Violation of the Legislation on Religious Rites in the Ukrainian SSR (second half of the 1960s – first half of the 1980s): manifestations, opposition of the Soviet authorities

The purpose of the article is a retrospective analysis of the specifity and peculiarities of manifestations of violations of the legislation on religious cults in the Ukrainian SSR during the period of developed socialism, the study of the forms and methods of the struggle of the Soviet party and state authorities against these phenomena. The methodological basis of the work is principles of historicism, consistency and objectivity in the approach to covering the events of the past based on a comprehensive study of sources and scientific literature. For solving these tasks, general scientific (systematization, typologization, retrospection), special-historical (problem-chronological, historical-comparative, critical-analytical, biographical) methods were used. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the attempt to: illustrate specific examples of violations by believers of legislation on religious cults; disclosure of the mechanisms of counteraction of the party-state apparatus to the spread of the influence of religion on the population of the region; establishing the effectiveness of scientific and atheistic propaganda of the central and local Soviet authorities. Conclusions. Communist Party documents marked «secret» allow us to state that the party and state authority of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1960s–1980s. have not achieved much success in monitoring the observance of legislation on religious cults, especially in the western Ukrainian regions. The outline thesis is vividly confirmed by numerous letters of believers to party officials with demands to open closed religious disputes, register liquidated, new religious communities, attempts by religious activists to arbitrarily open inactive religious buildings in certain localities of the Ukrainian SSR, the introduction of religious rituals into everyday life, underground ordination of the clergy and so on. To counteract the spread of religiosity among the population of the republic, the CPU widely used the methods of atheistic propaganda, applied repression to the most active believers and clergy