This article describes the historical path of Orthodoxy in the lands of contemporary Belarus, which has taken more than athousand years and which can be distinguished by a great peculiarity. The states, including the Western Russian lands, have had a decisive influence on the church life of the local population. Orthodoxy came to the lands of present-day Byelarus together with the baptism of all Rus at the late 10^th century. It was the beginning of a complex and long-term process of the Christianization of the vast Old Russian state and the political unification of the East Slavic tribes. The second period in the history of Orthodoxy in ancient Russian lands was connected with the formation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and lasted until the proclamation of the Brest Church Union (the second half of the 13^th — the late 16^th century). It was characterized by a gradual loss of the position of the Orthodox Church as a result of the religious indifference policy pursued by the pagan authorities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, since 1387, open support of the Roman-Catholic Church, which ended with the adoption of the Brest Church Union. The third period, the 17^th — late 18^th centuries, was the time of struggle for survival in an environment of dominating Catholicism and anti-Orthodox legislation, which led the Orthodox Church to the brink of extinction. The late of 18^th — early 20^th century is characterized by the inclusion of White Russia territories into the Russian Empire. It was a time of Orthodoxy revival and reunification of the Belarusian people divided by the Brest Church Unity into Orthodox and Uniates. The Soviet years in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Belarus are connected with the hard trials, which the Orthodox Church experienced during the Soviet time. The contemporary period in history of Orthodox Church in Byelarus begins with the foundation of the Belarusian Exarchate of Moscow Patriarchate in 1989 and proceeds up to now. It is characterized by not simple process of spiritual revival of the society and fast restoration of Orthodoxy’s positions in the sovereign Republic of Byelarus.

This article discloses those aspects of abolishing the Brest Church Union within the borders of the Russian Empire in 1780–1875, the comprehension of which remains relevant for historical and church-historical science. The author draws the following conclusions: 1) The reunification of the Uniates with the Orthodox completed a centuries-old period in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, which can be characterized as an era of separation. Formally, the canonical division of the Russian Orthodox Church, which took shape in the mid-15^th century, was overcome at the end of the 17^th century, when in 1686, the Orthodox of Rzeczpospolita became part of the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the consequence of the canonical division — the division of the Western Russian population into Orthodox and Uniates — was overcome only in 1875, when 250,000 Uniates returned to the Orthodox faith. 2) As a result of the Uniates’ reunification with the Orthodox, most of the Byelarussian–Ukrainian population returned to the Orthodox path to their salvation and spiritual origins. This freed the Western Russians from the grafting of the alien to them Western Christian form of spirituality and Polish culture and served to develop the Orthodox forms of religiosity natural to the people in the second half of the 19^th century. Therefore, the development of distinctive Byelarussian and Ukrainian cultures as branches of all-Russian culture became possible. 3) The reunification of the Byelarussian–Ukrainian Uniates with the Orthodox was one of, if not the most, significant achievements of the Russian Empire in the lands annexed from Poland. Without this event, a lasting comprehensive integration of the Western Russian territories with the Great Russian provinces would not have been possible. 4) The termination of the Brest Pact halted the process of the involvement of the Byelarussians in the Polish Church and united the Byelarussians spiritually and culturally, having destroyed the religious and cultural boundary which divided the people, and which could be traced on the geographical map. In 1839, the Byelarussians got rid of the intrusive Romanization, Polonization and Russophobia propaganda and returned to the Russian historical and cultural world, where they got the opportunity to cultivate their identity and did not feel like second-rate people, as they did in the Commonwealth of Poland.

