Imperial Nationality Policy and the Russian Version of the History of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article analyses how changes in Russian nationality policy after the 1830–31 Uprising in Poland and Lithuania led to the initiative of an historical project that sought to prove the Russian nature of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It focuses on the tender organized by the Ministry of Education in the 1830s for the publication of a history textbook, which was to form the canon of Russian interpretations of the history of the Grand Duchy. The most important creator of this narrative was Nikolai Ustrialov. According to Ustrialov, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was just as much a Russian state as the Grand Duchy of Moscow, with the sole caveat that the tiny Lithuanian nation had played a part in creating it. Territorial rivalry between these two states was a mere ‘family quarrel’ over which dynasty would prevail. The supremacy of the Lithuanian dynasty did not mean the victory of an alien power since the Lithuanian princes were closely related to Russian princes and moreover, a considerable number of them belonged to the Eastern (Orthodox) Church. Russians could regard therefore them as their own. The last part of this article is devoted to the changes in nationality policy after the 1863–64 Uprising and the requirement for a new interpretation of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.     

The Natsyas of the Grodno region of Belarus: A Field Study

Abstract. This research was conducted in 1993–4 in several peripheral kolkhoz villages in the north-west Belarus Grodno province, a religious (Catholic/Orthodox) and linguistic (Belarussian/RussiadPolish/Lithuanian)borderland. The members of the folk communities of this region conceive and categorise social reality differently than it is done by the members of a nationalised and urbanised society, according to religious, and not nation-state, criteria. People are divided by these criteria into natsyas, i.e. religious groups. There are two main natsyas: the Catholics (also called Poles) and the Orthodox (called Rus' or Belarussians). The distinctive criterion for several natsyus is the language of a prayer: the Catholics pray in Polish and/or Lithuanian, the Orthodox in Old Church Slavonic and Russian. The terms Catholic natsya and Polish natsya (and similarly Orthodox natsya or Rus' natsya) are synonymous. The language of everyday speech does not differentiate the natsyas; all the villagers speak Belarussian dialect or so called ‘plain language’. The natsya, a concept specific of traditional folk societies, should not be confused with a ‘nation’, a political term of the modem world. None the less, the kolkhoz peasants of the region under study are confronted with a concept of ‘nation’. It results in a turmoil in their worldview and in confusion about their identity; what we see in the Belarussian villages is a process of change. The borderland where the material was collected seems an excellent field for the study of the process of the emergence of nations.     

Was Fifteenth-Century Lithuanian Catholicism as Lukewarm as Sixteenth-Century Reformers and Later Commentators Would Have Us Believe?

Abstract

The English are not alone in subjecting their history still to the ideological nonsense of sixteenth-century apologetics concerning the alleged weakness and unpopularity of fifteenth-century western Christianity. In Lithuania the lack of historical source material has led to even more acceptance of superficial Protestant and Jesuit disputes over what constitutes true religion as unbiased reportage of the state of Catholicism in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which paints a picture of failed Polish (sic!) mission and ‘pagan’ resilience. This paper uses material from local diocesan records from Podlasie and the Sacred Penitentiary in Rome to illustrate how common European religious fashions took root in Lithuanian society during the long fifteenth century: the activities of Church courts, fraternities and the cult of the dead, burgher and gentry initiatives to privatize Catholic practices (requests for indulgences, connected in particular with devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, permission to choose confessors, requests for portable altars and so forth).     

The Social and Legal Status of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Influence on the Status of Tatars and Karaites

