ABSTRACT
This is a book about the relationship between the Catholic Church and Russia from the advent of the Soviet era to the death of Pope Pius XI in 1939. It is based on archival material in both the Russian and Vatican archives and on secondary sources. The Vatican archives covering between 1917 and February 1939, when Pope Pius XI died, are open, and the Vatican has published select materials from its archives between 1939 and the end of World War II in a multivolume compendium called Acts et documents du Saint Siege relatives guerre Mondale. In addition, the archives of the Assumptionist priests, who were assigned to Moscow’s one Catholic Church, St. Louis des Français, are open for the Soviet period. The Russian archives that are available and that relate to the Catholic Church are sparse and eclectic, but sufficient enough, when used with secondary sources, to sketch the story between 1917 and 1939. Other primary sources that throw light on Soviet-Catholic relations include the lives of Catholics in Soviet Russia that the Martyrology Commission published in 2000, which was edited by Father Bronislaw Czaplicki and Irina Osipova, translated by Geraldine Kelly, and made available as Book of Remembrance: Biography of Catholic Clergy and Laity in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1918 to 1953, University of Notre Dame at https:// biographies.library.nd.edu/catalog.
