On the Contradictions in the Policy of Deunization: The Greek Catholic Architectural Heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Church Architecture of the Synodal Period

Abstract

Modernist empires seem to be a complex research phenomenon. Its study can be carried out from various methodological perspectives, some of which focus on the mechanisms of implementation of imperial political practices proper. These approaches imply a thorough reconstruction of the social, economic, and spiritual spheres of the center and suburbs, necessary for subsequent imagological analysis. In this article, it is proposed to address the Western Russian region in the era of deunization. The liquidation of Greek Catholicism, the return of the clergy and flock to the bosom of the Greek-Russian Church and the renaissance of Orthodoxy in the former lands of Old Rus’ were accompanied by a large number of difficulties, largely due to the ethnic factor. Moreover, certain aspects of Russian culture, which had undergone strong Westernization in the 18th century, continued to be based on European values by the 1830s, which had previously been transmitted largely through the Catholic and Uniate environment of the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth. On the pages of the study, this contradiction is analyzed using the example of the church architecture of St. Petersburg and Moscow during the Synodal period and the state of the Greek Catholic Church on the eve of the Polotsk convocation is updated.