Abstract

At the end of the fourteenth century, when Lithuania was baptized, three non-Christian communities — Jews, Tatars, and Karaites — began to settle in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and their legal and social status began to take shape. The segregation of Jews from Christians was legitimized in the first privilege granted for the Jews of Brest in 1388 by the Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold, Vita&?t) the Great. This privilege, which adapted Western variations of the Judenrecht to Lithuanian realities and introduced some local improvements, began the process of the formation of the legal and social status of non-Christians in the Grand Duchy. The expulsion of Jews to the margins of the estate system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the establishment of the incumbency of the iudex iudeorum and internal community court, and the fully formed relations between the Jews and the legal system of the Grand Duchy were used as reference points in trying to define the legal status of the Tatars and the Karaites. In the case of Karaites, Magdeburg law, which was already known in Lithuania, was adopted. Grand Duke Casimir Jagiellon granted such a privilege to the Trakai (Troki) community in 1441, and the Karaite community’s life was organized according to the principles of the existing model of urban self-government. For some time the legal status of the Karaites differed from that of the Jews. Despite its uniqueness, Magdeburg law was not applied to the community’s everyday life, and the Karaites gradually absorbed the privileges granted for the Jews (especially that of 1646). The Tatars, who were socially stratified within their community and thus had different interests, were never granted a common privilege. Those ‘Jewish’ legal and social models, which were adapted for the Tatar community, were best revealed in the Third Lithuania Statute of 1588, which contained more regulations for non-Christians than its two predecessors. The content of its articles shows similarities of the social and legal status of non-Christians and the entrenchment of the social strata of non-Christians. The features of the model applied for regulating the state’s relations with the Jewish community might also be observed in the state’s relations with the Roma (Gipsy) community, which, although Christian, was considered unacceptable in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania because of its way of life.     

Imagining the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: The Politics and Economics of the Rebuilding of Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius

Abstract

In 1884 the prominent nation-builder Jonas Basanavi?ius declared that castle mounds and literature were the only appropriate elements from which to build the Lithuanian nation. Basanavi?ius’s view, this article suggests, had a lasting influence on the public uses of history in twentieth-century Lithuania. The study explores the construction of two iconic images of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius. Built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Trakai Castle was once the seat of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, but fell into neglect before its reconstruction in the 1960s. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the Palace in Vilnius deteriorated during the eighteenth century, was dismantled at the beginning of the nineteenth, and has been completely rebuilt since 2000. It is striking that the reconstructions of castles were the largest state investments in culture in both the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. The reconstruction of Trakai Castle was criticized on economic and ideological grounds by Nikita Khrushchev. The rebuilding of the Palace polarized Lithuanian intellectuals. The presentation compares the intellectual, social, and political rationales which underpinned the two projects and explores the changes and continuities in the uses of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.     

Constructing National Identity: The Image of the Medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Lithuanian Art from the 1920s to the 1990s

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the ways in which the image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, intended to awaken the national pride and contribute to the building of the national identity, was constructed by artistic means in the Republic of Lithuania during the 1920s and 1930s. It contains a brief discussion on the genesis of the image of the Grand Duchy, including the selection of appropriate historical heroes and events, and the main aspects of their interpretation. The article analyses some of the most striking and influential examples of the image of medieval Lithuania, such as the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Grand Duke Vytautas the Great in 1930 and art works created for that purpose, the decoration of public buildings (for example, the Museum of War and the Officers’ Club in Kaunas, and Lithuania’s pavilion in the New York World Fair of 1939). It also looks briefly at the dissemination of the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in popular culture. The article also touches on isolated efforts by a number of intellectuals to warn of the dangers inherent in the extreme glorification of the past. The image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, created in interwar Lithuania, was preserved during the period of Soviet occupation. After the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990, this image had a significant influence on the mentality and culture of Lithuanian society at the turn of the millennium. In this respect the situation in Lithuania could be treated as a case study, for a similar relation to the past can be encountered in other European post-Communist countries faced with the problem of creating a new identity.     

‘As Poor as Church Mice’: Bishops,Finances, Posts,and Civil Duties in the Duchy of Warsaw, 1807–13

