Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the Nazis

It has been said for years that one of the factors holding up the canonization of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky is some concern around what he may have said with regard to the German invaders of 1941. This new study, by a young historian Andriy Mykhaleyko, is therefore going to be invaluable in airing and analyzing these claims once and for all: Metropolit Andrey Graf Sheptytskyj und das NS-Regime: Zwischen christlichem Ideal und politischer Realität (Brill, 2020).

Mykhaleyko's book is published by Brill as the first volume in their new series, Eastern Church Identities. About that series Brill tells us this:

This new series focuses on the interplay between theological thinking and cultural self-understanding of the Oriental-Orthodox, the Byzantine and the Uniate branches of the Eastern Churches worldwide. The series studies the Eastern Churches' various roles within their mainfold contexts, i.e. either as actors within the transformation-processes in Eastern Europe or as minorities both in the Middle East and in the north American diaspora. By fully acknowledging the role of ritual and hagiography for the ecclesial community-building and the theology of the Eastern Churches the series opens up new approaches to an often-neglected dimension of global Christianity. The series accepts contributions in English, German and French. Each incoming manuscript is evaluated in a peer-reviewing-process conducted by renowned specialists from the editorial and the advisory boards.

And about the book itself the publisher tells us this:

Metropolit Andrey Sheptytskyj war der einflussreichste Repräsentant der Ukrainischen Griechisch-Katholischen Kirche im 20. Jahrhundert. Sein letzter Lebensabschnitt unter dem NS-Regime wird bis heute sehr gegensätzlich bewertet und kontrovers diskutiert.

Während die sowjetische Geschichtsschreibung Sheptytskyj als Kollaborateur des NS-Regimes, Feind des Kommunismus und Agenten des Vatikans verurteilte, verehrt die griechisch-katholische Kirche ihn als nationale Symbolfigur, als »neuen Moses«, dessen Heiligsprechung sie betreibt. Mykhaleyko legt einen Beitrag zur Neubewertung Sheptytskyjs vor: Durch die Kontextualisierung seiner Biographie im Zeitalter der Totalitarismen während der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts korrigiert die Studie die historischen Narrative, dekonstruiert die ideologischen Porträts Sheptytskyjs und entmythologisiert das ambivalente Verhältnis Sheptytskyjs zum NS-Regime.

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs (III): the Great Catastrophe

In the previous two installments treating The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, I noted some of Bouyer's wide-ranging publications, and then his contacts with some of the leading lights of Orthodoxy, especially in France after the 1917 Russian revolution. In this final installment, let us turn our attention to Bouyer's involvement with and analysis of the Second Vatican Council and in particular the disastrous liturgical "reforms" carried on in its name in the later 1960s.

Bouyer was a participant in both the council and the commission charged with reforming the liturgy. Before that, he was appointed to the commission for reforming seminaries, and he does not leave his readers guessing as to what he thought of his fellow commissioners: "a mass of worthless idiots," "mere blockheads obstinately clinging to their own limitations." They do and did nothing to prevent what Bouyer saw as the already longstanding "collapse of ecclesiastical culture in the seminaries."

Bouyer notes the debates about Latin at the council: often, he maintains, those most obstinate in defending Latin were the least capable of speaking it; and those who had facility in Latin did not see why it had to be imposed always and everywhere on everyone.

One of the major goals of Vatican II was the achievement of Christian unity. But every time that "ecumenism" comes up in Bouyer's memoirs, the unease is palpable. Though the reasons for his unease are not always clear, at one point his characteristic bluntness reasserts itself by quoting the Anglo-Catholic Eric Mascall's denunciation of "'Alice in Wonderland Ecumenism': Everybody has won and all must have prizes!" Bouyer objects to the fact that in the rush to unity, significant and serious doctrinal disagreements are merely dismissed as unimportant, "the important thing being to agree that one may behave or believe as he pleases."

In his various ecumenical activities over the years, Bouyer came into contact with other Orthodox figures after Lossky and Bulgakov (discussed in Part II of this series) had passed from the scene, including Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Metropolitan Georges Khodr of Lebanon. Strikingly, he would also encounter "Bishop Kiril of Viborg" who, in 2009, was elected Patriarch of Moscow. Bouyer would go on to serve from 1979 on the official commission for dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Church.