This article describes the main features of spiritual life of Uniate archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych (1580–1623), who was killed by the rebellious citizens of Vitebsk because of his zeal in spreading uniatism. Through the efforts of the Uniates and Latins, he was declared a martyr in the name of Christ, the Catholic faith, and the holy union with the Roman Church. The author notes the difference of approaches to the interpretation of his personality in the context of the two confessional traditions: the Latin-Uniat and Orthodox. This article aims to objectively examine Kuntsevych’s spiritual image, based on the rules of monastic life peculiar to the Orthodox East. A wide range of sources have been studied: Kuntsevych’s writings and various historical accounts on the peculiarities of his missionary and pastoral activities, as well as the materials of the canonization process. It The results show that Josaphat Kuntsevych is an early example of the union’s Latinization. Under the Jesuits’s influence, he adopted an intolerant view of “schisma”. This led to an internal break from the Eastern spiritual tradition and its replacement with a surrogate of Catholic exercises and Orthodox fasts and prayers in the inner life. Lacking proper instruction at the beginning of his monastic journey, Kuntsevych indulged in reading and applied spiritual exercises guided by his own imagination. His zeal for asceticism in the spirit of Jesuit practices attracted the attention of others, and without the advice of a spiritual director, he was unable to develop self-criticism and true humility. His harshness to himself led to him treating others the same way. Kind and affectionate to submissive and agreeable listeners, Josaphat became intolerant and intrusive to dissenters. With a passionate desire for martyrdom, Josaphat followed the lessons of his Jesuit leaders, who saw death at the hands of infidels as the best means of converting them. In conclusion, Josaphat Kuntsevych affiliated himself internally with Latinism despite his outward adherence to the Eastern rites.

This article covers little-known aspects of personality and activity of Metropolitan Józef (Siemaszko) of Lithuania and Vilna, which became an important factor of the successful reunion of Byelarussian and Ukrainian Uniates with Orthodox Christians in 1839 and their further confl ict-free integration into the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Józef was a unique person, who devoted his whole life to the revival of Orthodoxy in the Western Russian lands. In his everyday life, Metropolitan Józef was very simple and shunned the common entertainment of high society of that era. The money which he had, he spent on charity and help to his subordinates, which earned him their well-deserved respect. Metropolitan Józef’s distinctive features as a church leader were scrupulousness in matters, fairness to everyone around him, including those who hindered his activities because of their convictions, as well as insistence combined with sincere care for his subordinates. Metropolitan Józef’s authority was based on the fact that all those around him saw his unfeigned faith in God, which implied an unswerving adherence to the Truth, and which was accompanied by his high morality and personal modesty. Metropolitan Józef had no prejudice against Catholic clergy and Catholic high society in the Byelarussian–Lithuanian and Ukrainian lands. His patient and unspiteful attitude toward those who hated him was the evidence of his religious and moral strength. It convinced his subordinate priests of the spiritual justice of the renunciation of Unia, and encouraged them to follow their archpastor. Of particular importance to the success of the work of the Most Reverend Józef were his approaches to church administration and interactions with the authorities. He set a personal example and encouraged his subordinates’ successes, inspiring them. At the same time, Metropolitan Józef’s independent and fi rm attitude towards the authorities gave the reunited priests confi dence, that they could always fi nd justice and support, and that the attacks, slander and provocations, which they constantly experiences in the 1840–1850s, would be to no avail. This was largely the reason for their zealous fulfi llment of their duties as Orthodox clergy.

In 1948, the Byelarussian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (BAOC) was organized in West Germany, which declared itself canonical and historical for Byelarussians. The BAOC itself considers that the autocephalous Byelarussian tradition began in the 14th century. However, at that time there was no Byelarussian identity, so it is incorrect to speak about the Byelarussian autocephaly. The first attempt to create an autocephalous Byelarussian church occurred in the 1920s in Soviet Byelarus, but this attempt was not supported by the overwhelming majority of clergy and believers. During the Great Patriotic War, the Byelarussian collaborators, with the support of the German occupation authorities, forced the episcopate in the occupied territory of Byelarus to start the procedure of autocephaly. However, this led to no real autocephaly being created. Emerged after World War II, the BAOC is extremely small and operates mostly outside of Byelarus, yet it claims to be the Church of the Byelarussian people. After the civil war in Ukraine started in 2014, the Byelarussian Autocephalous Church actively engaged in depicting Russia as the enemy, claiming that Russia is committing aggression against Ukraine. Virtually all Christmas and Easter messages from Archbishop Sviatoslav (Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich Login), the head of the BAOC, were semi-political manifestos, critical of Russia. The BAOC also claimed that Byelarussian nationalists, who fought on the side of the Kiev regime, defended the Byelarussian statehood. After the 2020 presidential election in Byelarus, the BAOC became actively involved in political life by supporting the protests against Alexander Lukashenko. Archbishop Sviatoslav (V. V. Login) of the BAOC excommunicated Lukashenko from the Church, although Lukashenko has never been a parishioner of the BAOC. In 2021, former presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said she was ready to apply to Constantinople to receive the Tomos and give the BAOC the official status. However, Tsikhanouskaya’s entourage quickly refused her words.

