Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox Perspectives on the Ps-Sobor of 1946

Last week, Daniel Galadza (author of this book which you must read) and I finished editing a volume we hope to see in print next year: The 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946: Arriving at a Common Narrative. It is a collection of scholarly papers given at a private conference we both attended at the University of Vienna (where Daniel teaches) and hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation of that city in June 2016. This is just a shamelessly self-promoting and very advanced notice of the book. I will post more details as they are available.

What is this book about? As we said in our prospectus:

The volume consists of papers presented at an international conference in Vienna, Austria, in 2016, organized by Pro Oriente Stiftung and the University of Vienna, dealing with the 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946, a gathering of Greek-Catholic clergy in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv organized with the help of the Soviet government, with the aim of liquidating the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Depending on whose perspective one accepts, the event is seen either as the 'reunion' of 'Uniates' to Orthodoxy or the perpetration of a violent act against human rights and freedom of conscience. Thus, one side views it as a church council, while the other sees it as a pseudo-synod.

Why look at a little-known event now more than 70 years old? The simple answer to that finds the old line very true: the past is never truly past in Eastern Europe at least, and so 1946 is a live issue in part because, in the minds of Russian Orthodox Christians at least, it is the righting of the "injustice" of the Union of Brest of 1595/96, that event which created the modern method of "uniatism" everybody (or almost everybody) has been reprobating for a quarter-century now.

1946 has not, until our book, been given a lot of attention apart from Bohdan Bociurkiw's pioneering monograph, published in 1996: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950).

For its part, though, Brest has been subject to earlier scholarly treatments. The best two books for those looking to begin to understand these events and their context would be the collection of scholarly articles edited by B. Goren et al: Four Hundred Years Union of Brest (1596-1996) A Critical Re-evaluation.

The other important work is Borys Gudziak (who was in Vienna), Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest.

For those wanting wider and longer historical contexts, then two well-known historians who were in Vienna, one of whom contributes to our volume, have authored important works: Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy.

Churches and States in Ukraine

Harvard University Press tells me that early in 2017 they are bringing out a collection of articles that reprints some essays previously published but still meriting attention: Churches and States: Studies on the History of Christianity in Ukraine, ed., Halyna Hryn. About this collection we are told:

This book collects nine articles that originally appeared in the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies and that arose from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Millennium Project, an initiative launched in the 1980s to celebrate one thousand years of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus´. The articles cover a wide array of subjects: the ecclesiastical structure of the Christian Church in Rus´ in its earliest period (Andrzej Poppe); the conflict between Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church from 1569 to 1700 (Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel); an account of the Uniate Church and the partitions of Poland (Larry Wolff); the transformation of the Greek Catholic Church under the Austrian Empire (1848–1914) (John-Paul Himka); the Greek Catholic Church in the period between the two World Wars (Andrew Sorokowski); a rethinking of the relationship of Church and society in Galician Ukraine from 1914 to 1944 (Bohdan Budurowycz); and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine during the interwar period (Bohdan Bociurkiw). The book concludes with a bio-bibliography of Bohdan Bociurkiw, a scholar who devoted his career to the study of Ukrainian Church history (Andrii Krawchuk). These essays provide new insights and a fresh perspective to the discipline.

But you do not have to wait until next year to read on this topic. When I was in Vienna earlier this month, I was pleased to be able to meet Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy, perhaps the two leading historians of Ukrainian Christianity and history generally, and authors of many books, including collections they have collaborated on such as Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine, which I have read with great interest.

Plokhy is also the author of such studies as Yalta: the Price of Peace, which is a fascinating study of the infamous conference at the end of World War II which led, inter alia, to Soviet domination of Poland and Eastern Europe until 1991. For those who are students of the war, this is a book not to be missed.

More recently, Plokhy has authored The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. I have not read it yet, but historian friends who have tell me it is magnificent, which is no surprise.

And then, mentioned above, and also much discussed at our conference in Vienna, is a study that has been out for 20 years now, but is no less valuable for that: Bohdan Bociurkiw's The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950). (Bociurkiw has a fascinating biography, some of it detailed here.)

So the areas, broadly, of church and state in a Ukrainian context continue to attract considerable scholarly attention, and this is very much welcome given the region's pivotal place in European history, past and present.

The Battle of Poltava

Serhii Plokhy, the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, has done so much to advance our understanding of East-Slavic history, one integral part of which, of course, is its religious history, which he has treated in such books as Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003), co-authored with Frank Sysyn; The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2002); and Tsars and Cossacks: A Study in Iconography (Harvard, 2002). He is also the author of a fascinating story about the end of World War II and the Yalta conference, to which I drew attention here. 

Now he has come out with a new collection of articles under his editorship: Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth (Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies) (2012), 480pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us: 

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

Honouring Frank Sysyn

Those who follow Slavic studies in general, and particularly religion among the East Slavs--Ukrainians especially--will need no introduction to the work of the historian Frank Sysyn, author of such acclaimed books as Culture, Nation, & Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600-1945), and editor of others, including Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine.

The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press has recently put together and published a Festschrift for Sysyn: Tentorium Honorum: Essays Presented to Frank E. Sysyn on His Sixtieth Birthday (CIUS Press, 2011).

About this collection the publisher tells us:

The special issue Tentorium honorum is a collection of thirty-three essays written by North American and European colleagues and former students in honor of Frank E. Sysyn, the distinguished specialist in Ukrainian, Polish, and East European history and a major figure in the development of Ukrainian historical studies in the United States, Canada, Ukraine, and Germany for more than three decades. The essays, which range from medieval to contemporary East European and Ukrainian history, reflect the breadth and impact of his scholarship. Tentorium honorum includes a biographical essay about Professor Sysyn and a select bibliography of his works. The title was adopted from a seventeenth-century panegyric to Adam Kysil, the Ukrainian leader and Polish statesman who was the subject of Professor Sysyn's groundbreaking monograph on early-modern Ukraine and Poland-Lithuania.

Further details, including the table of contents, may be seen here.