Disunion within the Union

Larry Wolff

• Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674246393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annex and eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. With the partitioning of Poland, the dioceses of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) were fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.Larry Wolff's deeply engaging account of these events delves into the politics of the Episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria. Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiqués to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded. Disunion within the Union adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis ( The Return of Martin Guerre ) and Carlo Ginzburg ( The Cheese and the Worms ) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety. This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century's premier absolutist powers.

Part I. Church and State

Principles of Authority

In 1782 Tsarina Catherine II gave her Warsaw ambassador a message for Pope Pius VI, insisting that he create a Roman Catholic archbishopric in Russia for her cooperative pet bishop, Stanisław Siestrzeńcewicz. The pope was to be informed, in no uncertain terms, that if he did not swallow his objections to Siestrzeńcewicz and promptly provide the ceremonial regalia for the grand promotion, the tsarina would not hesitate to withdraw her protection from the Catholic Church in Russia. The consequences, Catherine pointed out, would be particularly grave for the Uniates who resided in the Belarusian lands detached from Poland in 1772:

The Pope himself cannot be ignorant of the fact that most of those who profess the Roman communion under my government of White Russia were once of our Orthodox religion, and that they and their ancestors only adopted the Roman communion on account of the persecution they experienced in Poland and the artifices of Roman priests. Under these circumstances, the majority of them await only the least signal to embrace our Orthodox religion, which they abandoned with regret and of which they retain many traces and vestiges in their hearts—a religion whose dogmas are all the more precious to humanity inasmuch as they have never been found in contradiction with the principles of authority and civil power, nor with the well-being and the administration (la police) of states.⁸

The tsarina’s reading of Uniate history was simplistic, one-sided, and self-serving, but not so wildly off the mark as to fail to put across her basic point: that the balance of power in the region, which had favored Poland and Catholicism at the time of the Union in 1596, had now shifted decisively in favor of Russia and Orthodoxy. For Catherine, the past history, current crisis, and future fate of the Uniates was, above all, a question of power.

Her interest in the “traces and vestiges in their hearts” suggests that she was attuned to the political significance of Uniate religious identity. Orthodoxy, which she claimed to see as a vestigial feature of the Union, revealed its preciousness in its relation to “principles of authority” and “the administration of states.”

These were, of course, the great political issues of enlightened absolutism in eighteenth-century Europe, and they were particularly sensitive in empires confronting a diversity of cultural and religious communities. Catherine in the 1770s immediately addressed the administrative problems raised by her acquisitions from Poland, and remained attuned to the religious ramifications of those problems throughout her reign. In the 1780s, the Josephine revolution in Habsburg relations between Church and state also addressed these issues of authority and civil power. In the 1790s, at the Four-Year Sejm, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth itself reorganized its religious institutions in that spirit of state authority and government involvement—a spirit not altogether unrelated to that of the simultaneously codified Civil Constitution of the Clergy in revolutionary France. Whatever the evolving religious climates for the Uniate Church—nourishing in Austria, harassing in Russia, ambivalent in Poland—the fundamental institutional engagement of Church by state was structurally similar. The terms of that engagement were defined according to the values of enlightened absolutism by the governments in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw, pursuing analogous political agendas, however divergent the ultimate religious consequences.

Pacification

Catherine II, from the moment she cast her imperial eye on Poland in the 1760s, was inspired to present herself as the enlightened patroness of religious freedom against the alleged intolerance of the Commonwealth. Voltaire led the pack of philosophes who acclaimed her imperial policy of power as a crusade of the Enlightenment. From the very start of the reign of King Stanisław August, whose royal election Catherine arranged in 1764, an Orthodox campaign was mounted against Uniate parishes in the eastern lands of the Commonwealth, and some communities were encouraged to take an oath of Orthodoxy: “that we and our descendants shall eternally and without fail preserve the Greek-Russian faith, oppose with every means the Roman Uniate faith,” or else “submit ourselves to the unforgiving last judgment and to eternal damnation.” ⁹ With such religious polarization taking place at the village level, Catherine herself began interfering in Polish affairs with a memorandum to Warsaw favoring equal civil rights for Poland’s non-Catholics, the Dissidents. This demand for legislative equality was presented to the Sejm in 1766 and formalized in an imposed Russian-Polish treaty as the religious articles of 1768.

