In the 1920s-1930s, the Soviet government was faced with the fact that the most organized and systemic resistance to it during the suppression of Orthodoxy in the country was provided by two groups: the most poorly educated and “dark” groups of believers who closed themselves in communities at the village level, who turned out to be able to live without the clergy or who perceived as such wandering priests and “priests”, and some of the highly educated intelligentsia from large cities, who at first tried to keep the systemic defense together with the hierarchy, and in case of its refusal or betrayal – without it (for example, “mechevtsy” if anyone is interested to read about it).
In modern Ukraine, it is exactly the same – resistance to the state project of a single local Church was led, on the one hand, by “grandmothers from parishes”, united in network communities by “elders” authoritative for them, and on the other hand, legally justified and well-coordinated, and sometimes even the power protection of the parishes of these very “grandmothers” is carried out by the most advanced, quite liberal in the ecclesiastical sense, quite sympathetic to autocephaly (in principle) and rather young in age, part of the Ukrainian-speaking church, primarily the intelligentsia and clergy. And this is the factor that greatly mixed the cards for those who were going to fight the “conservatives” and “obscurantists”.
