The 1930s saw a shift in Stalin's policy from revolutionary internationalism to national Bolshevism and the revival of the Russian imperial heritage. This shift predictably created conditions for the regime's agreement with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Drawing on this, Bohdan Bociurkiw proposes the concept of ecclesiastic-nationalities policies of the Soviet leadership. He claims that the official policy on the religious question was subordinated to the requirements of the official policy on the national question when it came to its implementation in Ukraine. (Bociurkiw, 1965). The 1943 church-state agreement is often seen as a watershed between the brutal, repressive policy toward the ROC in the post-revolutionary and interwar period, on the one hand, and the postwar decades, when repression focused on so-called sectarians and national religious manifestations, while the ROC became a kind of state church in the officially atheistic state, on the other hand. This is an oversimplified picture: the official anti-religious policy was not revised or curtailed at any point during the USSR's existence. Still, many visible changes took place since the mid-1940s: from the opening of Orthodox theological schools to the revision of clergy taxation. The contrast with the pre-WWII situation was especially stark because of the repressive policy against national churches (the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church) at the same time. The explanation by a Republican Commissioner of the Council for the Affairs of the ROC, Pavlo Khodchenko, used in the title, was given in 1945 to stop rumors about the inequality of religious confessions spread at the time. The aim of my paper is to trace the birth of the new Soviet policy toward religious confessions, establishing a visible hierarchy in the atheist state: with the Russian imperial church at the top and national churches severely repressed.