Ukraine

For over a millennium, Ukraine, Europe's second largest country, has seen a variety of religious and political entities representing various cultures and social systems. It has been a crossroads of religious traditions and denominations.

[Page 1317]Out of a shrinking population of some 46 million, Ukraine's religious believers constitute about 32 million. Around 25–30 million of these are Christians. Over half of the Christians are Orthodox, divided among the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, and the smaller Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The rest include 4–5 million Greek Catholics, 1 or 2 million Protestants, less than a million Roman Catholics, and several million unchurched Christian believers. Jews, Muslims, and others number less than a million each. Religious belief and practice are strongest in western Ukraine and weakest in the east and south. Several million Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholics reside in other parts of the former Soviet Union as well as in western Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

Around 988 CE, Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv (Kiev) adopted Byzantine Christianity as the religion of his realm, known as Kievan Rus’. It received and developed a Byzantine Slavonic religious culture developed in Bulgaria on Greek models. In 1596, part of Ukraine's Orthodox Christians under Polish Lithuanian rule reestablished communion with the Roman Church. These were known as Uniates (later Greek Catholics). Some of the nobility embraced the Reformation. In the 17th century, there arose an influential Ukrainian Orthodox culture distinguished by its theological literature, church architecture, icon painting, and choral music. After the union of Cossack Ukraine with Muscovy in 1654, Orthodox Ukrainians came under Russian Orthodox Church jurisdiction. Most of western Ukraine, which passed to Austria in 1772 and to Poland after 1918, remained Greek Catholic.

During the national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, Christian motifs remained important in Ukrainian art and literature, also appearing in film. As in previous eras, the folk culture produced wooden churches, icons, and ritual objects.

In the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, an independent Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church thrived briefly, only to be destroyed along with the dominant Russian church in the 1930s. During World War II, Stalin restored the Russian Orthodox Church and, in 1946, suppressed the Greek Catholics. With the disintegration of the USSR, an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church sprang up along with a revived Greek Catholic Church. Evangelical Baptist, Adventist, Pentecostal, and other Christian congregations, persecuted under Soviet rule, expanded their activity in one of the most tolerant of the post-Soviet states.

Since the Middle Ages Jews have lived in Ukraine, the birthplace of Hasidism. The Jewish community survived repeated pogroms, only to be annihilated in the Holocaust. Most of Ukraine's Muslims are Crimean Tatars. Deported to Central Asia during World War II, they have been gradually returning to their homeland.