Barbara Skinner is to be congratulated for producing a timely and significant study of a complicated, controversial and poorly understood topic: the history of the Uniate Church in the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian empire. Caught between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions of Poland and Russia, the Uniate Church accepted papal authority and Catholic doctrine while preserving the Slavonic liturgy and Greek rite. The result was a culturally rich, distinctive, and not so distinctive kaleidoscope of practices, teachings and beliefs that helps to explain the development of the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. Equally important, the experience of Uniate believers in Poland-Lithuania and later in the Russian and Austrian empires highlights the fateful and surprisingly adaptive interconnections between the primary Christian traditions of Eastern Europe. For commentators who condemn early modern Christianity as rigid and doctrinaire, or who paint centuries-old conflicts between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in stark terms of Catholic-Polish or Orthodox-Russian aggression, this study will compel reconsideration of any one-sided conclusions. What strikes the reader of Skinner's original and informative book is the extent to which concrete historical events, rather than authoritative religious doctrine, defined the evolution of Uniate beliefs, practices and institutions. Drawing upon Russian, Polish and Ukrainian archives, Skinner begins her account by describing the religious landscape and ‘fault lines’ of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the founding (1596), early development and mature confessionalisation of the Uniate Church; and the relationships between Uniate and neighbouring Catholic or Orthodox populations. She continues her analysis into the late eighteenth century, the book's primary focus, when the partitions of Poland brought Uniate parishes into the Orthodox Russian empire, and already in the reign of Catherine ii Uniates began to suffer from repressive conversion campaigns. Shifting back and forth between the condition of Uniates in the Russian empire and Orthodox in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Skinner documents the political violence, repression and occasional religious conviction that overwhelmed both communities. Caught in a cauldron of great power politics, amid the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian state and the consequences of the French Revolution, the Uniate Church developed along a bifurcated trajectory – success within the Austrian empire and complete elimination from the Russian empire. For historians of imperial Russia, Skinner's book is a cautionary tale. Her multilingual research is a reminder of the critical events beyond Russian borders that belong to the history of Russia, and her detailed study of Catherine ii's policy toward the Uniate Church shows that the empress's much-touted religious toleration derived more from political expediency than Enlightenment principle. Any notion of a benign Russian empire is completely misplaced with reference to the western borderlands where religious policy served imperial aggression.