Catherine thus gave satisfaction to her own Russian Orthodox hierarchy inasmuch as she offered protection to the Orthodox peasant population in the eastern lands of the Commonwealth. For Orthodoxy, like Protestantism, was “dissident” in Catholic Poland, and Orthodox grievances targeted not just Catholic dominance by law in the Commonwealth, but the ongoing pastoral struggle between Orthodox and Uniates that dated back to the Union of 1596. The Uniate Church did not spring fully formed from the Union of Brest: such dioceses as Lviv and Przemyśl remained Orthodox through the seventeenth century, and during the first half of the eighteenth century the Union continued to aggrandize itself among the communities of Ukraine under the sponsorship of the Commonwealth. In the articles of 1768, Catherine determined to set back this ongoing displacement of Orthodoxy by the Union, and a tribunal was proposed to settle disputes with reference to the status quo of a hundred years before. Political explosions forestalled such a resolution at that time, but Catherine had already elaborated the perspective that would lead her to later denounce the Uniates for “persecution” of the Orthodox.

The mounting tensions of the 1760s finally erupted into warfare in 1768 when Catherine’s treaty articles on behalf of the Dissidents provoked patriotic Catholic Poles to take up arms in the Confederation of Bar, and to fight against their own king and his Russian patroness. For Catherine, this quickly turned into a two-front war against the Ottoman Empire as well as the Polish Confederation. Ukraine, the heartland of the Uniate Church, constituted the intermediary terrain between Turkey and Poland, and was overrun by Russian troops. This Russian military presence in the lands of the Commonwealth created a domain in which Warsaw could not hope to govern or protect its subjects. At the same time, an Orthodox missionary crusade against the Uniate parishes of Ukraine was unleashed from beyond the Dnieper River, led by the bishop of Pereiaslav, while a campaign of in-surrectionary violence was directed against Roman Catholics, Uniates, and Jews, led by Haidamak Cossack bands. This latter violence culminated in the Uman massacre, in which the Haidamaks seized the Uniate Basilian monks and “paraded them naked and barely alive amidst abuses and sneers around the town hall” before murdering them. The Basilian Uniate church in Uman was desecrated by the Orthodox insurrectionaries, who were reported to have “dashed the ciborium with the holy sacrament to the ground, trampled on the image of the Savior on the cross, speared it with pikes, shot it through, and finally hung it by the head.” ¹⁰

The conventions of sacrilege clearly did not apply in the fiercely antagonistic climate of Orthodox-Uniate conflict. Catherine felt obliged to dissociate herself and her state from such irregular atrocities, but the ravages of the Haidamaks certainly helped to create a convenient political void and chaos in those strategic lands which she intended to occupy for the duration of hostilities.

With Russian troops negating the efficacy of Polish government in Ukraine, and Haidamak bands adding an element of terror, the Orthodox missionary effort met with great success.

Uniate priests were pressured to convert to Orthodoxy and bring their parishes with them, while those who resisted were expelled and replaced. Thus began a period of intense pressure on the Uniate Church which did not abate until after the partition of 1772, and did not cease completely until the treaty settlement of 1775. During this period, more than a thousand Uniate parishes in Ukraine were taken over by Orthodox priests. Missionaries, however, did not achieve these impressive results entirely on their own; Russian soldiers actively collaborated in the crusade. At Bila Tserkva, for instance, the Orthodox priest VasylŹrazhevs´kyi and the Russian captain Kruglov worked together to arrest all the local Uniate priests on Christmas Eve, keeping them locked up through Christmas Day.¹¹ Such local teamwork reflected the presumed collaboration at the highest level between Hervazii Lyntsevs´kyi, the Orthodox bishop of Pereiaslav, and General Piotr Rumiantsev, the Russian commander in Ukraine. Catherine formalized the religious role of her army in Ukraine with an ukaz of 1771 that authorized the protection of Orthodox communities from Uniate persecution. Thus, she continued to present herself as the champion of religious freedom.

