CIUS Publications on Religion and Culture

To order any of the publications listed below,
please go to the CIUS Press site.

Сергій Плохій
Наливайкова віра: Козацтво та релігія в ранньомодерній Україні (Nalyvaiko's Faith: The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine) (2006)

Published by Krytyka (Kyiv) in association with the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the CIUS, this is a Ukrainian translation of Serhii Plokhy's The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (2001, winner of the 2003 Book Prize of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies), a pioneering study of the Ukrainian Cossacks religious attitudes and policies, recognized as "the first serious synthetic study of the relationship between the Cossacks and the Orthodox Church."

The Ukrainian Cossacks, often compared in historical literature to the pirates of the Mediterranean and the frontiersmen of the American West, became famous as ferocious warriors, their fighting skills developed in their religious wars against the Tartars, Turks, Poles, and Russians. The Cossack revolts have traditionally been viewed in historiography as a species of peasant rebellion, with little ideological appeal beyond that social stratum. However, religion played a significant role in Cossack life, although it has been overlooked by modern historians.

In this pioneering study, Serhii Plokhy examines the confessionalization of religious life in early modern Ukraine and discusses the role of religion in Cossack revolts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648-54). By examining the religious discourse of the period and the Cossack attitude toward religion, the book shows that the religious element was no less important in Cossack revolts than the social factor. Without the skillful use of religious ideas, the Cossack uprisings would never have attained their considerable proportions and attracted as many members of the nobility, clergy, and townspeople into the rebel ranks as they actually did.

The book breaks significant new ground in several respects. Reinterpreting Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historical sources, it shows how the confessionalization of religious life affected Cossack attitudes toward religion and how Cossack involvement in the religious struggle between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism contributed to the formation not only of Ukrainian, but also Polish and Russian cultural identity. The discussion of Cossack-Jewish antagonism reveals the fundamental significance of the previously overlooked religious dimension, showing how Counter-Reformation ideas shaped the opposing perspectives of Cossack officers and rank-and-file rebels. Thus the book does not focus narrowly on matters of faith and church history, but treats religion as a "cultural system" and uses the religious perspective to shed new light on broader social questions of mentality and identity formation.

Iaroslav Isaievych
Voluntary Brotherhood: Confraternities of Laymen in Early Modern Ukraine (2006)  

The study of the confraternity movement in early modern Ukraine is vital for our understanding of the unique place Ukrainian culture and society have occupied between Eastern and Western Christianity. Ukraine and Belarus were the only countries where Orthodox lay confraternities came into being. Their activities coincided with a period of crucial social and cultural change. Although structurally similar to their western European counterparts, the Eastern-rite confraternities developed their unique features. They introduced a spirit of competition between the two Ruthenian churches--the Orthodox and the Uniate--and contributed to an increase in the pace of Ruthenian socio-cultural growth. The schools attached to the Orthodox confraternities in several larger cities disseminated European humanist ideas and introduced generally accessible post-humanist education, while the confraternity presses promoted the development of scholarship and literature.

Voluntary Brotherhood is a translation of one of the best works on early modern Ukraine to appear in the USSR after the 1920s. It is also a thoroughly revised and updated version of the original, Ukrainian-language work. The author has not only deleted terminology Soviet censors imposed before the book could be published in Kyiv in 1966, but has also broadened the scope of his analysis by utilizing a comparative approach and taking into account the scholarly literature on the subject published in the past four decades.  

$29.95 (paper) $49.95 (cloth)

Богдан Р. Боцюрків
Українська Греко-Католицька Церква і Ра д янська д ержава (1939–1950) (2005)  

Published by the Ukrainian Catholic University Press in association with the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the CIUS, this is a Ukrainian translation of Bohdan R. Bociurkiw's Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, a pioneering study of the suppression of this Ukrainian church under Stalinist rule.

Dr. Bociurkiw's book is the fruit of a lifetime of painstaking research. The study takes into account all the most important publications on the subject. It draws on publications that have appeared in a great variety of religious, Ukrainian underground, Soviet and non-Soviet (especially emigre) journals, newspapers, propagandistic pamphlets, and leaflets.

