Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine

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

The Greek Catholic Church has sometimes been described as a hybrid that
accepted union with Rome yet retained its Byzantine rites and
traditions. Ukrainian Greek Catholics (or Uniates) have in the 20th
century seen themselves as members of a national church and have played
an important role in fostering national awareness not only in Western
Ukraine but also, since their mass emigration after the Second World
War, around the globe.

This has not always been the relationship of the Church to nationalism.
In the 19th century, particularly from the 1860s until the 1890s,
Russophiles who attempted to draw the Church closer to orthodoxy exerted
a strong influence. The countervailing pressures of Polish society,
Rome, and Vienna also made an identification with the Ukrainian movement
problematic. It was only in response to the discrediting of Russophilism
in the 1880s and the ascendancy of the national populist orientation in
the following years that the Uniate church began to shed its suspicions
concerning the national movement, and in particular its hostility toward
the idea that they constituted the same people as Dnieper Ukrainians and
that unification with them should be a goal. The appointment of Andrei
Sheptytsky as bishop of Stanislaviv in 1899 and subsequently as
metropolitan of Halych opened a new era. He was able to formulate a new
vision of the Greek Catholic heritage, “disentangle the easternizing
tendency from Russophilism,” and lay the foundations for a
“neo-Byzantine” approach to Ukrainian Catholicism. Ukrainian
Uniatism subsequently approached the image of a “particular church”
that the national populists had desired.

The conflict between two constructs of nationality (the pan-Russian and
the pan-Ukrainian) and the roles of the intelligentsia in shaping these
constructs is described here by one of the foremost scholars of Galician
history. The first part of the story leads up to the crisis of 1881–82
caused by the treason trial of a group of Russophiles. The second part
focuses on the decline of Russophilism in the trial’s aftermath.
Declassified archival materials from Ukraine, together with material
from archival sources in Rome, Vienna, and Przemysl are incorporated,
providing a comprehensive and sensitive appreciation of multiple
perspectives. Indeed, the book is a model of insightful and balanced
history, shedding light on the motives of various parties and
overturning cherished beliefs, such as the standard national conception
of the Church.

Himka’s book has implications for the study of nationalisms in
general and for the analysis of religion’s involvement with national
movements elsewhere. These implications are drawn out in the conclusion,
which balances the claims of two paradigms in historical studies: that
of nationalism as an inevitable evolutionary process nurtured by history
itself and that of nationalism as a cultural construct, an artifact
produced by an intelligentsia. In this regard, the book shows how the
competing claims of society and agency can be observed and assessed.