Bouyer was skeptical about how much official dialogues could achieve. What he thought more important and more efficacious was "a common effort of purification, of understanding, and especially of humble faithfulness to what is authentic." Bouyer despaired that few 20th-century churchmen, both Catholic and Orthodox, understood the need for, and were themselves capable of offering, such purification and reconciliation. Of the few he thought capable of doing this, he mentions Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, Metropolitan Nikodim again, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky.

Let us turn at last to Bouyer's experience with the commission reforming the Latin liturgy ostensibly in the name, and with the purported mandate, of Vatican II. He had the expertise to be able to take part in this effort, but equally the intelligence to see that what the others were trying to pull off was in fact a giant swindle--manipulating data to accord with pre-arranged conclusions and decisions; manipulating people to make them do what others had chosen for them to do. And the worst culprit here, the greatest fraudster and master manipulator was, of course, Annibale Bugnini, whose The Reform of the Liturgy (1948-1975) attempts to offer a grand self-justification. Bugnini's machinations eventually caught up with him and he was exiled from Rome in disgrace but his deeply damaging actions remain in place to the present day--and defended as recently as 2007 in the altogether absurd and risible book of Piero Marini, A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal. (I cannot improve on George Rutler's take-down of this book.)

Bugnini was adept at playing off members of the commission against one another and especially playing the commission off against the rather hapless Pope Paul VI. But we must not be too hasty to blame Paul for employing Bugnini, who had in fact begun his destructive reign at the behest of Pope Pius XII in the 1940s. Thus we see--once more--the lie that Pius was some towering figure of unflinching and unchanging "tradition." Pius brought in major liturgical revisions on his own initiative, and many of these were of provenance and rationale as dubious as those promulgated after Vatican II. (As a side note, it remains more than curious to me that Pope Paul VI has yet to be the object of a major scholarly biography. The only English biography I know of is Paul VI: The First Modern Pope by the deceased journalist Peter Hebblethwaite--an entertaining read, as I recall from many years ago now, but clearly prejudiced and not very intellectually rigorous. Pius XII, for his part, has been often studied but almost always entirely in connection with what he did, or did not, do during World War II; few focus on his liturgical views as far as I know.)

Bouyer begins his reflections on his experience by noting that "I should not like to be too harsh on this commission's labors," not least because it had some decent people on it with both intelligence and genuine pastoral solicitude. But all that was lost as the commission was hijacked by the "mealy-mouthed scoundrel" Bugnini, "a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty." The "deplorable conditions" under which the commission operated were a direct result of "the despicable Bugnini" who "cobbled together" a "slapdash Mass" (the infamous Eucharistic Prayer 2 in the Roman Missal, the most widely used prayer today, was hastily jerry-rigged in the space of one evening over plates of pasta in a Roman trattoria the night before Bugnini wanted to send everything in). Bugnini knew he had to proceed with such indecent haste in order to rush all the changes through before people wisened up and got to the pope to stop Bugnini.

Bugnini was not alone in some of his most damaging activities but instead aided by a "trio of maniacs" whom Bouyer does not name. The alterations to the calendar, the suppression of ancient feasts and the octaves of others, the yanking around of saints' days, and the destruction of the ante-Lenten periods of preparation (to say nothing of fasting, which Bouyer does not treat) were all raced through the commission by the simple expedient of telling members "but the pope wills it!" and telling the pope "the commission wants this" and forbidding the other commissioners from talking independently to the pope. Both were kept in the dark and the "subterfuge Bugnini used" proved successful.

Only at the end did the mask slip and some of the game be given away. Thus Bouyer records his own private conversation with Pope Paul VI in which an incredulous pope asks why the commission did certain things, only to be staggered when Bouyer tells him that "'simply because Bugnini had assured us that you absolutely wished it.' His reaction was instantaneous: 'Can this be? He told me himself that you were unanimous on this!'"

It remains a great mystery--and on this Bouyer says nothing--as to why the pope, seeing that he had been played for a fool, and knowing the commission led by a wicked and manipulative man of massive mendacity, did not send that swine Bugnini off a Gadarene cliff sooner, and disband the commission or at the very least reject its findings and start over. Why would he have allowed all this to go through once the game was up? Why not start over? Why push forward reforms about which he himself, for many reasons, was justifiably and understandably ambivalent? What was he afraid of?