Many of the Soviet archival materials from Communist Party and government (including KGB) repositories used by the author had been classified and has hitherto remained unknown to scholars and analysts. These sources have been supplemented by documents from ecclesiastical archives in Rome and Ukrainian church repositories in the West. Furthermore, the author has availed himself of a number of oral informants, including victims and eyewitnesses of Soviet repressions against the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, thereby including in his considerations vital insights that otherwise would not have been preserved.

Dr. Bociurkiw judiciously pieced together these disparate and scattered bits of information to narrate the planning, realization, and immediate consequences of the Soviet liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church. The book carefully analyzes Soviet policy toward the church from the first occupation of Galicia by the Red Army in 1939 through the liquidation of the visible structures of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, Poland, and Transcarpathia in the mid- and late 1940s.

The study shows what Soviet authorities sought to achieve through their policy toward the Greek Catholic Church in the context of preceding and contemporary Russian and Soviet nationalities policy and reveals the mechanism through which the Stalin regime sought to meet its objectives regarding Ukrainian Greek Catholics. In so doing the author identifies the main executors of the Kremlin-ordered "reunion" of the Greek Catholic Church with the state-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, including NKGB/MGB agents, officials, and propagandists, often hiding behind pseudonyms plausibly deciphered in the book, and ecclesiastical figures. Given the sensitivity of the subject matter, the perfidy of some actors on the stage, the heroism of others and the difficulty of separating well-intended fiction and deliberate disinformation from documented facts, Bohdan Bociurkiw's solid, well-informed, and balanced analysis of the Soviet attempt to liquidate the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine is a major accomplishment.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church or in the suppression of religion under Soviet rule.

xx, 268 pp, maps, tables, photographs
Translated by Nataliia Kochan; Translation edited by Oleh Turi.

$19.95 (paper)

Serhii Plokhy and Frank Sysyn
Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (20003)

In August 2003 the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press released this 232-page collection of eleven essays.

Drs. Plokhy and Sysyn wrote their articles in 1983–99. They began their research at a time when East and West were still divided by the Iron Curtain—Dr. Sysyn was then a professor at Harvard University, and Dr. Plokhy was teaching at Dnipropetrovsk University in Ukraine. Since the early 1990s both scholars were associated with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Their diverse educations and experiences underlie their differing interests and perspectives, enlivening the volume.

M uch of the analysis presented in Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine deals with the responses of Ukraine's Eastern Christians to the challenge of the national idea. The book views the history and current status of Ukraine's Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities in the context of the modern Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of the resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Among the topics the authors discuss are the formation of modern Ukrainian religious culture; the impact of the traditions of the Kyiv Metropolitanate on the Ukrainian Orthodox autocephalous movement; the foundation of the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church in Canada in relation to the formation of national identity in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora; international factors in the Soviet liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946; the rebirth of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the USSR (1989–1991); the role of the Moscow Patriarchate in independent Ukraine in the early 1990s; the struggle for a Ukrainian Catholic patriarchate in Ukraine in the early 1990s; and the church-state relationship in contemporary Ukraine.

The book is indispensable for anyone interested in the history of Ukraine or in the church-state-nation interrelationship in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. For students of the nteraction of the state and nation building and religion, Ukraine constitutes one of the most important case studies at the dawn of the twenty-first century. With more than forty-eight million inhabitants, the country is the second-most populous state to emerge from the break-up of the former Soviet bloc. Ukraine today contains one of the largest Orthodox communities in the world. Alongside are more than three thousand Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes, which constitute the world’s largest Eastern Christian church united with Rome.

The publication of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine was made possible by the support of the Ukrainian Church Studies Program at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, and by the generosity of the Skop Family (in memory of Constantyn Hordienko), the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies, the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League of Edmonton, and the Self-Reliance League Foundation of Canada.

Paper $27.95
Cloth $39.95 

xvi, 216pp.

