The history of the Catholic Church in Kazakhstan dates back to the 13th century, when missionaries from the Hungarian Franciscan and Dominican orders were sent to spread the Gospel in Magna Hungaria – the mythical homeland of the Hungarians, thought to be located in the vicinity of the southern Urals. Whether the missionaries ever reached the Urals is unclear, but this marked one of the earliest known efforts to introduce Catholicism to Central Asia. Greater success was to follow when missions were dispatched to the khans of the Golden Horde.
The Travels of an Italian and a Pole
The Golden Horde was a vast state which stretched from the Black Sea to Central Asia, encompassing Siberia, the Urals, and the North Caucasus. It is known that the papal legates: Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Benedict of Poland from Wrocław met with Batu (Khan of the Golden Horde) and his son Sartak in 1246. The meeting took place in Sarai, at that time the capital of the Golden Horde, located on the Volga River. Seven years later, in 1253, the Franciscan William Rubruck, acting as an envoy on behalf of French king Louis IX the Saint, reached the capital of the Mongol khanate Karakorum, meeting there with Khan Mongke.
The journey of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine deserves special attention. This courageous Franciscan, left Lyon on April the 16th 1245, at the age of 63, to negotiate an alliance with Russia on behalf of Pope Innocent IV against the Mongol invasion. However, Giovanni’s desire to meet face to face and look them in the eye, influenced his decision to go directly to the Mongol rulers on February the 3rd, 1246. Two months later, he met with Batu Khan in the territory of Kipchak (Kazakhstan). In turn, Batu Khan dispatched his own courageous envoy to the seat of the Great Khan of Mongolia, located near Karakorum, the capital of the empire. During his three-and-a-half-month stay at the court of the Great Khan, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine was afforded the unique opportunity to not only learn more about the legendary Mongols, but to even participate in the ceremonies related to the election of the new ruler of the Mongol Empire, Güyük.
We baptized several people…
The presence of Catholics in the territories of present-day Kazakhstan was marked not only by meetings with the khans of the Mongol Empire, but also by the creation of church administration structures. From 1292, missionary centers began to develop in the cities of the Great Silk Road, eventually leading to the creation of two dioceses: Tataria Aquilonaris and Tataria Orientalis. Franciscans who came with a mission to the territory of Kipchak (Kazakhstan) obtained the following privileges from the descendants of Genghis Khan: exemption from military service, from all kinds of taxes, and in addition, the khans were obliged to guard Catholic churches and bell towers. In 1328, the Catholic diocese of Almalyk (southeastern Kazakhstan) was established. The first bishop of this diocese was to be Carlino de Grassis, and in 1338 he was succeeded by Father Richard of Burgun, who was martyred in 1339 (1342?). Confirmation of the existence of the Catholic diocese in Almalyk is found in the memoirs of the papal legate Giovanni Marignoli: “Three years after leaving the papal court (1338) we arrived at the border of Armalek (Almalyk) (…). There we built a church, bought a plot of land, served mass and baptized several people. We preached freely and openly, and we were fearless, even with the knowledge that only a year before a bishop and six Minorite brothers had been martyred there.” The contacts established during missionary journeys were severed at the beginning of the 14th century, when the Uzbek Khan declared that the state religion of the Golden Horde was to be Islam. Catholicism fell upon difficult times. Temples and monasteries were destroyed, and the faithful and their pastors were tortured and killed. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the last traces of Christianity disappeared from Siberia and Central Asia.
The largest parish behind the Urals
The Catholic Church in Central Asia was to experience a resurgence at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1815, the Jesuits founded a parish in Tomsk, which formally covered the territories of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. It was one of the largest behind the Urals. Legally, it formed part of the Archdiocese of Mogilev and was subordinate to the Metropolitan of Mogilev. The parish priests and vicars who assisted him served the Catholic communities scattered over the vast territories of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Over time, as a result of exiles and voluntary labor migration, a significant number of Catholic believers appeared in Siberia and Kazakhstan. In turn, this fueled an increase in the number of Catholic parishes established behind the Urals. After the establishment of an independent parish in Omsk in 1893, pastoral duties in northern, eastern, and central Kazakhstan fell to the parish priest of Omsk; Western and southern Kazakhstan, along with Central Asia, were subject to the military chaplaincy in Tashkent.