This paper analyzes the factors, which have led to Russia and Byelarus signing the Treaty on the Establishment of the Union State, as well as the reasons, why it was not fulfilled and why this idea became relevant now. The Treaty, signed in 1999, is an international legal act. It was supposed to be completed by the adoption of a Constitutional Act, a founding document legally proclaiming the formation of the Union State. The Treaty was preceded by several stages of integration, accompanied by several other treaties and agreements. Its conclusion was the result of a rare coincidence of the will of the people and the political leadership of the countries. This article considers the people as a collective subject of social relations, identifies their goal (self-preservation), the condition for its achievement (self-development) and the main prerequisites for self-development (unity, cultural development, improvement of the quality of life). The author concludes that people felt alien to the divisive ideology of prevailing consumer values, egoism and pride. The people’s ideology is integrational in its nature. Therefore, the two peoples, Byelarussian and Russian, seek unification, which, however, is prevented by the mercantile selfishness of individuals who prefer material values. This is the essence of the conflict between the will of the peoples and the will of the political elites, preventing the unification. Following the signing of the Treaty, the interests of the political leaders of the countries ceased to coincide and thus, the Treaty was not implemented. Since 2018, Russia was no longer satisfied with the current format of relations. This was caused, above all, by the changes in the global economy. Byelarus will inevitably become a member of the Silk Road Economic Belt project (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU). The new priorities require a guaranteed functioning of the Byelarussian state in the necessary format under clear rules that exclude uncertainty and impulsiveness in decision-making. Therefore, there was a need to limit the capabilities of the Byelarussian institutional bodies. Russia has possibilities and desire to carry out the launched scenario. This is the radical difference of the current situation, which once again opens the prospects for implementing the treaty on the creation of the Union State.

This article examines the competition of alternative projects of national self-determination of Byelarussians: the all-Russian idea and Byelarussian ethnic nationalism. The situation between Byelarus, Ukraine and Russia is an example of the struggle of integration and separatist tendencies. The integrationist tendency is embodied by the idea of a big Russian nation, which includes all ethnic groups of the Eastern Slavs, and a “big” Russian language as an aggregate of all East Slavic dialects united by a common literary form. The separatist beginning is embodied by the Byelarussian and Ukrainian national projects, advocating for the formation of the Byelarussian and Ukrainian nations with separate languages. The author notes that the disintegrative tendencies were primarily associated with the entry of Western Russia into the zone of Polish-Catholic geopolitical and cultural influence.
Revolutionary upheavals were also directly reflected in the solution of the national question in the lands of historical Western Russia. At first, the Bolsheviks encouraged the Byelarussian and Ukrainian national movements, as well as the struggle against the all-Russian concept as a manifestation of Russian “great-power chauvinism”. A policy of “korenization” unfolds, and those who disagree with it are denigrated as “great-power chauvinists.
Later, however, there is a transition from the doctrine of “exporting the revolution” to the doctrine of “building socialism in one country”. Soviet patriotism prevailing over national and regional identities was required. The Soviet leadership turned to the meanings and symbols of the Russian Empire (adapting them to the communist ideology), on the geopolitical basis of which the USSR emerged.
After the war, the USSR was experiencing de facto national integration of the Eastern Slavs on the all-Russian model. However, this process was largely spontaneous without being conceptualized or recognized. Despite the renunciation of “korenization” in its radical forms, the Soviet authorities have not definitively departed from the “Leninist national policy”. There was a gap between the integration of the Eastern Slavs, which was going on objectively on the all-Russian basis, and the national separateness, even though “brotherly”, declared by the state. The result was a ghettoization of the nationalist humanities intelligentsia, which occupied the cultural and educational infrastructure of Byelarus and Ukraine, but was not in demand by the mainstream population, which was focused on the space of Russian-speaking culture.
In the post-Soviet period, the Ukrainian and Byelarussian national projects have received a second chance. The author draws parallels with the situation in Ukraine. The inconsistency and incompleteness of the processes of national self-determination of Byelarussian society, fraught with confl icts in the future, are noted.