Abstract

Relations between the Catholic Church and the secular authorities of the Duchy of Warsaw were characterized by the one’s efforts to maintain its old privileges, and the other’s modernization of the law in a Josephist spirit. Cooperation and compromise between Church and state were possible, but their relations were full of tension, which sometimes erupted into open confl ict. This article presents a wider range of problems than has hitherto been noted in the historiography. From the beginning of 1807, the Catholic clergy was expected to fulfi l new duties, because of the shortage of administrative staff. Confl icts arose over the duties of patrons, payments for the clergy, their taxes, the government’s prohibition on plural holding of benefi ces cum cura animarum, and over ecclesiastical organization in general. The place of the Church was more clearly outlined in the Constitution of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807), but the concept of the ’state religion’ was seen by some clergymen as an opportunity to spread the Church’s infl uence. Further changes opened the higher ecclesiastical ranks to commoners. The civil government and the episcopate also differed on the role of religious orders, with the former looking to employ nuns and monks in social welfare and education. Bishops complained of ministers and offi cials who did not pay priests’ salaries punctually, if at all, but some episcopal interventions led to the authorities releasing the orders from fi nancial obligations and taxes. The Civil Code, introduced in 1808, assigned the duties of registrars to priests. Insofar as divorces and civil marriages were concerned, this role could place priests in contravention of canon law, although in practice almost no such cases occurred. Despite the work undertaken by representatives of the clergy and the civil authorities, no concordat, which would have resolved these issues, was agreed with the Holy See. As a result, the period of the Duchy brought the Catholic clergy great insecurity, alongside their hopes for the Polish nation.     

Two forms of Catholicism in twenty-first-century Italian public debate: an analysis of positions on same-sex marriage and Muslim dress codes

There is a peculiar relationship between religion and the political system in twenty-first-century Italy. In particular, the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party has favored the rise of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit religion as a legitimacy factor, while the Catholic Church has attempted to influence politics without the mediation of any specific political party. New debates involving religious values have therefore developed. This article analyzes the positions taken and the frames proposed by Italy’s Catholic political actors in relation to two particularly telling issues, that of same-sex marriage and that of the Muslim dress codes. Its most striking finding is the presence in the Italian political system of two distinct forms of Catholicism in politics. One, promoted by the Catholic Church and followed by most centrist Catholics, is quite tolerant in terms of social and religious pluralism and supportive of human rights and social justice, but it emphasizes the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family as the cornerstone of society. The other, ‘civilizational’ form, promoted by the Lega Nord and some other center-right representatives and intellectuals, is based on an idea of Italian citizenship articulated in religious, cultural, and ethnic terms, and thus excluding those who are not members of this community. Here Christian identity is not defined by the Church’s teachings, but rather represents a marker of Western civilization in opposition to Muslim civilization.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

Small state imperialism: the place of empire in contemporary nationalist discourse

Many modern European nations can trace their heritage back to one of the large multinational empires that once encompassed much of the European landscape, and nationalising elites often refer back to their place in these empires for the materials upon which their nation was purportedly built. In this article we examine some Belarusian nationalising elites and their references to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in order to demonstrate a recent trend in East European small‐state national identity construction, which we refer to as ‘small state imperialism.’ Small state imperialism exhibits realist characteristics and paints the small nation's place in empires of the past as privileged and aggressive, and in this way deviates from the oppressed but morally superior image one typically expects of a small nation. This interpretation is not limited to Belarus; in a number of East European states a similar imperialist turn has taken root in nationalist discourses.     

From Empires to Nation-State: Remaking the Roman Catholic Church in an Independent Poland

ABSTRACT

Roman Catholicism is most often imagined as an element of continuity in Poland’s turbulent history: even when a Polish state was absent from the map of Europe from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, a recognizably ‘Polish’ church has been presumed to provide a robust institutional anchor for the Polish nation. This article, however, argues that the creation of a ‘Polish’ Roman Catholic church was a belated and protracted process, one that was only getting started in the years following the achievement of Polish independence in 1918. The church’s ‘Polonization’ was only partially a matter of emancipation from imperial-era restrictions. It often also involved the defence and attempted extrapolation of laws, practices and institutions that had developed under the auspices of the German, Austrian or Russian states and that the Catholic hierarchy viewed as healthy and desirable building blocks for a future Polish church. These imperial precedents continued to provide crucial points of reference in ongoing debates about what ‘Polish’ Catholicism was and what it should become.     

