Claiming religious freedom in Soviet Ukraine: ‘letters to the authorities’ of Orthodox believers in Chernihiv, 1960s–early 1970s

The article focuses on the petitioning campaign by Orthodox believers from Chernihiv, which began in 1962, to reclaim the Holy Trinity Church, closed during Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign. Religious activists wrote hundreds of letters with thousands of signatures and made dozens of visits to those they saw as ‘the authorities’, responsible for deciding the fate of their churches. These included primarily local party and state officials in Chernihiv, Ukrainian republican authorities in Kyiv and all-union authorities in Moscow, along with the official Soviet body responsible for religious affairs – the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC), renamed the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA) in 1966. These ‘letters to the authorities’ are now stored in the Fond of the Ukrainian Republican Commissioner of CAROC/CRA in the Central State Archive of the Higher Authorities and Administration of Ukraine in Kyiv (Fond 4648, Folders 1, 5, 7). The article follows the first decade of petitioning, explaining why and how it evolved: how self-proclaimed loyal Soviet citizens, who believed in Soviet justice and adopted official discursive figures and practices to support their cause, gradually gained agency in the religious Cold War through their appeals to international bodies for human rights and religious freedom, and in defence of Ukrainian religious heritage. The length, intensity and scope of this petitioning campaign make it a notable display of religious activism and protest in the late Soviet period. By using a lived religion approach, the article contributes to the special issue’s central theme of the relationship between social and religious change, and to the historiographical re-evaluation of church–state relations and, more broadly, forced secularization in the USSR.