154 KOSCIOL
authorities. The goal was to be attained by the strict supervision of all appoint-
ments; by the total denial of all access to Rome; by control of the Church's
material resources; and from 1801, by the creation of a state-controlled super-
visory body, the Sacred College in St. Petersburg. Once these provisions were
instituted, the protests and demands of the Vatican could be safely disregarded.
When it suited Russia's purposes, any Roman decree, including the dissolution
of the Jesuit Order, could be ignored. The terms of the two Concordats, in 1847
and 1883, could be openly flouted. From an early date, the administration of the
Roman Catholic Church in Russia was deliberately entrusted to a series of
incompetents, and of imperial time-servers, who had no interest in defending
their charge from the onslaughts of autocracy. As a result of the November
Rising, almost half of the Latin convents of Russian Poland were closed, whilst
payment of the stipends of the clergy was turned over to the state. Unauthorized
correspondence with Rome was punishable with summary deportation. All ser-
mons, pronouncements, and religious publications were to be approved by the
Tsarist censorship. All seminaries were to be inspected by the Tsarist police. As
a result of the January Rising, the great majority of Catholic orders were dis-
banded. The entire landed property of the Church was confiscated together with
the estates of lay patrons of Catholic benefices. The conduct of the Sacred
College was placed under the Ministry of the Interior, and all business between
the College and the diocesan curias was handed over to lay police-approved del-
egates. In 1870, open conflict was provoked in the diocese of Wilno when steps
were made to introduce a Russian-language liturgy. The most that can be said
about religious toleration in Russia is that no attempt was ever launched to close
the Roman Catholic churches wholesale.^2
In the case of the Uniates, however, Tsarist policy aimed at total extirpation.
The Uniates, whose forebears had abandoned Orthodoxy, were treated as
renegades and traitors. The chosen method was that of forcible conversion to
Orthodoxy. The campaign started in 1773, in the y ear of Catherine's proclama-
tion of religious liberty.^3 In the following decades, an Orthodox 'mission' vis-
ited the former Polish provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and Ukraine with fire and
sword. Cossacks were billeted on recalcitrant villages, and given unlimited
licence to plunder, carouse, and kill until the peasants submitted. Uniate priests
were faced with the choice between submission or violence. Parents were threat-
ened with the abduction or mutilation of their children. Resisters were tortured
and killed. Apostates were given rich rewards. Along a trail strewn with blood
and humiliation, with mass suicides and unrecorded martyrdoms, the mission-
aries of the Empress effected the confiscation of most of the Uniate churches,
and the nominal conversion of some four-fifths of the Uniate population. Two
further operations - one sponsored by Nicholas I in the Russian Empire in
1827-39 and another by Alexander II in the former Congress Kingdom in
1873-5 - brought the campaign to its inevitable conclusion. On the first occa-
sion, the Tsar formed a separate Uniate College in order to drive the Uniates
from the protection of the Catholic hierarchy, and then ordered the merger of