ABSTRACT
The Ukrainian struggle for survival as a people has expressed itself through the traditional structures of Eastern Christianity, such as autocephaly. This institution of the Orthodox church became a symbol, sometimes of mythical nature, of political independence. The initiative came from people, and then was facilitated by the Ukrainian state. For the latter, the issue of ecclesial independence of Ukraine is not only ecclesiastical, but also political. The Russian Orthodox Church directly and through its outpost in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, has systematically weakened Ukrainian resistance to the Kremlin. The Russian hostility to Ukraine catalyzed the cause for the Ukrainian autocephaly. This cause, however, was already at least one hundred years old. The first struggles for the Ukrainian autocephaly began after the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917. Constantinople also played a key role at that time because of the historical relationship between the churches of Constantinople and Kyiv, which began in the tenth century. This chapter explores the history of Orthodoxy in Ukraine and Ukrainian autocephaly and argues that current tensions can be interpreted as a conflict between competing visions of the role of neo-imperial political projects in the Orthodox church.
