Personal Responsibility of Organizers and Participants of Repressions Against Protestant Communities in Ukraine

Authors

Oksana Vysoven, Hryhoriy Skovoroda University in Pereyaslav, UkraineFollow
Ihor Datskiv, Professor of the Department of International Relations and Diplomacy, West Ukrainian National UniversityFollow
Alina Zadorozhnya, National Historical and Ethnographic Reserve “Pereyaslav”Follow
Yurii Fihurnyi, Research Institute of Ukrainian Studies of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National UniversityFollow

Author ORCID Identifier

Oksana Vysoven - ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0061-2301

Ihor Datskiv - ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8359-3937

Alina Zadorozhnya - ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-9054

Yurii Fihurnyi - ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6463-0920

Abstract

The article analyzes the personal responsibility of the organizers and participants in the repressions against Protestant communities in Ukraine. The punitive and preventive atheistic campaigns of the communist regime were carried out by specific individuals who were organizers and participants in the destruction of churches, the dispersal of prayer services, the destruction of material and spiritual values of Protestant communities, the harassment of believers at work and their place of residence, the imposition of monetary fines on them, and so on. Communist regime functionaries participated in the persecution of believers during trials, in places of imprisonment, etc. Believers suffered most from officials, security officers, and law enforcement officers who were fanatically devoted to the totalitarian government, and due to them, the communist regime mercilessly persecuted all those who opposed it for a rather long period. The organizers and participants of the repressions are responsible for their misanthropic actions, organized against believers of various denominations of the Christian Church in the period of the 1940s–1980s. It was substantiated that, first of all, the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the heads of the Ministry of State Security-State Security Committee, the heads and commissioners of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults had to be responsible and condemned by the democratic world for crimes against humanity, including against believers of Evangelical Baptist Christians and all religious denominations, as those who were the organizers of anti-religious campaigns, their names should be recorded and included in the court proceedings, and the court should establish the degree of guilt or innocence. It is proposed that an open trial of functionaries of the communist regime and all those involved in crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitations is required.

Recommended Citation

Vysoven, Oksana; Datskiv, Ihor; Zadorozhnya, Alina; and Fihurnyi, Yurii (2025) "Personal Responsibility of Organizers and Participants of Repressions Against Protestant Communities in Ukraine," Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol. 45 : Iss. 6 , Article 10.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55221/2693-2229.2641
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol45/iss6/10