DOI: 10.4324/9781003311294-7 “There was no church, the old women gathered around the houses to pray. (…) And the children also went when we prayed around the houses. There were a lot of children. And there were no men, men didn’t go. (…) I have all the books, I can read Polish, I know all the prayers, only I can’t speak”. These were the words of Mrs. Janina Ulrich (née Stachowska), a 95-year-old resident of the village of Petro- vka in northern Kazakhstan. 1 She was part of a community of Polish and German “special settlers” who continued to practice Catholicism after their deportation in the Stalin era – a phenomenon that remained unstudied by both Soviet ethnography and Western sociology. What does this old Polish woman’s account reveal us? As it turns out, the Polish settlers’ local Catholicism showed tendencies similar to that identifed in Soviet Islam. Along with the “parallel” or “unoffcial” Catholicism that the Kazakhstani Polish woman mentions, there was also, as I will show in my paper, “offcial” or “registered” Catholic communities. 2 I will analyse how “unregistered”, “illegal” community of believers achieved offcial registration in accordance with Soviet religious legislation. The analysis will focus on two cases – one community with pre-revolutionary roots and the other formed only in 1936. This chapter will also examine how “underground” Catholicism functioned in the reality of Soviet Kazakhstan. The origins of Catholicism in the Kazakh steppes: a general overview Mrs. Janina is among the last surviving witnesses of a generation of Poles and Ger- mans who were deported from the Ukrainian SSR in 1936, and whose descendants have formed the backbone of Kazakhstan’s Catholic population. Nevertheless, the history of Catholicism in Kazakhstan does not begin in 1936, for its roots go back to the pre-revolutionary period. Before 1917, the structures of the Catholic Church in the Kazakh steppes were only weakly developed. However, the take-over of government by the Bolsheviks would lead to the complete disappearance of church structures on these lands. At the turn of 1922, there were only 15 parish churches and 25 affliates in the Trying to Leave the Religious Underground Registration of Catholic Communities in Late Soviet Kazakhstan Jerzy Rohoziński 6 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.