ISBN 1-895571-45-6 (cloth)
ISBN 1-895571-36-7 (pbk)

Перший всеукраїнський собор УАПЦ, 14-30 жовтня 1921
(The First All-Ukrainian Council of the UAOC,
14-30 October 1921) (1991)

The publication of the proceedings of the first Council of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which was held in Kyiv in October 1921, contains the previously unpublished proceedings of the ecclesiastical council that laid the foundations for the independence (autocephaly) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchate.

The documents were discovered in the Kyiv archives after Ukraine became independent in 1991. They have now been published by the Church Studies Program in cooperation with the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies and the Central State Archives of the Supreme Government Institutions of Ukraine. The volume was published just in time to be launched at this year's Fourth Congress of Ukrainian Studies in Odesa.

The publication of the volume was made possible by the generous support of the Publications Fund of the Ukrainian Theological Faculty at St. Andrew's College in Winnipeg, St. John's Fraternal Society of Edmonton, the Edmonton Branch of the Ukrainian Self-Reliance Association and the Stephania Bukachevsky-Pastushenko Archival Fund at CIUS.

Andre Partykevych
Between Kyiv and Constantinople (1998)

Dr. Andre Partykevich, a Ukrainian Orthodox clergyman from Boston, examines the life and times of Oleksander Lototsky.

Lototsky (1870-1939), a writer and scholar, was an influential ecclesiastical and political figure who served as minister of religious affairs in 1918 in the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. He left Ukraine two years later, serving as Ukraine's ambassador to Turkey and attempting unsuccessfully to gain recognition of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Lototsky later settled in Warsaw, where he was a professor of canon law and Orthodox Church history, also serving as minister and deputy premier of the Ukrainian People's Republic in exile. Dr. Partykevich's study analyzes the course of that little-known but important episode in Ukrainian church history.

Andrii Krawchuk
Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytsky

(1997)

Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944) headed the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Galicia for almost half a century. He was not only and outstanding ecclesiastical, cultural and civic leader, but also a thinker and writer of distinction. Grappling with the social and political problems that beset his religious community, Sheptytscky
applied key priciples of Christian social ethics to such issues as patriotism, inter-ethnic relations, church-state relations, the ideal of church unity, Soviet Communism, nationalism, religious liberty, ideological atheism, and Nazism.

Whether in pastoral letters that probed the Christian life through ethical reflection on social and political reality or in personal representations to such figures as Emperor Frances Joseph, Pope Pius X, Khrushchev, Hitler, and Stalin, Sheptytsky promoted a vision of human life that was grounded in the practical wisdoom of both Eastern and Western Christendom.

Andrii Krawchuk offers the first comprehensive scholarly study of this complex sphere of Metropolitan Sheptytsky's thought and activity. This pioneering analysis of how Christian moral teaching was applied within an Eastern European context breaks new ground in out understanding of the churches that survived Soviet persecution.

Co-published with the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian and with the Basilian Press.

Cloth $49.95

Bohdan Bociurkiw
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939-1950 (1996)

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950) is a pioneering study of the suppression of this Ukrainian church under Stalinist rule. The study takes into account all the most important publications on the subject. It is one of the first works in Ukrainian studies written after the collapse of the USSR that effectively bridges the Soviet and the non-Soviet corpus of source material. It draws on publications that have appeared in a great variety of religious, Ukrainian underground, Soviet and non-Soviet (especially emigre) journals, newspapers, propagandistic pamphlets and leaflets.

Much of the Soviet archival material from the Party and government (including KGB) repositories used by the author had been classified and was hitherto unknown to scholars and analysts. These sources have been supplemented by documents from ecclesiastical archives in Rome and Ukrainian church repositories in the West. Furthermore, the author has availed himself of a number of oral informants, both living and deceased, including victims and eyewitnesses of Soviet repressions against
the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, thereby including in his considerations vital insights that otherwise would not have been preserved.

