Bishop Sipovich new file

41 The bishops, most of whom were Russians, agreed to this independence unwillingly, under pressure from the nationally conscious faithful. In emigration, free from that pressure, in 1946 they joined the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile. In the confusion caused by their defection the Belarusian Orthodox community was split into two camps of those who remained faithful to the bishops, and those who refused to follow them. The other division was on political grounds. Initially Belarusians in exile had one political representation in the form of the Council (Rada) of the Belarusian National Republic (abbreviated as BNR) which claimed continuity from the original Council set up in 1918, when Belarus was proclaimed independent. That independence was short-lived, and the Council went into exile, where it had remained ever since. Its centre after the war became Paris, where the Council’s president, Mikola Abramtchyk, lived. The right of the BNR to represent Belarusians was contested by the Belarusian Central Council (Rada), or BCR, a body set up in Minsk with the consent of Germans towards the end of 1943. The President of the BCR was Radaslau Astrouski. He and the whole BCR left Belarus together with the Germans in the first days of July 1944. After the war he kept quiet for some time, but emerged again on the Belarusian political scene towards the end of 1947, when the "cold war" between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union began to warm up. Among the BNR supporters there were people of different religious persuasions: Orthodox, Catholics, Evangelicals (Baptists) and even Muslims (Belarusian Tatars). It was the Orthodox of this group who, with the help of the Ukrainians, in 1948 succeeded in restoring the Belarusian Autocephalous Church. The BCR supporters, who were almost exclusively Orthodox, did not recognise this church. In this their position was no different from that of the former Belarusian bishops who defected to the Russian Expatriate ("zarubezhnaia") Orthodox Church. For this reason they were nicknamed by their opponents "zarubezhniki" or "expatriates". On the other hand the BCR supporters called the others "kryvichy", from the name of the largest of the three East Slavic tribes which formed the basis of the Belarusian nation. Some Belarusian authors suggested that, in order to avoid to be confused with Russians, Belarusians should adopt "kryvichy" as their national name. This suggestion, which might have been an interesting subject for academic discussion, had never been taken seriously by the majority of Belarusians. But the nickname stuck. The first signs of division in the Belarusian community in Great Britain began to show towards the end of 1947. They manifested themselves first of all in the change of attitude of certain members of the Association of Belarusians. The final break came on 2 May 1948 at the Annual General Meeting, when a group of members, all supporters of the BCR, walked out. It was a heavy blow for the Association. Eventually it recovered and continued its work. But the harm was done, and, although some of those who walked out eventually came back, the former unity of the Belarusian community was lost. Two months before those events, in March 1948, the supporters of the BCR founded their own organisation called "United Christian Whiteruthenian Workers in Great Britain", and began publishing the journal Abjednannie (Union), in which they attacked the management of the Association of Belarusians, targeting in particular Dr Vincent Zhuk-Hryshkievich and Father Ceslaus Sipovich. For the latter this was the first taste of the difficulties which lay ahead of him. It saddened him to see how the attitude of people could change overnight from friendly to hostile. About the same time Father Sipovich suffered another setback. On 10 January 1948 he gave an interview to a correspondent of the Catholic weekly paper Catholic