It seems, according to the speculations of such historians as Eamon Duffy (see his Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes) that Paul VI was himself a deeply conflicted man about many things, and so perhaps for all his unease about the changes nonetheless felt that some of them were good and he could sincerely appreciate and promote them. Perhaps too he was aware of the propensity for divisions to increase and be magnified in the Church after past councils, and he would not block liturgical changes if doing so would run the risk of schism (which, ironically, came precisely because he did push the reforms through!).

I think, in the end, that any assessment of Paul's pontificate must never collapse this irreconcilable tension: his great achievement (let it be counted unto him as righteousness!) in holding the line in Humanae Vitae set alongside his great failure in pushing through liturgical reforms whose results, as Ratzinger famously said, could only be catastrophic.

In concluding this series, I should say some things I forgot to mention at the outset: the book is superbly presented in its translation and editing. The footnotes are wonderful and almost lavish in their details, but never excessive; enough detail is given about more obscure references or persons to make their role in Bouyer's life plain without overwhelming the reader. The translation reads very nicely too, and this is no small achievement given Bouyer's cosmopolitan learning and lyrical, sometimes lapidary French. In sum, this is an important book and it has been given the translation and editing commensurate with its status.

Concluded. 

Heroic and Holy Ukrainian Churchmen of the 20th Century

The news that the Vatican dicastery responsible for such matters has been ordered by the pope of Rome to publish a decree recognizing the heroic virtues of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky is good news indeed, as the Ottawa institute bearing his name explains.

Would it be churlish to remark that such news is grossly overdue, and should never have been held up for decades in Rome in the first place? There are important ecclesiological issues here. More than a decade ago now I asked those involved with the process why the synod of the supposedly sui iuris Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) did not simply go ahead with its own process of declaring Sheptytsky a saint (of which I am not in doubt). The argument in favor of handling matters locally only gained strength under the papacy of Benedict XVI, who returned beatifications to the home church of the candidate in question, and was, moreover, on record going back decades in calling for far greater decentralization (of many issues and practices) out of Rome and back to the local and regional structures of the Church. Canonizations were once, of course, very local affairs, and only gradually centralized in Rome for reasons that make rather limited sense today.

There are, moreover, important geopolitical considerations, at least according to John Allen. I think Allen may be making more of this than meets the eye, but let that pass for now.

What of this towering man--both literally and figuratively (he was nearly 7 feet tall)? Who was this "lion of Halychyna"? For those unfamiliar with his life, this recent article, while suffering from the usual infelicities of English (and some confusion about Habsburg geography), is not a bad place to start. The historian Timothy Snyder--who, I recently discovered with some surprise, is apparently a fluent Ukrainian speaker--outlined Sheptytsky's role in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust in this 2009 piece from the New York Review of Books. Snyder is the author of such important and well-received studies as his recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and earlier works, including The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–-1999.

For those who want good studies on Sheptytsky, there are, fortunately, several in English by reputable scholars--though, alas, no good book-length biography that I know of, notwithstanding the fact his rich, long, productive life would certainly lend itself to one. Perhaps the estimable church historian and priest Athanasius McVay, author of several recent studies, and author also of this invaluable blog, can be thumb-screwed into writing one if he is not already doing so. I interviewed him here about one of his earlier books; but see here also for others.

Returning for a moment to the question of his role in the Holocaust, see this handsome and moving book recently published by the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa: Archbishop Andrei Sheptytsky and the Ukrainian Jewish Bond. But see even more the memoirs of one Jew whose survival he attributes to Sheptytsky: Kurt Lewin's  A Journey Through Illusions. (A Ukrainian version was apparently published in 2007.) This is a haunting, moving book deserving a wide audience.

For a study of Sheptytsky's liturgical theology, see Peter Galadza's The Theology and Liturgical Work of Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944).

For his sophiology, see Andriy Chirovsky's Pray for God's Wisdom: The Mystical Sophiology of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky.

For his moral theology, see Andrii Krawchuk's  Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytsky.

For an early and very short work about his ecumenical activity, see George Perejda's Apostle of Church Unity: The life of the servant of God, Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky. But there is in fact a much more recent, much more scholarly, and much more wide-ranging treatment of his ecumenical activity and much else besides in the collection Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts'kyi. Edited by Paul Robert Magocsi and Krawchuk, with an introduction by the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan, this collection is not to be missed.

