SUMMARY:

This article explores the use of religious ceremonies in Western Ukraine by Ukrainian national activists, the Nazi authorities, and the Soviet state during and immediately after the World War II. It contends that the religious ceremonies that bookended the successive occupations of Ukraine’s Galicia region demonstrate that while the visions of Ukrainian national liberation that local nationalists, Nazi officials, and the USSR promised the Ukrainian people were distinct, these actors found that drawing on the resonance of local religious authority was an effective strategy for mobilizing the population to participate in their differing calls to action. For various Ukrainian national organizations and later the Nazi occupying regime, commemorating the dead using familiar symbolic funeral ceremonies could render victims of Soviet state violence martyrs for the Ukrainian nation and characterize Soviet power as a foreign occupation. For the Soviet authorities, emphasizing the connections between local religious authority and an Orthodox ancestral tradition could tie people and territory that had historically been part of Polish and Habsburg lands to Russia and the Soviet Union. The use of religious ritual and the local clergy was not a rejection of nationalism or rule through national categories, but a way to use religion in simultaneous nation and state-building processes.