Regardless of who was actually the object of persecution (by 1771, the balance already had shifted against the Uniates), the point of the ukaz was to express Catherine’s official approval of the arbitration and interference of her military officials (indeed, mandating it). In 1768, she had involved herself in Polish religious affairs by bilateral treaty; now she did so by unilateral decree. In fact, in 1771 it was almost meaningless to speak of Poland’s sovereignty in Ukraine: the war was ongoing, and the partition was under negotiation. Under these circumstances, for the duration of the war, Catherine could issue decrees against Uniate persecution; her soldiers could arrest Uniate priests; and her missionaries could take over Uniate parishes. In the region around Uman, the site of the Haidamak massacre, Russian military instructions specified that the keys to village churches should be taken from Uniate priests and handed over to Orthodox priests, for “as there had formerly been the Orthodox faith, so shall there be until the end of time.” With such fiercely charged crusading ideology, the religious tensions on the ground readily became violent; for instance, one Uniate priest reported that the Russian soldiers “beat me with the butts of their rifles and clubs” as the Orthodox priest took over the parish.¹² The Warsaw nuncio, Giuseppe Garampi, was trying to keep a careful account of the lost parishes, but recognized in 1772 that it would be impossible to think about restitution until after the “pacification” of Poland.¹³ The religious crisis of the Uniate Church in Ukraine between 1768 and 1772 accompanied Catherine’s Polish policy, from the war against the Confederation of Bar to the diplomacy of the partition settlement.

While the massacre of Uman became a byword for anti-Catholic terror in Ukraine, it was above all the imprisonment at Berdychiv that came to epitomize the violent persecution of the Uniate Church by the Russian army. There, in 1772 and 1773, sixty-eight Uniate priests were jailed, and in 1774 the Uniate bishop of Chełm, Maksymiliian Ryllo, who was traveling throughout Ukraine to visit ecclesiastical prisoners, was himself imprisoned at Berdychiv.

The case of the sixty-eight priests received considerable attention, with reports reaching Garampi at the Warsaw nunciature that the prisoners were chained, starved, and confined together in a suffocatingly inadequate space; the affair was publicized in the manner of the Black Hole of Calcutta almost twenty years before. The nuncio appealed to King Stanisław August and to Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, while sending the prisoners copies of St. Cyprian’s Exhortation to Martyrdom. The Uniate metropolitan sent a Polish translation for those captive priests who could not read the Exhortation in Latin, since they were not, after all, Roman Catholics.¹⁴

Martyrdom, however, was not the ultimate outcome. The priests were liberated in September 1773 at the recommendation of the Russian ambassador in Warsaw, Otto Magnus Stackelberg, and just after the ratification of the treaties of partition by the Polish Sejm. Clearly, the prisoners were not destined to follow the exhortation of St. Cyprian; the timing of their liberation revealed that all along they had been not martyrs, but hostages—hostages to Catherine’s Polish policy. Once the partitions had been ratified in Warsaw, Russia could begin to relax its grip on Ukraine. As for the bishop detained in 1774, he woke up two months later to discover that his guards had disappeared and that he was free to go. In fact, the Russian government denied that he had ever been detained, dismissing the incident as “merely a Uniate calumny.” ¹⁵ The years since 1768 had been years of lawless bullying in Ukraine, which remained in a state of suspended irregularity while Catherine fought her wars and negotiated the partition.

By 1774, however, Catherine was ready to reconsider the value of social stability over irregular violence.

When the captive priests of Berdychiv were liberated in 1773, they were not restored to their parishes, which remained in the hands of the Orthodox. In this sense, the liberation, though naturally a joyous occasion, was no great institutional triumph for the Uniate Church; the thousand lost parishes remained lost, for the moment. Garampi, the nuncio, was well aware of this, and in 1774 he so despaired of not being able to influence Ukraine from Warsaw that he resorted to an extravagantly roundabout approach to the problem. From Warsaw, he urged the Vatican in Rome to appeal to Versailles so that the French king might in turn appeal to the sultan in Constantinople on behalf of the Uniates of Ukraine. Garampi hoped that the restitution of the Uniate parishes might become one of the concerns of the Ottoman Empire in its war against Russia. This peculiarly indirect and rather unlikely appeal was never properly launched, as Russia finally won the war in 1774, putting Turkey in no position to realize any desiderata at all.¹⁶ The scheme clearly indicated, however, Garampi’s sense of the urgency regarding the Uniate situation, and also suggested the apparent futility of strategies for achieving a remedy.

