supervisory administrative structure for them. She did, however, permit conversion
from Uniate to Orthodox, which the Vatican considered apostasy, and otherwise
refused to defer to Vatican authority over both groups of Catholics in her realm.
At the same time, however, Catherine II was turning her self-declared role of
defender of Orthodoxy into a useful rhetoric of imperial expansion. Echoing an
argument that went back to the Orthodox revival of early seventeenth-century
Kyiv, she and her ideologues began to represent the Uniate Church as persecutors
of Orthodoxy in the Commonwealth, and furthermore not even as a confession but
as a fraudulent trick forced upon the unwilling Rus’Orthodox by Poland. In this
view, all the East Slavs—Ukrainian, Belarus’an, and Russian—were united by
language, culture, Orthodoxy, and history into one people; the 600 years when
Belarus’an and Ukrainian lands shared in the culture of what became in 1569 the
Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was dismissed as irrelevant. This stance
provided a useful rationale for intimidation of Uniates by Orthodox in the 1780s
and for a directly coercive policy towards Uniate parishes when Russia annexed the
rest of the Commonwealth in the 1790s.
In the second partition in 1793, Russia moved its southwestern border 250 miles
to the west, taking in most of the Ukrainian palatinates and a population of over
3 million, about 2 million of whom were Uniates. In the third partition in 1795,
the remaining Ukrainian palatinates, plus western Belarus’and ethnic Lithuania,
came into Russian control, with another 1.2 million people, largely Uniate. The
times were tense: the three partitioning powers had just wiped Poland off the map
againstfierce armed Polish opposition and were mobilizing an alliance against
revolutionary France; they were determined to quash any sign of Polish insurgency.
Uniate parishes, Polonized and Catholic-leaning, were suspect. Much more coer-
cive in these circumstances, Catherine II immediately (1794) ordered a“mission-
ary”campaign of forcible conversion; she abolished and confiscated property of all
but one Uniate bishopric (Polotsk). In Right Bank areas where resistance to the
Uniate Church had long simmered (and had been stoked by Russian Orthodox
support from Left Bank hierarchs and monasteries), these campaigns succeeded in
bringing more than a million parishioners into Orthodoxy. But elsewhere resistance
was endemic. Uniate priests refused to convert to Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox
Church found few Russian priests who could match the Uniate clergy’s educational
and linguistic abilities. Local landlords and civil officials, as well as parishioners,
refused to cooperate in the re-sanctifying of Uniate Churches and re-institution of
Orthodox rituals. Many went underground to continue Uniate rituals in defiance.
The Orthodox Church, for its part, lacked essential supplies for this massive task,
not only replacement clergy but liturgical, catechistic, and pietistic texts in the
appropriate languages to acquaint Uniates with the tenets and rituals of an Ortho-
doxy that itself had greatly evolved since 1596.
Larry Wolff concludes that Catherine II’s goals were not to eradicate the Uniate
Church, but to bring it under sufficient control to eliminate it as a locus of political
opposition. Already in 1795 the conversion effort slowed and it never reached the
lands of the third partition. When Paul I succeeded Catherine II in 1796, there
were still 1.4 million Uniates in the Russian empire (including some Basilian
424 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801