Dr. Bociurkiw was judiciously pieced together the disparate and scattered bits of information to narrate the planning, realization and immediate consequences of the Soviet liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church. The book carefully analyzes Soviet policy towards the Church from the first occupation of Calicia by the Red Army in 1939 through the liqudation of the visible structures of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, Poland, and Transcarpathia in the mid and late 1940s. The study shows what Soviet authorities sought to achieve through their policy toward the Greek Catholic Church in the context of preceding and contemporary Russian and Soviet nationalities policy, and reveals the mechanism through which the Stalin regime sought to meet its ojectives regading Ukrainian Greek Catholics. In doing so, the quthor identifies the main executors of the Kremlin ordered "reunion" of the Greek Catholic Church with the state-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, including NKGB/MGB agents, officials, propagandists--often hiding behind pseudonyms plausibly deciphered in the book--and
ecclesiastical figures. Given the sensitivity of the subject matter, the perfidy of some actors on the stage, the heroism of others and the difficulty of separating well-informed and balanced analysis of the Soviet attempt to liquidate the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine is a major accomplishment. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church or in the
suppression of religion under Soviet rule.

Cloth $39.93

Ihor Sevcenko
Ukraine Between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (1996)

Ukraine between East and West presents twelve essays by Ihor Sevcenk that explore the development of Ukrainian cultural identity under the disparate influences of the byzantine Empire and Western Europe (mediated through Poland). For Kyivan Rus', Byzantium was the source of the Christian religion, as well as of a highly developed literary and artistic culture that stimulated Kyiv's own achievements in these fields. The author shows how the prestige of Byzantine civilization was reinforced by the activities of Greek metropolitans of Kyiv, Byzantine emperors, religious missionaries and teachers of Greek, dominating the outlook of the Slavic elite during the Middle Ages. This civilization influenced Kyivan culture even after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.

Sevcenk also analyses the impact of the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ukraine. The intellectual ferment of the era is captured in essays on the defense of the Orthodox faith and the religious polemical literature. The essay on Metropolitan Peter Mohyla examines the complex cultural world of this important churchman. Sevcenk's essays will reward not only students of Byzantine and East European history, but all readers interested in problems of cultural development. The volume is enhanced with fifteen chronological tables and four maps.

Cloth $34.95
Paper $24.95

Irena R. Makaryk, trans.
About the Harrowing of Hell: A Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Play in its European Context (1989)

The seventeenth-century Ukrainian play About the Harrowing of Hell is probably the last European manifestation of an important medieval dramatic tradition. This edition features a detailed introduction and notes, a facsimile of the original (discovered by Ivan Franko), and an English translation.

In Western Europe, harrowing of hell plays are among the best extant medieval plays, offering many opportunities for the spectacular and the awesome, as well as the farcical. In Eastern Europe, which felt the reverberations of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, almost all at once, the drama is both numerically and qualitatively more slight. About the Harrowing of Hell is one outstanding example.

A full, contained, independent harrowing play from the early seventeenth century, About the Harrowing of Hell forms a nexus between Western and Eastern dramatic traditions and is probably the last manifestation of this genre anywhere in Europe. Unknown to all but the Slavic specialist, this text broadens the scope of what is generally regarded as medieval religious drama and reveals the curious changes wrought on a harrowing play by a complex period.

The play represents a detailed psychological portrait of Lucifer, a Hades close to the knowing and fearful one of the Gospel of Nicodemus, a familiar look at "Johnny" (St. John the Baptist) Senecan-like messengers, and a solemn Christ. The play ends with the wily figure of Solomon, who is summarily thrown out of hell as he sings the praises of the Birth-Giver of God and prophesies the Second Coming.

Published in association with Dovehouse Editions ( Ottawa) in the series "Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation".

$12.95 (paper)

Paul Robert Magocsi, ed.
Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts'kyi (1989)

Andrei Sheptyts'kyi (1865–1944), metropolitan-archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, was a towering figure in twentieth-century Ukrainian life. This collection of twenty-one essays examines Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi as church hierarch, theologian, ecumenist, national leader, and philanthropist.

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