Can you be any more ignorant? The Ukrainian Catholic Church was the largest illegal church in the world up until 1989.
I did not write about Stalin. And you still do not address the supportive role of the partriarch of Moscow(Aleksei) in the persecution of other Eastern Churches.
It is a fact that the Russian Orthodox Church was the recipient of confiscated churches & properties, so it begs the question.............
Why do the Ukrainian Orthodox & Catholic Churches, to this day, have to butt heads with the Russian Orthodox Church to have their properties respectfully return to them? It would have been the honorable thing to do but it seems denominational vanity gets precedence over morality.
They are Catholics are they not? The Soviets cared nothing for the Uniate differences between Orthodox and Latins so these full Catholics (unless they claim some mutation) were placed under the Latin Churches until Soviet President Michael Gorbachev allowed these Uniates to reform. The Orthodox Church had nothing to do with it. In fact it was under the Soviets that the Uniates were allowed to reclaim Churches - while the Orthodox were still locked out of theirs.