The ultimate return: Dissent,apostolic succession,and the renewed ministry of roman catholic women priests

ABSTRACT

Significant numbers of practising Roman Catholics dissent from the Church’s orthodox teachings, especially those relating to sex, gender and contraception. Many such dissenters even occupy positions of ecclesiastical authority themselves. This raises interesting questions about how dissent manifests differently in various Christian traditions; how disagreement about fundamental principles only become legible if expressed in particular ways. This paper draws on research on Roman Catholic Woman priests whose claim to sacerdotal legitimacy rests on their having been ordained in apostolic succession by bishops within the Roman Catholic Church. It asks how do women priests negotiate both difference and repetition at the very same time. The ethnography prompts deeper reflection on Christianity’s long history of dissent which I argue has been written from a predominantly male and Protestant perspective. One in which dissent that leads to institutional differentiation is prioritized over dissent borne quietly that seeks to contain itself.     

Lay Defender of Catholicism: Dr. Edward Swarbreck Hall in Tasmania 1833–1881

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics persisted throughout nineteenth‐century Australia. Historians have tended to examine the part played by the clergy, pressure groups or newspapers in sectarian disputes in the main colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. This article contributes to an understanding of anti‐Catholicism in the Australian colonies by focusing on the actions and writings of one Catholic layman, Dr Edward Swarbreck Hall, in mid nineteenth‐century Tasmania. To minimise religious hostility, Hall was tolerant towards Protestants, loyal to the British Crown, and worked co‐operatively with other creeds in helping the poor. This approach made Catholicism more acceptable to Protestant society until the late 1860s. Thereafter religious divisions became more pronounced with the appointment of Irish Bishop Daniel Murphy, who adopted the authoritarian policies of the papacy and asserted the rights of Catholics. Feeling threatened by Catholic assertion and antagonised by Catholic doctrinal beliefs, Evangelical Protestants expressed anti‐Catholic sentiments at public meetings and in newspapers. In showing how Hall defended Catholics when aspersions were cast on their clergymen, their character, or their religious practices, this article concludes that Catholics were not passive victims, but Hall's fierce polemical style worked against his desire for religious peace.     

Belonging without believing: Catholics in contemporary Italy

Abstract

This article seeks to illustrate some characteristics of the religiosity of Italians, focusing on Catholicism and interpreting the data in the light of the model of religious economy. The issue of belonging to the Catholic Church is addressed first, with an emphasis on problems of measurement and on the factors which underlie the differentiation of religious orientations in Italy. Next, the practice of Catholicism, primarily attendance at Mass, is examined as an indicator of the diffusion and vitality of the Catholic Church, and its course since the Second World War is described. Finally, the article deals with the issue of belief, showing Italians’ widely diffused propensity to ‘deviate’ from full Catholic orthodoxy. Our analysis shows that while the Catholic Church has maintained its pre‐eminent position in Italy's internal religious market, it has lost ground in recent decades and at present must contend with a considerable lack of both vitality and orthodoxy.     

“Local religion” in Corfu: sixteenth to nineteenth centuries

The article discusses the changing meanings of a powerful Corfiot symbol, St Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the saint – whose cult had been bolstered by the civil rather than the ecclesiastical authorities – was venerated by both the Greek and Latin inhabitants of Corfu, thus symbolizing a unity at least on the level of the civic religion. Following the 1716 siege of the town by the Ottomans, one can clearly see that the Venetian state and its representatives did not hesitate to lavish many honours on St Spyridon in thanks for his alleged intervention during the siege, which saved not only Corfu but the whole of Western Christianity. At the end of the century though, when the island fell to the allied Russian and Ottoman forces, the old equilibrium between the two religious groups began to become unsettled. A text written by the Orthodox theologian Athanassios Parios just a few years after the Russo-Ottoman victory attempts to rewrite the behaviour of the saint towards the Catholics and present him as the defender of the Orthodox Church and the enemy of any rapprochement between Greeks and Latins.     

