Sytuacja prawna organizacji religijnych w obwodzie winnickim na Ukrainie 1918-1964

Abstract

The state policy towards religion during the proletariat dictatorship was modelled on the legal acts accepted by the Commune of Paris. They were the foundations upon which the party organized its programme and appropriate laws. It is the decree entitled “On the Division Between the Church and the State and School” of 23rd January, 1918, that decided about the existence of the Church. The decree was included into the Constitution of the Soviet Russia as article 13. In practice, that article was subordinated to article 6 of the constitution which read that CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] was the leading force of the Soviet society, the core of the political system, and of the state and social organizations. The application of the above article was regulated by numerous decrees, circulars, orders, resolutions and instructions issued for the administrative authorities which could interpret them freely, and thus had an unlimited range of opportunities to remove any manifestations of religious life. The order of 9th April 1929, which unified legal acts pertaining to religious organizations in the territory of the whole Soviet Union, in the Ukraine it gained its interpretation on 23rd June 1932 under the form of an Instruction issued by the Presidium of the All- Ukrainian Executive Committee. Moreover, the Stalin constitution of 1936 regarded all activities which were not part of the “cult” as illegal. The socio-political circumstances after the Second World War forced the party and state authorities to change some of the legal norms, and facilitated a more favourable interpretation of the actually binding norms. Owing to that religious organizations, among others, gained a limited legal personality. The local authorities introduced also their own legal norms which “regulated” the situation of the Church in their own territory. Further changes in legislation as regards religion took place in 1958, at the November Joint Assembly of CC CPSU [Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. It was then that Khrushchev presented his own 7-year plan to “Build communist society,” a plan that presumed, among others, total elimination of religion from social life. Consequently, the Presidium of CC CPSU adopted a new resolution as regards religion and the Church. The resolution legitimized legal limitation of religious organizations and the clergy. The law turned out to be ineffective, which is testified by the fact that the proxy to the Council of Religious Cults of the Winnica region proposed in 1964 to introduce a new all-Soviet or republican legislation about cults. This legislation was developed not on the basis of the resolution of 1961, but on the decree of 1918.