This volume is the result of a collaborative project designed to span two scholarly fields—Eastern European studies and the history of Christianity—that have remained largely closed to one another outside of Eastern Europe. Historians Bruce R. Berglund (Calvin College) and Brian Porter-Szűcs (University of Michigan) secured contributions from an impressive group of scholars based in eight different countries. The project's geographical scope is the part of Eastern Europe that existed under communist rule from the 1940s to the 1980s, thus generally excluding regions once belonging to the Soviet Union. The timeframe reaches from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the emphasis falling on the period between 1945 and 1989.
While lacking an overarching thesis or unifying theme, the volume successfully communicates the depth, variety, and intrigue of its subject matter. The authors employ a wide range of methodologies, and they draw from source material that is otherwise difficult for most readers in Western Europe and North America to access on account of either the archival provenance or original language of the material in question. At turn after turn the book upends conventional wisdom and challenges readers to reassess what they thought they knew about Eastern Europe and its religious history. It deserves a wide audience.
It is impossible to adequately summarize each of the book's thirteen chapters in a short review. Instead I will explore a couple in greater detail, so as to provide a sense of the book's conceptual richness. In a convincing example of historical revisionism, Jim Bjork sketches a portrait of postwar Poland that was not the staunchly and homogeneously Catholic country one reads about in standard accounts. A close analysis of statistical data reveals that before Vatican II, Poland was no more pious than other parts of Catholic Europe, and within the country, levels of Catholic practice varied considerably from region to region. He looks to old partition boundaries to account for much of this variation. Bjork goes on to argue that Catholicism often served as a source of differentiation within Poland, “fostering customs and affirming experiences that were seen as unique to particular regions or, even more provocatively, as manifestations of a civilizational divide that cut across Poland” (130). I suspect his argument will attract the attention of other scholars for many years to come.
In another outstanding chapter, Natalia Shlikhta analyzes the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in western Ukraine after World War II. Instead of offering a straightforward, top-down narrative of religious repression, Shlikhta portrays the liquidation effort as a tense dance between various actors that led to unseemly alliances and ironic results. Although their ultimate goal was to advance the secularization of Ukrainian society, Soviet officials initially required Ukrainian Greek Catholics to reunify with the Russian Orthodox Church; a more repressive course, they feared, could lead Greek Catholics to convert to Catholicism. Russian Orthodox officials eagerly cooperated with Soviet policy, which served as a means of demonstrating their loyalty to the state and of resisting the advance of secularization. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Greek Catholics found ways to preserve their religious distinctiveness while formally complying with the reunification policy. Shlikhta effectively applies a variety of Western European and American theorists to her subject, including Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Sabrina Ramet, Colleen McDannell, and James Scott.
Edited volumes often read like assemblages of discrete and uneven parts, and this book is not immune to these characteristics. While all of the volume's chapters have their strengths, some are more engaging, ambitious, and consequential than others. To their credit, the editors have made commendable efforts to enhance the internal cohesion of the work. They organized two conferences in which the authors involved in the project gathered to discuss a common set of readings and methodological issues and to critique each other's work. As a result, the authors are aware of where their respective chapters stand in relation to rest of the volume, and they repeatedly draw explicit connections to other chapters. For example, in Martin C. Putna's chapter on Catholic writers in interwar Czechoslovakia, he draws a parallel between the political tactics of one of the novelists he examines, Jaroslav Durych, and those of the anti-communist dissidents in East Germany treated later in the volume by Katharina Kunter.
The editors also contributed essays of their own that are designed to link the various chapters into larger interpretive frameworks. The introduction by Porter-Szűcs offers a highly informative survey of the fields of Eastern European studies and the history of Christianity, including their historical trajectories, the leading methodological and thematic concerns that currently define each field, and promising directions for future study. Berglund concludes the volume with a thought-provoking reflection on the various ways the religious imaginations and practices of Eastern Europeans have been informed by a sense of place.
A rare false note is the editors' rationale for restricting the project to the part of Eastern Europe that experienced communist rule from the 1940s to the 1980s. What unifies this region, they argue, is that communist regimes held power long enough to influence religious belief and practice without entirely defining “the experience of faith” (15). As the recent resurgence of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia demonstrates, seventy-plus years of communist rule in the former Soviet Union can hardly be said to have entirely defined religion there. One can also find fault in the uneven coverage of the region in question. The better part of two chapters is devoted to East Germany, while the Baltic States receive no mention.
Owing to the narrow focus of most of the chapters, this book reads like a series of vignettes that highlight small facets of the much larger topic of religion in modern Eastern Europe. Readers will have to turn elsewhere for more comprehensive treatments of the issues explored herein. As they do so, and I suspect many will, this volume will have achieved a goal identified in the introduction: to inspire further research into a fascinating, if underappreciated, subject.
