History of the Prohibition and Legalization of the Largest Persecuted Church of the XX Century. After the violent liquidation in 1946, the faithful of the UGCC maintained their faith underground for 43 years. The underground survived Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev to reborn in 1989. The ribbon heroes who exited the UGCC from the catacombs live in Ukraine and Russia, their fates closely intertwined with the history of the Church and the epoch.