The Story of Father Ivan Kypriyan

From Euromaiden Press:

In 1920, Father Ivan was arrested by the communist regime and exiled to Siberia. Unfortunately, there is no record of Father Ivan’s exact place of interment. The UGCC Historical Mission addressed an official request for information on Father Ivan Kypriyan to the Russian FSB, but has received no reply to date. 

In the gulag, the Ukrainian priest suffered hunger, illness, bullying and torture at the hands of the Bolsheviks. In his historical study Field Chaplains of the Ukrainian Galician Army: In Commemoration of the 45th Anniversary of the Liberation Movement, Winnipeg 1963 (Полеві духовники УГА: у 45-річчя участи у Визвольних змаганнях), Father Ivan Lebedovych writes:

“He was a saintly man, even though he was dirty, dressed in rags, and known commonly as “No.8986 from Barrack No.A-322”… His story is closely linked to the concentration camps in distant Siberia, where hunger, torture and daily beating set the tempo of everyday life, darken each dawn of the frosty Siberian sky, where evenings bring no rest to weary bodies, no peace to men’s hearts, nor even a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow… in this dark hole of total misery and enslavement.”

The Bolshevik Gulag system spared no one. One day, a group of very young children was brought into Barrack No.A-332, where Father Ivan was also incarcerated. They were the children of “enemies of the people”, whose parents had been summarily executed by the soviet regime. As these unfortunate children received little food, few of them could survive the harsh Siberian winters. Dressed in filthy rags, these children were no longer children, but ghosts of themselves; many of them died silently from starvation and disease. (Read more.)

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