the modern Ukrainian army. The reality of modern social and political processes is an occasion for the Ukrainian scientific community to take a somewhat new impulse to assess the past, in particular, to go beyond the traditional perception of events and facts. Most of them emigrated, often without proper scientific justification or refutation. This also applies to the Ukrainian liberation struggle, which began in the far 1917 and gave impetus to serious social transformations. For their militaristic political component, many of the serious processes that took place in the human mind were hidden. At the same time, a church-religious factor played a role, which influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, the will of the people and the definition of its vital landmarks. The urgency of the article is to rethink the role of the Orthodox clergy in the sociopolitical processes of 1917–1921 through the prism of its integration into the structures of the Ukrainian army.