The Ukrainian Greek Catholics in the Underground
The Ukrainian Greek Catholics in the Underground: Faith on the Margins of Soviet Society (1946–1989)
by Kateryna Budz, British Academy’s Researchers at Risk Fellow at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
During the period when the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) was officially outlawed in the Soviet Union (1946-1989), many Church members professed their faith in the underground. This presentation focuses on the strategies of accommodation and resistance that the clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholics employed in relation to the Soviet state. Based on archival holdings at the Blinken OSA Archivum, the presentation will seek to situate the Greek Catholics’ opposition to the Soviet state in a broader context of the human rights movement during the Cold War.
Mihajlo Mihajlov and Others: The Way to Support Democratic Solutions against the Communist Regime in Yugoslavia in the 1980s
by Mateusz Sokulski, Institute of History, University of Silesia in Katowice/ Institute of the National Remembrance, Katowice Department
The presentation surveys the ideas and activity of Mihajlo Mihajlov and his fellow dissidents from the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s. Special attention is placed on the 1980s and Mihajlov’s support of the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia. After being imprisoned twice in the 1960s and the 1970s, Mihajlov emigrated to the United States in 1978. The Yugoslav regime intended to get rid of the nonconformist opponent. Contrary, however, to the objectives of the Yugoslav regime, through his writings and activities abroad, Mihajlov promoted the issues of dissidents in order to gather support for the democratic movements in Yugoslavia and other communist countries. The anti-nationalist intellectual Yugoslav dissident established relations with outstanding figures of the Russian, Polish, and Hungarian pro-democratic political emigrants under the aegis of the Democracy International, a committee that he established to aide democratic dissidents in Yugoslavia. Mihajlov predicted that the communist elite in Yugoslavia would prevent any changes and feared a return of hardline Stalinist governance in the country. He appealed to the American political elite to support the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia. In his magazine, CADDY Bulletin, information about human rights abuses in Yugoslavia were widely published, revealing the struggles and repression of the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia. Mihajlov was in contact with many dissidents that resulted in mutual inspirations that will be discussed in the presentation. As Andrey Sakharov claimed, Mihajlov’s words about “freedom as a motherland” were important for many of those imprisoned in Eastern Europe. This presentation will consider his views on the “Solidarity” movement, ideas of spreading democratic initiatives in the communist countries, and on nationalism and imperialism, specifically from his essay The Return of the Great Inquistior as a polemic with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
