Though officially atheist, the Soviet Union’s metaphysics, morals, and liturgics were in many ways a simulacrum of the Christianity it had attempted to abolish. In this light the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church has many hallmarks of heretics being anathematized and forcibly converted to a new ‘orthodoxy’. Thus the Soviet Union, in common with Italian and German fascism of the same period, was a clear example of what the Hegelian political philosopher Moses Hess has called ‘political religion’, replete with cultic figures whose relics (e.g., Lenin) were venerated on certain feast days and whose writings became canonical texts of holy writ.