Volume 72, July 2024, issue 1

The issue of individual eschatology became an important problem in the interconfessional polemical discourse both in Western and Eastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Kyiv Church metropolia witnessed a lively discussion on the topic as well. Protestant ideas influenced the eschatological writings of Ruthenian Orthodox authors in the late sixteenth century. Beginning with Meletij Smotryc’kyj, Kyivan authors strongly criticised the Protestant teaching on the earthly paradise and temporary infernus, proclaiming instead the existence of particular judgement of each person after death, which determines whether they receive joy or torment. Contrary to the Catholic teaching, however, this torment and joy was seen not as final but as temporary states. The proclamation of the existence of the “third place” by Petro Mohyla was the main feature distinguishing Kyiv eschatology from its Moscow equivalent. Thus, by adapting both Roman Catholic and Greek eschatology, Kyivan authors created their own eschatological teaching that allowed them to demonstrate their own tradition in theological thinking.

This article reassesses the difficulties experienced in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by what was known as the Uniate Church, a Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite that had been created through a union with the papacy in 1595/6. Analyzing the twin issues of holiday and fasting reform, the article reveals the extent to which economic concerns of the Enlightenment exacerbated the eighteenth-century crisis of the Union. How many holidays should peasants celebrate? How strictly should they be expected or allowed to fast? Such questions became crucial issues placing pressure on the Uniate Church, particularly in the 1780s. Faced with this pressure, the Church hierarchy was alarmed but rather powerless, caught in what this article conceptualizes as the Uniate dilemma. On the one hand, rivalry with the Orthodox Church meant that Uniate bishops could not really reform holidays and fasting without giving the impression that they cared less about the “purity” of the Eastern rite than their Orthodox counterparts did. On the other hand, leaving the Uniate holiday and fasting calendar unreformed made the Union more vulnerable to Roman Catholic competition, for economic as well as religious reasons. Specifically, more and more noble lords wanted to restructure their estates in line with the agrarian ideals of the Enlightenment, and to produce a healthier, more numerous, more hard-working peasantry in the process. In the Ruthenian parts of the Commonwealth, however, ostensible excesses of Uniate feasting and fasting stood in the way of these goals. Roman Catholic nobles therefore increasingly resorted to denigrating Uniate ritual precepts and to pushing enserfed village populations to observe the Latin rite, which prescribed fewer holidays and fasts. These developments put the Union very clearly on the defensive even before the final partitions of Poland-Lithuania.

Some have framed the conflicts between the Georgian and Transcaucasian levels of the Soviet political police during the 1920s and 1930s as contestations between the layers of the early Soviet federal structure over their institutional interests. Yet, these established prerogatives seem to have competed with the particularistic agendas of individual actors and their entourages, comprising informal networks or “clans” that developed in the security organs for mutual protection and advancement. Combining published biographical and documentary sources with extensive new archival materials from the Georgian Party and KGB archives, this article reexamines the intersection of the institutional, individual, and network interests and motivations at play in these interactions. Its aim is to gain an insight into the workings and internal politics of the security services in the early Soviet periphery in order to better understand the role of informality, networks, and inter-network conflict in the first decades of the Soviet state.

What was “Soviet” in the late Soviet Union is an increasingly open question as of late. With recent research on the 1970s and 1980s providing illuminating insights into an increasingly heterogeneous society, this article seeks out the cohesive forces still at work. It uses the affective dimensions of Soviet intellectuals’ experience of the West and their encounter with Western race relations as an opportunity to discuss the specific frames of reference these Soviet intellectuals brought from home - to propose kul’turnost’ as a comprehensive object for investigating the ties that bound very different and even critical, highly self-reflective people to an overarching cultural system. Usually discussed in relation to consumption and political intentions of the Soviet state, kul’turnost’ entails a much broader, highly normalized set of both disciplining and enabling practices that were at work on an intersubjective level. These practices point to the rules of distinction and belonging, that allow us to connect mostly separate discussions on the political, cultural and everyday dimensions of the Soviet system.