After his death on 1 November 1944, Sheptytsky was succeeded as primate by the formidable Joseph Slipyj, who was arrested the next year along with the rest of the UGCC hierarchy and sent to the Gulag.

Many other Ukrainian Catholics were simply shot or murdered in other horrifying ways. Some of them were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001. Some of their stories are told in Blessed Bishop Nicholas Charnetsky, C.Ss.R., and Companions Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church: Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I also drew some lessons from this "church of martyrs" in a recent article here.

The story of another martyr is told by Athanasius McVay in God's Martyr, History's Witness.

Slipyj was not killed but spent a brutal 18 years in concentration camps. He would be released in 1963 and exiled to Rome (his "gilded cage" as I was told he called it) for the remaining 21 years of his life, dying just a scant 5 years before the legalization of the UGCC and its emergence from the underground.

Slipyj was the object of a study by the eminent Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan: Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. This, too, is an invaluable study and nobody with any interest in these matters can afford to be without this study written by Pelikan, who was regarded by many as the doyen of church historians until his death in 2006.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Slipyj's death last September, several publishers brought out English translations of some of his works. One such may be found here.

On James Hitchcock's Errors about the East

I just received in the mail a new book from the historian James Hitchcock, whom I have read with pleasure and profit in the past. E.g., his 1995 book The Recovery of the Sacred mounts a good case for fixing some of the problems in the reformed Roman liturgy. His latest book was published just before Christmas: History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium (Ignatius Press, 2012), 584pp.

Naturally I turned first to the sections on the Eastern Churches, and here I follow the so-called Hunwicke Rule: if a book is bad in seemingly small (but in fact greatly significant) matters, why trust it in large?

The Hunwicke test is this. I find some topic in his discussion in which the Big Writer has strayed into an area in which I do know something. And I test his assertions. My assumption is that if it turns out that he is writing a load of tasteless white fish with small, needle-like bones [pollocks] in an area in which I am able to judge him, there is every possibility (or at the very least a risk) that he is just as unreliable, tendentious, or crooked in areas where I do not have competence.

Some may assume this is an unfair rule, to which the always witty (and sadly infrequently blogging) Fr. John Hunwicke replies thus:

You may tell me that in so very Big a Book, it is unreasonable for a writer to be expected never to make little errors. "Don't be a pedant. Go for his Big Picture."

I could not more profoundly disagree with you. Any Big Picture is built up of innumerable small brush-strokes. If a man is slipshod about his details, it will be, to a greater or lesser extent, probable that his Big Picture is not worth the paper, so to speak, which it is written on. And in any case, nobody is under a legal or moral obligation to write Big Books. If someone chooses to do so, he should either get his facts straight or be excoriated for not doing so.

Hitchcock has written a very big book indeed, and in his small "brush-strokes" treating the Christian East, we see a picture little short of disastrous. Not only are hugely important events given no mention at all, but even very basic factual matters are dead wrong. It is alarming and depressing that this book, puffed on the back by "big names" in contemporary American Roman Catholicism (George Weigel, Timothy Dolan, Charles Chaput et al), cannot master even basic facts that even such a notorious site as Wikipedia is capable of mastering. Ignatius Press used to be a reliable organization, but it seems clear that for this book they employed no fact-checkers and subjected the book to no serious scholarly review from relevant experts. Consider the following:

