The catastrophic war in Ukraine has been an unwelcome reminder that this region's fragile peace of the past seventy years has been anomalous. The “bloodlands” of Central and Eastern Europe have reawakened in new and horrific fashion as that old pattern of neighbor devouring neighbor repeats itself once more. In Disunion within the Union, Larry Wolff takes us back to the late eighteenth century and considers another moment of conflict. Wolff's setting is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its dismemberment at the hands of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. But instead of investigating the fate of the Polish state, Wolff considers the future of one of its most fascinating institutions, the Uniate Church. Nearly two centuries earlier at the Synod of Brest (1595–1596), the Uniate Church emerged when Ruthenian Orthodox communities recognized certain Catholic doctrines and the primacy of Rome and in return were allowed to retain their traditional liturgical and ritual practices. Viewed by many Orthodox as apostate and by Catholics as flawed or deficient, the church plotted a course through stormy waters over the next two centuries. There were incidents of open violence such as a riot in Vitebsk when an angry Orthodox mob in 1623 hacked to death the Uniate archbishop, Josaphat Kuntsevych, but the church persevered and survived to face a yet greater crisis at the end of the eighteenth century.

In this short monograph, Wolff considers how the Uniate Church responded both to the immediate shock of the partitions and the longer-term impact of the Enlightenment. Wolff divides his study into two sections. In the first, he evaluates the response of Uniate leadership to the new political realities of the partitions. His principal focus within the Uniates is Archbishop of Polatsk, Iason Smohozhevs'kyi (Smogorzewski). Wolff draws extensively from his correspondence as he compiles a portrait of a churchman deftly moving between Orthodox and Catholic traditions, at one moment placating his new Russian masters while at another celebrating a Polish saint. One of Wolff's most important contributions in this volume overall is a reassessment of Russia's Catherine II. One scholarly tradition has portrayed the Orthodox Empress as an implacable foe of the Uniates, full of “hellish” designs of suppression, her efforts a precursor of the more systematic campaigns of Nicholas I and then Stalin to eliminate the church altogether. In contrast, Habsburg Emperor Joseph appears more favorably by granting the Uniates a greater degree of freedom as the Greek Catholic Church of Galicia. Wolff helpfully blurs the lines here as he argues that the polices of Catherine and Joseph were actually closer than many have acknowledged. In this age of Enlightened Absolutism, both sought control over the church in an effort to bolster the state. The second half of Disunion looks more closely at Uniate identity. Here, Wolff highlights its durability. After periods of persecution, peasants time and again returned to the church and a piety that, as one nineteenth-century observer noted, “rests more on form than on actual grasping and understanding of religious content” (139).

Disunion within the Union is a marvelous study of this often-misunderstood church. Wolff, to my mind the most versatile and creative scholar of Eastern Europe in the Anglophone world, presents here a focused study that returns to his early academic interests. Disunion within the Union is actually a revision of a lengthy essay he published in 2002 in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. The book may be challenging for those not familiar with the complicated ecclesiastical and political landscape of eighteenth-century East Central Europe. A map would have been particularly helpful in this respect. Nevertheless, for those who make the investment, the results are well worth it. This eloquently written monograph captures key dynamics of this region through the history of this neglected church in those critical decades of the late eighteenth century.