25 years ago I belonged to the single largest banned religious community in the world. The Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was, until December 1989, the most sizeable officially banned religious organisation, persecuted by Soviet authorities for 43 years. The Church, somewhat miraculously, managed to survive “underground”, in the Gulags, in exile outside the USSR, and clandestinely across Western Ukraine. On December 1st 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, visited the Vatican and sealed a decision to lift the ban on my Church’s existence.
I was in my second year at University in Rome when, on that sunny and …read more
Source: Ukrainian Institute, London
