Religion: Completely Loyal to the State

Churches are full in the U.S.S.R.'s spiritual heartland

Ever since Christianity first reached it 1,100 years ago, the Ukraine has been strongly religious. Located southwest of Moscow, the region, with a population of 50 million, is agriculturally rich and deeply nationalist. In the 1930s Stalin all but crushed the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and in 1946 expunged Eastern-rite Roman Catholicism in favor of the more easily controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Even so, the Ukraine by official count still has 4,000 of the 11,000 Orthodox churches now open in the U.S.S.R.—only a fraction of...

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