Few would dispute the link between religion and national feeling – in particular before the twentieth century – but the actual nature of this link often remains vague and unexamined. The central task that Ricarda Vulpius sets herself in her book, Nationalisierung der Religion, is to examine and explicate this link. The book takes as its subject the Orthodox clergy in the “Ukrainian” provinces (from Chernihiv to Podillia, Volhynia to Katerynoslav, roughly speaking) from the eve of the Great Reforms to the end of the Civil War. Among the topics taken on by Vulpius are clerical education (and its national element), the controversy of Bible translations into Ukrainian, concepts of “collective identity” among Russophile and Ukrainophile clergy, and the post-1917 struggle for and against an explicitly Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox Church. Throughout, the work is well argued, extremely well documented, and compelling. Vulpius makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex interaction between “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” and religious identities.
Vulpius begins her book with a marvelous background chapter presenting a capsule history of the Ukrainian (to use the author’s designation; one could equally have written “southern Russian” but of course neither term is without its national baggage) dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church. Vulpius argues that a consistent russificatory policy was followed in the region, in part simply by using and spreading the Russian language in church schools and sermons (obviously not in the liturgy), and partly by the installation of clergy from Central Russia in these provinces. Vulpius concludes that the Russian government pursued a “massive Instrumentalisierung der orthodoxen Religion fьr russisch-nationale Belange,” (P. 115) but that this policy was successful only in the three Southwestern provinces (Volhynia, Podillia, Kyiv).
Vulpius further develops this argument in a detailed chapter on the controversy over a translation of the Bible into Ukrainian. She begins by stating that the development of Ukrainian culture into a fully fledged national culture was “zunдchst eine Entwicklung mit offenem Ausgang” rather like the development of Welsh culture in Britain or Provenзal in France. This may or may not be true – the power of the Russian state to assimilate was certainly much weaker than that of France of Britain – but it can at least be argued. But what role would a Bible translation play in this process? Vulpius argues that by forbidding the publication of the Bible in Ukrainian, the Russian government aimed to stifle the development of Ukrainian high culture. So far, so good. But her repeated claims for the centrality of a Bible translation for the development of national culture are drawn almost exclusively from the Protestant experience and are thus not entirely convincing. Neither the French, Spaniards, nor Russians (to take just three prominent nationalities) regularly read the Bible in their native tongue (as noted on P. 124, only in 1858 was the prohibition of publishing the Bible in Russian lifted), and one can hardly doubt the existence of “national feeling” among them. Vulpius further claims that there was an “ьberragende Interesse der [Ukrainian] Bevцlkerung,” but the example she cites derives from an intellectual’s memoirs. It would be interesting to know more about the tens of thousands of copies printed in 1906–1907: did they reach the Ukrainian countryside? While Ukrainian intellectuals may have thought the Bible publication central for the development of national feeling, one may question that belief or at least demand more proof.
Identity is always a tricky and slippery term and Vulpius promises to present neither a Russia-centered imperial history nor a teleological story of Ukrainian development. While she fulfills her pledge in most regards, ultimately the Ukrainian teleology wins out. Certainly, “russkii” as used by Orthodox clergy did not necessarily mean Great Russian. But it is often less clear that “Ukrainian” was really meant, as the author tends to insist. Then there is the issue of “multiple identity.” Surely, as many earlier scholars have pointed out, national identities are seldom entirely exclusivist, even in the twentieth century. And in particular among peasant folk like Ukrainians in the late nineteenth century, religious identity often crowded out the national. But very often in this work Vulpius presses the Ukrainian, not maloross, Orthodox, or “multiple,” identity. Perhaps this is inevitable given the difficulty of retaining the level of semantic confusion that multiple identities (however real) entail. But it does point to a gap between the author’s original claims (P. 32) and the actual “follow-through” in the book.
Vulpius chooses the Orthodox clergy as the subject of her study. Inevitably this means that most primary sources examined here were written and published in Russian, not Ukrainian, at least until the 1905 revolution. This is not necessarily a drawback, as it is entirely possible to propagate a pro-Ukrainian line in Russian (e.g., Gogol in Taras Bul’ba). The author combines a close reading of diocesian journals such as Kievskie Eparkhial’nye Vedomosti with an admirable amount of archival sources and a judicious use of memoirs. And yet there are some surprising absences. The almost total neglect of the Uniate Church, or its memory (it had, of course, been abolished in the Russian Empire in 1839 and 1875), represents a serious gap. In particular as “Ukrainian” (as opposed to local “Little Russian”) identity developed, Ukrainians naturally looked across the border to Galicia where they enjoyed – despite the hegemony of the Poles – a kind of national church, publishing in Ukrainian, education in that language and eventually even Ukrainian university professors. None of this is Vulpius’s story but certainly must have been reflected in the writings of her Orthodox priests, especially after 1905. It would have been interesting to know more about how both Russophile and Ukrainophile priests presented the Uniates, whether as Polish dupes (as one suspects from typical Russian views) or as the kernel of a future national church.^[1]
Vulpius is less interested in official church doctrine – which would in any case have been developed and set down in the Russian center rather than on the periphery – than in how individual clergymen interpreted this doctrine as it related to their “Russian” identity. As others have demonstrated before Vulpius, the boundary between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” was often determined by specific situations that require a close reading of texts.^[2] Indeed, “russifying” (obrusenie) could in some contexts mean “Ukrainianization” (P. 271). By presenting the two discourses – Russophile and Ukrainophile – as they appeared in the parish publications of the time, Vulpius is able to show the complex interworkings of Russian, Ukrainian, and religious rhetoric. But the connection between the rhetoric itself and the categories Vulpius assigns (“russophil,” “ukrainophil”) is not always so clear. Why, for example, place the Soiuz russkago naroda only within the “russophile” camp? Similarly, surely anti-Polish and anti-Jewish rhetoric was not exclusive to the russophile clergy? From Vulpius’s account, it seems that the Russophile clergy were thoroughly retrograde and chauvinist, while the Ukrainophile priests, with their rhetoric of the educated, democratic, and independent nation (Volk), were progressive and enlightened latterday followers of Johann Gottfried Herder. This kind of dichotomy is obviously biased and enmeshed in a Ukrainian national teleology that sees the “natural” and “inevitable” outcome of these complicated national processes in the triumph of the Ukrainian nation.
Vulpius’s extended excursion into the “Ikonisierung von Taras Љevčenko” demonstrates this tendency. No one would deny the importance of Shevchenko for Ukrainian national consciousness, though one can take issue at the citation from George Grabowicz making the exalted claim for Shevchenko as “Bard and Prophet, the inspired voice of his people, and the spiritual father of the reborn Ukrainian nation” (P. 320). More interesting is Vulpius’s description of how Ukrainophile priests interpreted Shevchenko, ignoring or re-interpreting his “blasphemies” and putting him forward as a hero of the people and – eventually – of the Ukrainian nation. Already in 1898, Vulpius notes, a circle of Ukrainophiles at the Poltava Orthodox Seminary organized Shevchenko evenings, and in early 1905 Ukrainophile priests felt secure enough to hold a memorial service in the poet’s honor in a Kiev church. Despite other such memorial services, a request from the Podillia Seminary to celebrate the poet’s one-hundredth birthday with such a service was refused by the authorities. By this point, Vulpius notes, few cases of “multiple identity” still existed as the “members of an oppressed people saw themselves obliged to ‘decide... to identify either with the dominant (“herrschend”) or oppressed nation’” (P. 331). Vulpius here assigns a national identity to Orthodox priests in the Ukrainian provinces (why should they not be “Russian” or “Little Russian” rather than “Ukrainian”?) and suggests that if they were to “feel Russian” this would amount to a kind of betrayal – a rather strange passage to find in a scholarly work.
Vulpius’s work is excellent for what it does: it presents a clear (if sometimes one-sided), detailed, and well-researched discussion of how Orthodox clergy in the Ukrainian provinces either supported Russian national claims or developed Ukrainian ones. The chapter on the efforts to get a Ukrainian Bible published, whether or not one agrees with all parts of the thesis, is exemplary in its portrayal of this complex issue and the arguments pro and contra, false starts, and perceived importance (again, both for and against) of this translation. Similarly, the final chapter on the open conflict after 1917 between Russian and Ukrainian concepts of the Orthodox Church in this region illuminates a little-known chapter both in the history of the Civil War in Ukraine and in the history of Orthodoxy.
The book is somewhat weaker in making the case of how significant and effective these clergymen (whether Russophile or Ukrainophile) were. The reader gets many anecdotes and a wealth of details, but no clear overview. Similarly, Vulpius argues for a concerted program of russification undertaken by the tsarist government through the agency of the Orthodox Church and concludes that, at least for the Duma period, this program had some successes. But events during the first World War and after suggest that these successes were, at best, rather superficial. In the end, the “Ukrainophiles” – or at least the Ukrainians – won out. To what extent was the victory due to Ukrainophile Orthodox clergymen? To be sure, this question is very hard to answer, but it is a key one for a book that centers on this particular group, and a tentative answer could have been made. Certainly, some key individuals rise to form the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church at the volume’s end, but these are just individuals, and in any case that entire controversy is overshadowed by the threat to all Christian churches presented by the Bolsheviks. Still, with a book this full of insightful information and provocative arguments, it would be wrong to end on a negative note. For anyone interested in the role of religion in the formation of national identity or, more specifically, in how Orthodoxy could foment not only Russian but also Ukrainian national sentiments, this book is recommended.