Religious Assimilation: Ban on Worship in the Native Language

As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may categorically prohibit the use of the indigenous people's language in religious rites, sacred texts, and spiritual education. Displacing the local language from the sacred sphere cements its status as second-rate, severs the spiritual bond between generations, and accelerates the linguistic absorption of the colonized society.

ID: T0116.003
Sub-technique of:  T0116
Tactic: Persistence
People: Ukrainians
Contributors: decolonial.ist project
Version: 1.1
Created: 21 April 2026
Last Modified: 9 August 2026

Procedures Carried Out


January 1685
C0008 Annexation of the Kyiv Metropolis by the Moscow Patriarchate (1685–1690)
G0008 Tsardom of Muscovy
S0011 Moscow Patriarchate

Following the establishment of control over the metropolitanate came the gradual unification of liturgical printing and pronunciation along Muscovite models, culminating in Peter I's direct decree of 1720: church books could be printed only after being checked against Muscovite ones, "so that there be no discord or distinct dialect in them"[1].

January 1769
C0044 Russification of Education and Religion (1769–1786)
G0009 Russian Empire
S0011 Moscow Patriarchate

The displacement of the local population's language from the sacred sphere: metropolitan Samuil Myslavsky's order of 26 October 1784 demanded that students and future priests practice "the reading of church books of every kind, and above all the Bible, acquiring a good and pure pronunciation" - after the Moscow model instead of the Ukrainian church tradition, under the threat of expulsion from the clerical estate[2], and in 1786 metropolitan Myslavsky prescribed to the clergy the unification of pronunciation and orthography along the Russian model[3].

References