When the Partition Sejm in Warsaw finally concluded its two-year session in 1775 with a general confirmation of the religious articles of 1768 on behalf of the Dissidents, the question of the parishes of Ukraine was referred to a future joint commission composed of Polish and Russian members. The commission was to consider “the grievances of the Greek non-Uniates against the Greek Uniates and reciprocally of the latter against the former,” phrasing that reflected Catherine’s preferred emphasis on the Uniates as persecutors; it suggested that the commission would be concerned, principally, with Orthodox grievances against the Uniates, whereas the possibility of Uniate grievances was merely noted afterwards, in perfunctory fashion, as occurring “reciprocally.” ¹⁷

The commission, however, was never constituted, for by the end of 1775 the usurped parishes had suddenly begun returning to the Union. Orthodox priests were set aside, while Uniate priests who had accepted Orthodoxy under pressure now renounced their apostasy. By 1774, Ryllo, the visiting bishop, was already absolving Uniate priests of their coerced apostasies—but Ryllo was arrested at that time. Now, in 1775, the Uniates returned to the Union without obstruction, and what had seemed to promise the elimination of the Union in Ukraine was revealed as temporary harassment.

Not only the priests at Berdychiv, but their parishes, too, had been held hostage pending the “pacification” and establishment of a new order in Poland. The timing was, again, unmistakable: just as the liberation of the priests followed immediately after the ratification of the partition treaties, the return of the parishes, too, began within months of the conclusion of the Partition Sejm in Warsaw. Catherine relaxed her grip, the army ceased intervening, and the Orthodox ecclesiastical intruders lost the ability to hold on to the parishes they had acquired. Now it was Polish authorities (rather than Russian soldiers) who facilitated the changeover in these parishes, bringing about the return of Uniate priests.¹⁸ Catherine’s influence in Poland remained para-mount, but now she looked on with seeming nonchalance as the parishes of Ukraine slipped back into the Union. For Catherine, the Union in Ukraine had served as a convenient pressure point in the campaign to dominate Poland, but she was not at this time committed to the elimination of the Uniates.

The Mutation of Temporal Dominion

The person who was most acutely aware of the political significance of religion in Ukraine during these years was the Warsaw nuncio Garampi. When he came to Warsaw from Rome in 1772, it seemed shocking to him that such a successful Orthodox campaign could be mounted in the lands of the Catholic Commonwealth.

Unable at first to believe that Warsaw was really so powerless to resist, he tried to impress upon the king, his ministers, and the representatives at the Partition Sejm the political importance of the Uniates for Poland. In 1773, he wrote and began to circulate anonymously a pamphlet entitled Exposé of the Condition of the Church in Ukraine. In it he appealed on behalf of the persecuted priests, but he also pursued a carefully reasoned political analysis of what that persecution implied. Because the peasants of Ukraine were “ignorant,” Garampi feared they were “incapable of distinguishing civil from religious obedience.” Therefore, he reasoned, “when such a people is won for the Greek Oriental religion, they will confuse the center of their religious state, which will be St. Petersburg, with that of their political existence, which is the Republic of Poland.” Garampi, beginning to accept that Poland was either powerless or indifferent, developed the same argument in his 1774 suggestions for an appeal to Constantinople, insisting that “beyond religious considerations there are political ones which ought to interest that court.” If the Uniates of Ukraine became Orthodox, they would become assets for Russian policy against Turkey. “Although Russia does not care at all about leaving to the Republic of Poland dominion and sovereignty over the territory of Ukraine,” wrote Garampi, “the inhabitants nonetheless will be, if necessary, like subjects, even more than subjects, of the Muscovite monarchy.” ¹⁹ This whole analysis of “distinguishing civil from religious obedience,” and of relating sovereignty and subjects, was both sophisticated and prescient—perhaps too much so for the members of the Sejm. When Garampi was lobbying for a formal Polish guarantee of the rights of the Uniates in Poland, the representatives were “dazed and dead tired”—too tired to act on the nuncio’s recommendation.²⁰

If the Vatican was disappointed in the inaction of the Polish Sejm, the Uniate Church itself might have been less surprised.

The history of the Union in the Commonwealth had always been marked by the disconcerting official concession of preeminence to Roman Catholicism—symbolized, on the highest level, by the exclusion ...

Table of contents

• Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction: Disunion within the Union
• Part I. Church and State
• Part II. Ritual and Identity
• Index