Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba and the editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

All but one of the 11 articles in this collection were published in
various journals during the 1980s and 1990s. They have now been revised
and, in some cases, translated into English, providing an updated and
scholarly account of the religious factor in Ukrainian and Russian
political life. The focus is on the 20th century, but several
contributions provide indispensable background to understanding current
events.

The positions of the main protagonists in present-day religious life
and the origins of conflicts are examined in detail. The Ukrainian Greek
Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate, and the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church–Moscow Patriarchate have today emerged as the main players in a
struggle that is sometimes confusing to outside observers, but that is
of great significance because it involves core issues of national
identity and civilizational values.

The contemporary picture is complicated by history: the formation of
the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1596, the transfer of the Kyiv
Metropolitanate to Moscow in 1686, the persecution of the Ukrainian
Orthodox as well as the Ukrainian Catholics under Soviet rule, and the
continual drive to draw Ukrainians under the umbrella of one
“all-Russian” church. When religious life revived in Ukraine after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, many observers were amazed to learn
that an estimated 50 percent of all Orthodox parishes in the Russian
Orthodox Church (the only permitted Orthodox church under Soviet rule)
were in Ukraine. More than 25 percent of the all-Soviet total were in
Western Ukraine, a region in which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
was dominant until it was forcibly incorporated into the Russian
Orthodox Church in 1949. The post-Soviet struggle for religious loyalty
therefore became, among other things, a competition for parishioners,
churches, and assets that had been transferred against the will of
parishioners.

In the 1990s the newly independent Ukraine, which contained the
second-largest body of Orthodox believers, faced the problem of having
no church of its own. The ensuing debates over the possibility of
creating a national church immediately involved a struggle with the
Russian Orthodox Church (which has continued to promote an
“all-Russian” unity and to deny Ukraine’s spiritual and cultural
legacy) and raised issues of canonicity, ideology, nationality, and
culture. These conflicts have been only partially resolved.

The authors both direct research institutes that focus on Ukrainian
history, and both have written extensively on Eastern Christianity in
Ukraine. The volume is carefully written, expertly edited, and
attractively produced. Although there is some repetition, inevitable in
a work of this nature, it is kept to a minimum. Overall, the book
provides a readable introduction to the history of Ukrainian religion
from the 16th century to the present day.