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Liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church and Vatican policies towards the Greek-Catholics in the USSR and other Warsaw Pact countries (1944–1953)

Viktoriia Serhiienko

This project is aimed to study the policies of the Holy See toward the USSR and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact on the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in the late Stalinist period. I would like to suggest a transnational perspective – looking comparatively at several countries, not just Ukraine, and paying special attention to interrelation in politics and the impact of the global trends on the local situation.

It is planned to reconstruct the multiple layers of the Vatican`s involvement, its information sources, and diplomatic tools, to capture the complex interrelation between religious and political aspects, and to understand the underground practices implemented locally and supported or disapproved by the Vatican. I am also going to analyze the formal and informal layers of interaction between the Vatican, on the one hand, and the communist authorities, on the other hand, towards the faithful of the disbanded Greek Catholic Church.

I hope that my research, which is not a study of church history in a narrow sense, would bring more insights to the history of the Stalinist period in Central and Eastern Europe.