Breaking the Bad News: Plans for the Announcement to the Empire of the Death of Elizabeth II and the Proclamation of Her Successor, 1952–67

This article uses recently released official papers to examine British planning for the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II to the Empire/Commonwealth, and for the involvement of Commonwealth representatives in the proclamation of her successor. The planning process was complicated by the complex and varied nature of the relationship between the Crown and different parts of both the colonial Empire and the independent Commonwealth. While the debates generated by this process tended to revolve around relatively minor issues of protocol, they were informed by a much more serious concern: the extent to which the institution of the British monarchy should adapt to meet the needs of the ‘new’ Commonwealth. Those advocating flexibility saw this as essential if the Crown was to continue to have a unifying role within the Commonwealth. Traditionalists, however, feared that reform would weaken the value of the monarchy as the focus of a specifically British national identity.     

"A Troubled Godless Place": Catholic Practice and Local Politics in the Communes of the Central Vaucluse, 1830–1905

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, men and women in the French communes of the central Vaucluse began to defer or neglect vital Catholic rites of passage. Against a backdrop of turbulent regional politics and economic upheaval, formal adherence to church doctrine declined sharply, never again to regain its previous levels. This article assesses the religious gestures of individuals and communities through the analysis of their sacramental participation, the only recorded response of Catholics to the church's presence in their lives. The implementation of the lay republic in the community by means of both local and national secularizing policy from 1878 to 1905 was the primary precipitant of general, dramatic decreases in formal Catholic practice. It was only upon the official secularization of communal society and politics that significant numbers of central Vauclusiens began to relinquish their attachment to Catholic rites of passage surrounding birth, marriage, and death.     

‘According to the Confession in Which I Die’: Taking the Measure of Allegiances in Seventeenth-Century Wilno

Abstract

The range of multiconfessionalism in early modern Wilno (Vilnius) was unusually wide. This was a place where not only Christians, Jews, and Tatars engaged in more and less structured interactions, but where all (including the Jews and the Tatars) had to be ready to negotiate a Christian landscape of five recognized and openly practising confessions: Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox, and Uniates. The practice of toleration (not to be confused with tolerance) was one of finding a set of habits — some of them implicated in violence, or at least in adversarial relationships — that allowed individuals and communities to co-exist, sometimes cheek by jowl, with people who were hated, or, at the very least, held for incorrigibly pigheaded. My point of departure is the assumption that all had to find some sort of modus vivendi with people beyond their own confession, but that individual Vilnans represented a large spectrum between zealously exclusionary practices and attitudes, at the one extreme, and a sort of protoecumenicism, at the other. Drawing on evidence such as explicit statements in last wills and testaments, ranges of deathbed bequests to religious institutions and individuals, mixed marriages, and godparenting practices, I sketch out a range of individual practices and their underlying attitudes. These data provide material for concluding considerations of the question whether these crossings of confessional limits were symptoms of the ground-level ‘indifferentism’ that some revisionists have sought to establish as a corrective to, and in some cases in opposition to, the top-down etatism of confessionalization paradigms.     

Death-Agony and Birth Pangs: Inheritors of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under German Occupation 1915–1918

ABSTRACT

The Ober-Ost administration instated in 1915 covered a fragment of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania; a territory contested by Germany and Russia, inhabited by a nationally and religiously diverse society, with the Polish-Jewish city of Wilno as its central point. The German policies exploited the national aspirations of both the Lithuanians and the Belarusian leaders to dissolve the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the Belarusian leaders focused on short-term benefits, the Lithuanian politicians proved more resourceful in using the seemingly pro-Lithuanian and pro-Belarusian policies towards obtaining their own nation state. The Germans discriminated the Lithuanian Poles in terms of rights to political activity, even when conducted without subsidies from the occupier. The disunity with the local society progressed and benefited the supporters of Polish national policies, however few in Wilno in 1915. The German authorities successfully pushed the Lithuanian Poles, so far seeking consensus with other local communities, towards merging with the post-war Polish state announced by the Act of 5th November 1916. The Germans backed the creation of small, interdependent Lithuanian and Belarusian states. The Lithuanians however issued a second declaration of independence (16.02.1918), thus becoming the only ones to benefit from Germany's military defeat.