It also had the unintended effect of increasing the importance of the Ukrainian clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church. Although the authorities closed Orthodox churches en masse in the traditionally Orthodox regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, they were much more careful in western Ukraine, where excessive pressure might well have caused believers to abandon government-controlled Russian Orthodoxy and join the “nationalist” Ukrainian Catholic Church, which maintained an underground existence. Most of the approximately 8,000 parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church that survived
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