• Hitchcock uses the term "Uniates" with no recognition that this is a pejorative and, to many, offensive term now widely avoided.
• He claims that Pope Benedict XIV was univocal in his support for Eastern Christians, Eastern Catholics especially. There are no sources given for this claim, and the historical record is not quite so univocal as, e.g., Maria Teresa Fattori's article on Benedict, published in the most recent issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, shows.
• His too-brief discussion of married Eastern Catholic priests in the US totally ignores the pig-headed chauvinism of Latin bishops (e.g., John Ireland) which resulted in, inter alia, thousands of Catholics leaving the Church and becoming Orthodox.
• He claims that "[u]ntil 2000 [sic], one of the official papal titles was 'patriarch of the West'" (p.207)! This is just embarrassing. Does nobody Google these things or pop onto the Vatican website, or for that matter read my book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, which discusses the fact that it was in March 2006 that Pope Benedict XVI quietly retired the title, for no compelling reason he ever explained?
• He treats the Byzantine Rite as a monolith and flatly asserts that it "uses Old Church Slavonic." That's wrong, and would be news to, inter alia, Greeks, Ukrainians, Romanians, Melkites, Antiochians, and Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Christians in the OCA and other bodies using a dozen and more languages for the Byzantine liturgy--none of them Slavonic. Apart from the Russians, almost nobody else today uses Slavonic.
• When it comes to the primate of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC), Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky (on whom major studies exist in English, as well as French, and of course Ukrainian, inter alia), he gets two important and basic facts wrong: first (though it seems almost churlish to point out this almost charming error), he calls him "the heroic St. Andreas Szeptycki." Ukrainian Catholics will appreciate this (as will many others, not least the many Jews whom Sheptytsky personally saved), as many feel he is indeed a saint, but Sheptytsky (the common English spelling today) has never been officially glorified or canonized by either the UGCC or by Rome. Second, Hitchcock claims that Sheptytsky "was deported to Russia, where he died in 1944." This, too, is wrong: he died in his see-city of Lviv, Ukraine, which for most of 1944 was under German occupation before being retaken by the Red Army and murderously reintegrated into the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. Admittedly, given the shifting borders around Lviv, and more generally around Galacia (beautifully treated in Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magocsi's Galicia: A Multicultured Land), whom Lviv "belongs" to changed rather a lot--Habsburgs, Poland, briefly the Western Ukrainian Republic, the USSR, etc--but any serious historian should have no trouble sorting this out.
• After botching Sheptytsky's death, Hitchcock gives an inexcusably sanguine interpretation of events that saw the arrest of Sheptytsky's successor, Joseph Slipyj (treated in Jaroslav Pelikan's book Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj) who was exiled to the Gulag for 18 years, and the arrest of the entire UGCC hierarchy along with the forced reunion of the UGCC with the Russian Orthodox Church as the Pseudo-Synod of Lviv of 1946, which everyone now recognizes as a total farce--and not a funny one, either, as the UGCC would then spend the next 43 years as the largest illegal and thus underground religious body in the world, and many of her bishops, clergy, and faithful would be martyred. Some of those stories are recounted in such works as Blessed Bishop Mykolay Charnetsky, C.SS.R., and Companions: Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, but you wouldn't know any of this from reading Hitchcock. If thousands and thousands of people getting killed precisely for their fidelity to the Catholic Church (many of whom were beatified by Pope John Paul II) don't merit a mention in a book about the same, what does it take? Such an omission is a huge insult.
• Other errors abound, not least terminological: repeatedly Hitchcock refers to Orthodox Christians as "schismatics," which  (as Henry Chadwick's genuinely magisterial East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence makes clear) was never appropriate in the first place, and was rightly abandoned by the Catholic Church at Vatican II. This kind of language, along with a smug tone (smugness being, as Flannery O'Connor said, the besetting Catholic sin) through much of the rest of the book, make the whole thing very off-putting.
• Equally incorrectly he refers to Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians and others as "monophysite" though scholarship for the last four decades and more has shown that that term was never correct in the first place, and certainly isn't today.
• His treatment of Chaldean Christians ignores the hugely significant recent event whereby Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians came to an agreement of eucharistic sharing made all the more significant by Roman recognition of the ancient anaphora of Addai and Mari, a decision which the great Robert Taft said is the most significant ecumenical-ecclesiological decision made by Rome since Vatican II.

These are intolerable errors of both omission and commission. Some of these have huge ecumenical and ecclesial implications, so nobody can be thought picayune for pointing these out. Some are basic factual errors while others are more a problem of tone--and in some respects these are the more serious. For too long, as David Bentley Hart has said in his essay in Ecumenism Today, Catholics and Orthodox have allowed bad history to get in the way of unity. It is sad that this book, even in the brief treatment it gives to the East, merely repeats this process and compounds these errors. One expects better in 2013--much, much better than this "confessional propaganda" (Taft).  

Slavic Iconographical History and Developments

Just yesterday I finally received from Penn State Press a book which I noted at the beginning of the year: Jefferson Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, eds., Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University), x+276pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Passage into the modern world left the Russian icon profoundly altered. It fell into new hands, migrated to new homes, and acquired new forms and meanings. Icons were made in the factories of foreign industrialists and destroyed by iconoclasts of the proletariat. Even the icon s traditional functions whether in the feast days of the church or the pageantry of state power were susceptible to the transformative forces of modernization. In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great s Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy. Alter Icons shows how the twin pressures of secular scholarship and secular art transformed the Russian icon from a sacred image in the church to a masterpiece in the museum, from a parochial craftwork to a template for the avant-garde, and from a medieval interface with the divine to a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.

