When one thinks of religion and Poland, one naturally thinks first of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the history of the lands that have constituted Poland at various stages has been intertwined with Eastern Slavs and, therefore, with Orthodox Christians as well, and today Orthodoxy is the second largest faith in the country, with more than half a million adherents. The history of the Orthodox Church in Polish territories has been a turbulent one, and this is certainly true of the twentieth century. The scholarship on the subject in English is virtually non-existent, making Wynot's monograph very welcome.

Wynot argues that the Orthodox Church is particularly inclined to accommodate itself to the state. In the case of modern Poland, this has meant accommodating itself with the states that were regarded with greater hostility by Polish Roman Catholics: the Russian Empire, the Nazi occupation, and the communist government. As a consequence, Wynot argues, the Orthodox Church was placed under particular pressures when the Roman Catholic Church was more assertive, namely in inter-war Poland and after the collapse of communism. This alternation of regimes drives the structure of the book. The study draws upon secondary literature (primarily in Polish), Polish state archives (especially for the two central chapters on the inter-war and communist periods), and the press.

The first chapter provides a survey of the history to 1914. Orthodox Christianity first enters Poland with the latter's eastward expansion in the fourteenth century. Although Poland and Lithuania (joined by dynastic union at that time) were tolerant of their large Orthodox population, the drive for greater religious uniformity followed in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. The result was the “Unia,” eastern-rite Christians under the jurisdiction of Rome, which existed side-by-side with a diminished Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into the eighteenth century. That state—one of the largest in Europe—was partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century; those Greek Catholics in the Russian Empire were brought into the Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century. The Orthodox Church was viewed by Polish nationalists and the Roman Catholic leadership as an agent of Russian influence.

With the establishment of the Republic of Poland after the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Orthodox Church was subject to severe pressures and ethnic tensions in the new state (chapter 2). The Orthodox believers in the new Polish state were divided ethnically between Russians (the minority, but who dominated the Church hierarchy in the beginning), Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and these groups did not necessarily share the same vision for the future of the Church. The Polish Church, still subordinate to Moscow, sought and received autocephaly (ecclesiastical independence) in 1924 (granted by Constantinople in opposition to the wishes of Moscow). The greatest challenge came from intense pressures by both the Polish state and the Roman Catholic Church: the majority of the Orthodox Churches were closed (in two waves, first in the 1920s and then again in the late 1930s), the majority of which were either seized by the Roman Catholic Church or destroyed (such as the cathedral in Warsaw). The Orthodox Church struggled throughout the period to gain legal recognition.

As a consequence of the inter-war persecution, the Orthodox Church leadership was pro-German during World War II because the Nazi regime was more tolerant of it than the Polish one. With the establishment of new borders after the war, the majority of the Orthodox ended up in Soviet Ukraine, so that the Orthodox population in Poland dropped from 4 million to 450,000. The communists who came to power in Poland were more tolerant of religious minorities as a counterweight to the Catholic Church, a role that the Orthodox Church accepted and used to its benefit. Chapter 3 treats this story, together with the crisis in the Church's leadership and the effort to renegotiate autocephaly with the Moscow Patriarchate.

Because the Orthodox Church accommodated itself to the communist regime in Poland and the Roman Catholic Church was associated with the opposition, when communism collapsed, the Orthodox Church was once again in a vulnerable position in the new state with a resurgent Catholic Church. In the final chapter, Wynot follows the various ways in which the Orthodox Church fought to secure minority rights, especially with regard to the reclamation of properties, the legal position of the minority confessions vis-à-vis the Catholic Church, chaplains for the military, and religious education in the schools. Although the position of the Church was vulnerable in the 1990s and there were significant tensions with the Catholic Church, by the end of that decade, the situation stabilized, and the Orthodox Church has enjoyed security and energetic leadership since the 2000s. According to a recent census, the number of those who identify themselves as Orthodox is higher than the number of those who identify ethnically as Ukrainian and Belarusian, indicating that religious identification continues even when the sense of a separate ethnic identity no longer does.

As a first foray into the subject, the book naturally leaves many gaps. The focus of the book is primarily upon the evolution of ecclesiastical structures and the legal framework of its relationship to the state. Thus, the book provides some statistics about the persecution of the Orthodox Church in inter-war Poland, but not much analysis is provided on the causes and consequences of it. Although the communist regime may have been relatively tolerant of Orthodoxy, the goal of all eastern European communist regimes was the disappearance of religion—the tolerance was relative, and must have been balanced by restrictions to the practice of religion, which are not explored. Certainly there are more avenues for research, but Wynot's monograph will serve as an entry into the subject pertinent to those interested in the history of Christianity in central and eastern Europe, as well as the history of Orthodox Christianity.