According to the first and only census carried out in the Russian Empire in 1897, Catholics in the Asian part of the country numbered 13,585. Administratively, the parishes and branches in northern Kazakhstan belonged to the Omsk deanery of the Mogilev archdiocese, established in 1910. At that time there were numerous chapels on the territory of present-day Kazakhstan: in Semipalatinsk, Kellerivka, Petropavlovsk, Rozovka, Lubimovka, Linyivka, Baronovka. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the economic and social reforms of Pyotr Stolypin contributed to the large-scale migration of people to Siberia and Kazakhstan. New parish branches were established, Catholic communities flourished, and requests for clergy to be assigned to newly formed parishes constantly flowed in to the Empire’s capital. Catholics, frequently without any formal permission, began the construction of churches and rectories.
There is no place for religion
After the October coup and the establishment of power by the Bolsheviks (1917 the Catholic Church in Russia experienced the beginning of its next period of difficulties. The Bolshevik government announced the construction of a new model of society in which there would be no place for religion. Relations between the state and the Catholic Church deteriorated rapidly. The Christian model of peace and interpersonal relations did not fit into the framework of the future communist society. Religion stood as an obstacle to the Bolsheviks’ plans to subordinate human consciousness, which explains why they spared no means in order to eliminate it. It is worth emphasizing that the first circulars and decrees of the Bolsheviks were directed against religion, the Church, the clergy and the faithful. From the very beginning, the government’s policy aimed to eliminate the Church from all spheres of life. In addition to administrative and legislative measures, the Bolsheviks – desiring the eradication of religion – employed terror.
Catholic Church history in the period following the Bolshevik coup in Kazakhstan, can be divided into two stages: the history of the functioning of the apostolic vicariate in Siberia (1921–1936/8) and the history of the deportation of Catholics, which began in 1936 and lasted until 1941. In the first period, the focus is mainly on the relatively normal activity of the structures of the Catholic Church: the pastoral work of priests and parishes, relations with the Vatican, etc. Due to the enormous distances and the impossibility of administering parishes in Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East (due to the civil war and the chaotic nature of communication), in the early 1920s the Vatican made the decision to separate these territories from the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Mogilev.
Apostolic Vicariate of Siberia
On December the 1st, 1921, Pope Benedict XV created a new administrative unit – the Apostolic Vicariate of Siberia, directly subordinate to the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. In doing so, he established the largest administrative entity in the Catholic Church. Such a reform of the Church structure in the USSR was proposed to the Vatican in 1920 by the Archbishop of Mogilev, Eduard von der Ropp, who had been expelled from the Soviet Union a year earlier.
Before deciding upon reorganization of the structures, the Pope sent an apostolic visitor, Archbishop Jean Guébriant, to Siberia. After visiting China and the Far East, on July the 14th, 1921, he travelled on to Chita and Transbaikalia (visiting Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, Blagoveshchensk, and Verkhneudinsk), and upon his return, he passed on the data collected he had collected to the Vatican. The newly established vicariate initially consisted of five deaneries: Tomsk, Omsk, Irkutsk, Tashkent and Vladivostok. On the 2nd of March 1923, Pope Pius XI elevated the deanery of Vladimir (the Maritime and Amur regions and the island of Sakhalin) to the rank of a diocese, at the head of which he placed Bishop Karol Śliwowski.