With many plates, in both colour and black and white, this handsome book opens up absorbing areas of exploration. It begins with an introduction by Gatrall, and ends with an afterword by the well-known historian of the Russian Church, Vera Shevzov. In between, we have eleven articles by some well-known scholars, including Shevzov, Robert Bird, John McGuckin, and John-Paul Himka. Those articles are in four sections: (1) Empire of Icons; (2) Curators and Commissars; (3) Intermedial Icon; (4) Projections.

Those interested in Pavel Florensky (about whom Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies will be publishing an article in our upcoming fall issue) will find two articles of note: "Florensky and the Binocular Body" by Douglas Greenfield; and "Florensky and Iconic Dreaming" by McGuckin.

I have so far read with great interest two chapters. The first is "How America Discovered Russian Icons: the Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-1932" by Wendy Salmond. Though many of us in the US today take access to, and understanding of, icons for granted, in the opening decades of the twentieth century almost nobody here had any idea of what icons were, and the tiny handful who did--art historians, anthropologists, and the rest--almost invariably sneered at them as the primitive totems of backwards and stupid peasants, unfit for study or any serious consideration. The traveling exhibition of 1930-32 helped to raise awareness of icons in Russia especially, but it was also a very clever piece of Soviet propaganda. Interest in the Soviet Union was at an all-time high around 1930, and there were many articles constantly in the media. The exhibit was able to play into this interest, showing credulous Americans that an atheistic and iconoclastic regime ostensibly had a high aesthetic and religio-cultural sensibility. In reality this exhibit was used to deflect criticism of the Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church (and the various Catholic and other Christian churches), and also used to drum up money by showing the world what fascinating artistic wares existed in the USSR and could be purchased. The Soviets undertook a mass "dumping" of icons and other cultural artifacts onto the international markets in order to raise desperately needed Western dollars to finance the campaigns of collectivization, dekulakization, terror-famine, and other crimes.

An even more fascinating article for me was "Moments in the History of an Icon Collection: the National Museum in Lviv, 1905-2005" by John-Paul Himka, author of the recent and related volume Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians.

As I have noted before, I visited the museum whose history Himka describes in lucid and crisp prose. (More recently I attended an exhibition in New York that had many icons from the museum, now recorded in the lovely companion volume, The Glory of Ukraine: Sacred Images from the 11th to the 19th Centuries.) The museum, as Himka illustrates, was at the cross-roads of all the various major events of the twentieth century: the First World War, during and as a result of which its host city of Lviv passed from being Hapsburg crown-land and capital of Galicia to Russian-occupied territory; the abortive West Ukrainian National Republic, declared on 1 November 1918 and leading to the Ukrainian-Polish war of 1918-19; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 followed weeks later by the Red Army; the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union; and the 1991 independence of Ukraine and emergence of the hitherto suppressed Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, then headquartered in at St. George's in Lviv. In most of these conflicts, the premises of the museum suffered only minor damage from shelling.

The central figure in the establishment of the museum was, of course, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, primate of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church from 1900 until his death on 1 November 1944. As Himka succinctly puts it, Sheptytsky was a "scion of the upper elite [who] had toured Western Europe and studied its art firsthand. He had a finely educated aesthetic sense, a love of the visual arts, and great wealth." Sheptytsky's family patrimony, in fact, would be widely spent not only on buying icons about to be destroyed--whether by unknowing peasants convinced that wooden churches had to be torn down and replaced with modern brick ones, or hostile iconoclasts in the employ of the communists--but also on the land and buildings in which to house this ever-expanding collection.

The other figure to whom Himka pays careful attention is Vira Svientsitska, who worked for the museum under her father, the director, prior to being sent to the gulag from November 1948 to August 1956. After her release, she worked for the museum until her death in May 1991. She showed great cleverness in persuading the authorities to hang onto the icons, and amass others, by persuading them that far from being of religious significance, these icons were in fact "productions that expressed the Ukrainian people's longing for national and social liberation" (120).


For these and other fascinating stories and scholarly studies, I recommend Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, which will be reviewed at greater length by an iconologist in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2012.