CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

Finding the missing link

In 1989, Dr. Bohdan Rostyslav Bociurkiw had completed the final draft of the book, "The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950)."

Though its publishers, the University of Alberta Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press (CIUS) in Edmonton, wanted to release it, Dr. Bociurkiw said "no."

"I wanted to wait for more documentation, since the Church was given limited powers after [Mikhail] Gorbachev met with the pope [John Paul II] in 1989," said the now 70-year-old author.

It would take seven more years before the book - which, at press time, approached the 500-page mark in manuscript form - was finally released by the CIUS Press in Edmonton and Toronto in late July. It was well worth the wait.

In 1990, Dr. Bociurkiw returned to his native Lviv after being away since 1944, when he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a German concentration camp. He managed to obtain some rare photographs from Metropolitan Andrey Sheptystky's November 5, 1944, funeral and speak to some survivors.

A year later, Dr. Bociurkiw returned to Lviv and pored through Lviv's Central State Archives - bringing a stack of documents back home with him to Ottawa.

But in 1992 he fell gravely ill, suffering from congestive heart and kidney failure, and prostate cancer. When doctors inserted a catheter to clear the blocked arteries surrounding his heart, they inadvertently scraped the debris into his right leg. A diabetic, Dr. Bociurkiw lost circulation below the knee and almost lost it. "They had already taken measurements for amputation," he recalled.

But, like the people he chronicles in his new book, Dr. Bociurkiw proved to be a stubborn survivor. "I prayed to God to give me a sabbatical from my illness so that I could finish this book," said Dr. Bociurkiw, who still has difficulty walking and suffers from hearing loss.

During his convalescence, a researcher-friend from Ukraine continued to send Dr. Bociurkiw copies of documents from the Lviv archives, which were hidden during the failed Soviet coup attempt in August 1991.

Contained within them was something that quickly revived the Ottawa-based political scientist. Dr. Bociurkiw fingered the man responsible for conducting the liquidation campaign against the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

"His name was Karin," said Dr. Bociurkiw, his voice defiantly rising as he spells out each letter of the man's name. "Serhiy Tarasevych Karin."

Karin was Ukrainian, and his name was actually Danylenko. Karin was his NKVB code name.

Dr. Bociurkiw said that Danylenko's campaign against Christianity was ruthless. In the late 1920s, he was Joseph Stalin's agent to wipe out the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (the subject of Dr. Bociurkiw's next book). After serving a four-year stint as a Soviet spy overseas during the 1930s, Danylenko returned to the Soviet Union and became head of Stalin's special operations on state security to fight Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in 1944.

Danylenko, who died blind in 1989 at the age of 91, wrote slandering vitriol against the Church - as late as 1972, 25 years after his retirement - but Dr. Bociurkiw said Stalin was the brains behind the Soviets' anti-Catholic campaign.

"Stalin issued the order to liquidate and launch an open attack" against the Catholic Church in the Soviet Union and its satellites in mid-March 1945, after the Yalta Conference, he noted.

No sooner had the Soviets acquired Catholic-dominated western Ukraine, than they began closing churches and arresting clergy. By 1946, the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukraine was officially dead, as far as the Soviets were concerned.

Dr. Bociurkiw explained that few Ukrainian Catholic bishops, including Sheptytsky's successor, future-Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, would have been surprised by Stalin's vendetta. Ever since the Church united with Rome in 1596, Russian tsars were out to suppress it - from Peter the Great to Nicholas I.

"Stalin's objective was the same," said Dr. Bociurkiw. "It wasn't Marxist-Leninist philosophy, but rather a kind of new, Soviet-Russian nationalism which really aimed to assimilate Ukrainians."

For Stalin, the heavily nationalistic western Ukraine, especially Galicia, was the trouble zone. Ever since Austria annexed it in 1772, Ukrainians living there had enjoyed a sense of autonomy from the Russians that was foreign to those living in the East.

But even before Stalin officially acquired Galicia, his disdain for western Ukrainians was palpable.

Dr. Bociurkiw's family felt Stalin's sting. Dr. Bociurkiw's brother, Taras, was accused of anti-Soviet underground activity and shot in 1941. He was only 18 years old.

Dr. Bociurkiw's mother, Halya, and his sister, Marusia, now 76 and living in Ukraine, were arrested in 1945 under similar charges and spent 10 years in a Siberian prison.

A family photograph, taken in 1937 and in which all three appear, sits prominently on a living room end table in the Bociurkiw home. Dr. Bociurkiw said it was carefully hidden when the Red Army entered western Ukraine in 1939. It's probably worth a touch more to him than the documentation revealing the Karin link. Certainly, the yellowed photograph personalizes Dr. Bociurkiw's lifelong research into Soviet oppression.

"Oh yes, it's very valuable," he said, the tone of his voice lowering.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 11, 1996, No. 32, Vol. LXIV

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