After gaining sovereignty in 1991, the Republic of Byelarus had to independently form its policy in religious aff airs, which was based on the reaction to the changes taking place in the religious sphere. These changes concerned both the radical revaluation of the role and socio-cultural status of religion in the history and culture of Byelarus and the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the religious fi eld: the number of believers, religious organizations, religious publications and the nature of state-confessional relations were changing. In search for an optimal model of organization and regulation of the religious sphere, Byelarus has passed through several stages, learning and improving its own and the global experience. The present-day religious situation in Byelarus is the logical result of several cultural, historical and socio-political processes, as well as the result of a whole complex of reasons, some of which have a long history, while others are a product of the post-Soviet period and the present conjuncture. Many characteristics of the modern religious fi eld (religious structure, the nature of religiosity of the population, the presence of non-traditional religiosity and quasi-religiousness, and the peaceful nature of inter-confessional relations) make Byelarus similar to most countries of the civilized world, while others have their own specifi c characteristics. At the same time, the religious diversity in Byelarus has quite pronounced ethnic features: some national groups are the main carriers of certain religions, which is predetermined by their historical past. Thus, the Polish Catholics, German Lutherans, Russian Old Believers and Muslim Tatars are typical elements in the ethno-religious structure of modern Byelarus. Another characteristic of the contemporary religious situation in Byelarus is the internal organizational stability of religious organizations and confessions. Researchers might also be interested in religious-political reconstructions, which are typical for some intellectuals and take place in the framework of the debate about the Byelarussian identity and political future: if you choose your faith, you choose your political ideal. In this context, of special interest is the problem of peculiar socialization of historical and religious themes into actual political life, which began during the USSR collapse and aimed at formation of new national ideology.

The author of this article studies the religious political science, characteristic of the ideologists of church liberalism on the example of the Byelarussian Maidan. The model object of the analysis is the situation in the eparchy of Grodno, sermons and speeches of archpriest Artemiy (Kishchenko) and his entourage, with the help of which the church was supposed to switch the influence from preservation of civil peace to civil and religious conflict and delegitimation of the political electoral process’s results. The article defines religious political science as a post-secular cultural hybrid. This phenomenon, according to the author, is contrasted by church liberalism with a normative and dogmatically-inspired theology, whose ideas legitimately extend into the realm of politics. Religious political science is also defined as a postmodern dualism and a manifestation of contemporary post-theology. The role and consequences of the intentional politicization of the Catholic factor are considered in the context of the Byelarussian events among other factors, including the connection between political Catholicism and the problem of Polish participation in fomenting the conflict inside Byelarus. The article analyzes the difference in the understanding of freedom in the secular-right discourse and in the Christian sense. The author emphasizes that the idea of theologizing political discourse proper is a gross substitution of political theology, that is, the solution of political issues in a theological spirit. This post-secular hybrid or the phenomenon of postmodern quasi-religiousness aims to secularize the Church by inducing it to take ultra-right positions in the political spectrum and imputing secular political concepts and categories at the level of theoretical basis. Overall, this leads to a political secularization of Church preaching, when theology becomes a religious political science unrelated to Christianity.

This review examines one of the key chapters of the fundamental book “Kyjevská Rus: dějiny, kultura, společnost“ [Kievan Rus: History, Culture, Society] by Czech historianmedievalist Michal Téra. The chapter under review is titled “Dělníci poslední hodiny: Církevní organizace a křesťanství na Kyjevské Rusi” [Workers of the Last Hour: Church Organization and Christianity in Kievan Rus]. This chapter emphasizes that the adoption of Christianity at the end of the 10th century fundamentally transformed the East Slavic space, predetermining its cultural and historical unity for many centuries to come. At this period a type of Old Russian church and East Slavic Christianity formed, which for a long time ensured and preserved the unity of the East Slavic space. As Téra says, the Uniate projects of the 16th–17th centuries did not change anything. The culture, literature, language and mentality of local peoples to the present day are determined by the processes that took place in Kievan Rus in the 11th–13th centuries. This statement of Téra is in direct conflict with the claims of some post-Soviet historians, who seek to question the unity of Kievan Rus by isolating the separate East Slavic peoples as early as in the Middle Ages. The obvious factors of the unity of Ancient Rus have nowadays become the object of an aggressive revision on the part of politically engaged historiographies of modern East Slavic states to please the current interests of political elites. Therefore, familiarity with the fundamental work of M. Tera will be useful for specialists in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe.