The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine.(Book Review)

By Serhii Plokhy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 401 pp. $74.00.

Serhii Plokhy's book has much in common with a study situated at the other end of Europe: Marcus Tanner's Ireland's Holy Wars. In both, the story of how a group with indeterminate religious and ethnic affiliations acquired a well-defined identity within a few generations, both during the early modern period, as confessional and national lines began to be drawn. Just as Catholicism became the defining point for Irish identity, allowing for a fusion between the Gaels and the Old English (in opposition to the Protestantism of the "New English"), the Cossack assumption of the role of "defender of Orthodoxy" in Ukraine was a critical point in forging the national consciousness, not only of the emerging Ukrainian nation, but also of the Poles and Russians.

Plokhy starts with the building blocks--the Cossacks (warbands who were gradually drawn into the military service of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth), the nobility of the old Rus' lands (trying to balance their sense of identity as Orthodox Christians with their role as grandees within a largely Catholic state), and the church--the metropolis of Kyiv (Kiev)--loosely dependent upon the see of Constantinople, which by this time was now under Muslim Ottoman domination. He concludes that two overlapping processes--one of confessionalization beginning with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and one of state-building--set in motion the forces that would bring the Cossacks to the fore as defenders of Orthodoxy. As the Polish-Lithuanian state sought to clarify the position of the Orthodox metropolis vis-a-vis the Pope in Rome, embarking upon the strategy of encouraging, and then compelling, a union between the Orthodox of Ukraine and the papal see, the Orthodox were forced to more clearly define their position, and in so doing ...