“Who Will Answer at the Last Judgment?”: Emotions, Protest, and Subordination in the Kyiv Theological Seminary of the 1950s (The Case of Petro Honcharenko)

Abstract

The study aims to analyze the disciplinary practices of the Kyiv Theological Seminary during the first half of the 1950s. The focus is on examining the mechanisms of a private Orthodox educational institution functioning under the totalitarian Soviet regime through the lens of the individual experience of seminarian Petro Honcharenko. The author seeks to reveal the nature of the conflict between the student’s personal religious ethics and the administrative-hierarchical logic of the church leadership. The methodological basis of the work is the microhistorical approach, which allows for the illumination of global socio-cultural processes through the description of a “small” event. The toolkit of the history of emotions is also applied to analyze “emotional discipline” and the subjective experience of the actors. The key source of the study is P. Honcharenko’s letter to the Exarch of Ukraine, analyzed as an ego-document reflecting the religious consciousness of the youth of that time. Results. The article reconstructs the course of the conflict caused by the seminarian’s emotional reaction to the removal of his spiritual mentor from the parish. It was revealed that a specific regime of control prevailed in the seminary environment, requiring from students not only formal obedience but also a complete rejection of public moral judgments regarding the actions of the hierarchy. The behavioral strategies of key actors are investigated: the “non-institutional” religiosity of the Honcharenko brothers, bordering on mystical idealism; methods of ideological “deconstruction” of the believers’ experience by state officials; and the mediating role of the rectorate. Conclusions prove that Petro Honcharenko’s case is a revealing mirror of the structural contradiction of the era — the conflict between autonomous Christian ethics and the institutional logic of the Church’s survival in the Soviet state. The consequence of this contradiction was the “soft displacement” of sincere but “inconvenient” personalities from the system.