The original seat of the Apostolic Vicariate of Siberia was the city of Harbin, and its administrator for the first two years was the Franciscan Father Gerard Piotrowski. Bishop Śliwowski only took over the management on the 17th of December 1924. However, he was not able to personally manage it, due to Harbin already being outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Therefore, in 1926, Father Julian Groński from Tomsk was appointed as the new apostolic vicar in Siberia. After the separation of the territory of the Vladivostok diocese from the vicariate, it consisted of an area of 9.5 million square kilometers. The number of faithful (depending on the source) ranged from 75 to 101–140 thousand. Several dozen priests served in the vicariate, working in 80 parishes and branches. According to statistical data, on January the 1st, 1925, there were 25,120 Catholics in the Omsk deanery, with 3 churches and as many priests at their disposal. In the Tomsk deanery, the number of Catholics totaled 27,500 along with 5 priests, in the Irkutsk deanery the faithful numbered 23,800 with 3 priests, and in the Tashkent deanery – 1,500 believers and 1 clergyman. Thus, within the entire vicariate there were 77,920 followers and 12 priests.
The Great Terror
In fact, the Vicariate was liquidated during the “Great Terror”, when on October the 12th, 1937, the last apostolic administrator, Father Antoni Żukowski, was shot and all churches in the area were closed down.
The “Great Terror” of 1937–1938 was the culmination of Soviet repression, against both the Church and the faithful. During the so-called “Polish operation” of the NKVD (NKVD order no. 00485 in force from August the 11th, 1937), clergy were shot, accused of participating in activities in the Polish Military Organization and of spying for the Vatican and Poland. This operation served as the prototype for other national operations (German, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.), in which the Soviet authorities not only fought against and destroyed national minorities, but also exploited the situation in order to eliminate religious denominations. It is estimated that around 120 Catholic priests were murdered in the Soviet Union in the unfolding of the Great Terror. During this period, the Soviet authorities also decided to close down almost all religious buildings. In 1937 alone, over 8,000 Orthodox churches were made off limits.
In the spring of 1936, around 70,000 Poles and Germans from the Ukrainian SSR, most of them Catholics, were deported to Kazakhstan. The process of Sovietization got underway in the Polish lands occupied by the Soviet Union after September the 17th, 1939. One element of this process was the purging of potential “enemies of the people.” They were carried out in four waves (February the 10th, 1940, April the 13th, 1940, June the 29th, 1940, and May-June 1941). The outcome of these actions was the forced displacement of over 330,000 Polish citizens, most of whom were Catholics. It is worth mentioning that one category of deportees included Catholic priests, who, together with their parishioners, were forcibly deported to Siberia.
In 1941, on the territory of the Soviet Union (excluding the territories annexed after September the 17th, 1939), there were about 200 open churches, including two Catholic ones (in Moscow and Leningrad).
The Church from the Beginning
When the structures of the Catholic Church were destroyed, practically all churches were closed down, and priests experienced various means of repression. A new period had begun in the history of the Catholic Church in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East – the period of the so-called catacomb (or camp) Church. It existed in secret, without visible structures, parishes, or public services. The exception was a short period in 1941–1942, when formation of the army under General Wladyslaw Anders was being carried out. At that time, the Soviet authorities allowed Poles released from camps and poseloks to perform religious ceremonies.
Formally, the Apostolic Vicariate of Siberia existed until April the 13th, 1991, when the Holy See established new structures of the Catholic Church in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. At that time, the Apostolic Administration of Siberia with its seat in Novosibirsk and the Apostolic Administration of Kazakhstan and Central Asia with its seat in Karaganda were established. On May the 18th, 1999, these offices were merged into the Apostolic Administration of Western Siberia, which became a diocese on February the 11th, 2002.
Analyzing Soviet anti-religious policy between 1920–1930 and the deportations in 1936 and from 1940–1941, one can conclude that these two processes were mutually exclusive: on the one hand, the Soviet authorities physically destroyed the Catholic Church during the Great Terror, but starting in 1936, they proceeded to relocate a large number of Catholics to the same territories. The Soviets counted on the fact that, torn away from their homelands, they would no longer keep their faith, because all religious activity had been officially banned. However, the difficult situation of the deportees and the camp inmates contributed to the revival of their spiritual life. Later, in the mid-1950s, it was that very faith that enabled the revitalisaton of the Catholic Church, and in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it also allowed the Holy See to establish new church structures.
Dmitriy Pańto (PhD), historian, he works at Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk
Translated by Sylwia Szarejko