national idea. Ukraine declared its political independence following the fall of the Provisional Government in 1918 and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was established. Following the Soviet regime's taking root in Ukraine and despite the ongoing Soviet-wide antireligious campaign, the Bolshevik authorities saw the national churches as a tool in their goal to suppress the Russian Orthodox Church always viewed with the great suspicion by the regime for its being the cornerstone of pre-revolutionary Russian Empire and the initially strong opposition the church took towards the regime change (the position of the patriarch Tikhon of Moscow was especially critical). On November 11, 1921 , an unrecognised Church Council started in Kyiv. The council would proclaim the first formation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). The Russian Orthodox Church strongly opposed the formation of the Ukrainian autocephaly and not a single ordained bishop was willing or able to ordain the hierarchy for a new Church. Therefore, the clergy "ordained" its own hierarchy itself, a practice questionable under the canon law, in the "Alexandrian" manner - by laying on priests' hands on two senior candidates who became known as Metropolitan Vasyl (Lypkivsky) and Archbishop Nestor (Sharayivsky) (reportedly the relics of St. Clement of Rome who died in Ukraine in the 1st century were also used). Despite the canon law controversy, the new church was recognized in 1924 by the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VII. In the wake of the Ukrainization policies carried out in Soviet Ukraine in the first decade of the Soviet rule many of the Orthodox clergy willfully joined the church thus avoiding the persecution suffered by many clergy members who remained inside the Russian Orthodox Church. During the period in which the Soviet government tolerated the renewed Ukrainian national church the UAOC gained a wide following particularly among the Ukrainian peasantry. In the early-1930s the Soviet government abruptly reversed the policies in the national republics and mass arrests of UAOC's hierarchy and clergy culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930. Most of the surviving property was officially transferred to the ROC, with some churches closed for good and destroyed. On the eve of the Second World War only 3% of the pre-revolutionary parishes on the territory of Ukraine remained open to the public, often hidden in deep rural areas. Second Polish Republic The 1921 Peace of Riga treaty that ended the Polish-Soviet War gave the significant areas