The Uniate Church, created in the east of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the 1596 Union of Brest, finally settled into expansionary mode in the early eighteenth century. Its growth was interrupted by a Russian Orthodox counter-attack in the 1760s, before large parts of its canonical territory were annexed by the Russian Empire and Austrian Habsburg Monarchy following the first partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1772. When the Commonwealth was again partitioned in 1793 and 1795, its remaining Uniate clergy and laity became subjects of Catherine the Great. Despite the provisions for full religious toleration in the partition treaties, many Uniates were pressured into the Orthodox fold. Their story has traditionally been told as a martyrdom (or from the opposite perspective, righteous redemption of rebels) accomplished in stages by an implacable empire, driven by a Russian Orthodox mission to root out “schism.” The policies pursued by Catherine II have seemed to presage the near-total destruction of the Uniate Church in the Russian Empire under Nicholas I in the 1830s. In contrast, in Austrian-ruled Galicia the renamed “Greek Catholic Church” became formally equal in status with the Roman Catholic Church of the Latin Rite. The Greek Catholic clergy later played a vital role in forming the modern Ukrainian nation, before the Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Ukrainian Rite survived Soviet persecution to flourish in the southwest of independent Ukraine. In Disunion within the Union, Larry Wolff offers a different interpretation to this Biblically-inspired narrative.

Wolff has no rival as a scholar of outsiders’ perceptions of the vast region that at some point came to be known as “Eastern Europe.” Each of the other nine books in his distinguished oeuvre, which together span the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, has enabled readers to experience these diverse lands’ disconcerting mixtures of alterity and familiarity through Italian, French, British, German, Austrian, or American eyes. This volume is the exception. The author has again revisited aspects of his undergraduate and postgraduate apprenticeships, in order to explore the defining turning point of the Uniate Church from the perspective of its bishops. He draws on his earlier research in the Vatican archives, as well as on published volumes of episcopal and monastic letters. He also sets his findings into the context of advances in scholarship since the previous presentation of this research in volume 26 of Harvard Ukrainian Studies (2002/3). He might also, however, have consulted works by Andrzej Gil and the late Ihor Skochylas. From the moment early in the introduction when the reader marvels at the deftness shown by the Archbishop of Polatsk (Polotsk, Połock), Iason Smohozhev´skyi (Jason Smogorzewski), in inoffensively celebrating the birthday of the Empress of Russia on May 2, 1774, followed by the name-day of the King of Poland on May 8, Wolff succeeds in conveying subtle nuances of predicaments, identities, and symbols in the elegant fashion that has long been his trademark. Smohozhevs´kyi's reference to “disunion within the Union” is the starting point for persuasive explanations of “a profound crisis of identity” and “religious ambivalence” (17).

The first part of the book deals with the Uniate hierarchs’ responses to changing political conditions in the Russian Empire, the Austrian Monarchy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In their contrasting ways, the two absolute monarchies and the noble-dominated republic pursued comparable, enlightened goals: tightening the state's control of Churches and increasing their temporal utility. Wolff's key argument here is that Catherine II—thoroughly secular in her mindset, however Orthodox in her public piety—tended to intensify pressure on the Uniates whenever she wished to obtain other concessions, whether from the Commonwealth or from the Holy Apostolic See. At other times, she was content to receive the Uniate hierarchy's unswerving obedience and loyalty. In the second part of the volume, Wolff ventures into complex questions of liturgical changes and transfers between Catholic rites. In doing so he skillfully illuminates the far from predictable emergence of an identity that was all its own, poised between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West. This gem of a book can be warmly recommended to everyone interested in inter-confessional and Church-state relations, religious identities, and more broadly, the making of central and eastern Europe.