Moderated by Megan K. Duncan Smith, Programs Manager at HURI
Attendees are invited to enjoy an informal lunch.
Image: Detail of Cerkiew, 1990 by Jerzy Nowosielski, a Polish artist of Ukrainian descent
After WWII, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) was harshly persecuted by communist states. The story of this Eastern-rite Catholic church in Soviet western Ukraine is well-known: clergy of the UGCC were forced by Soviet police to “convert” to the Russian Orthodox Church, and those who refused formed an underground network of worship that preserved the church until it was finally legalized in 1989. In this talk, Anna Bisikalo draws on her dissertation research to explain what happened to Greek Catholics on the other side of the Polish-Soviet border. In communist Poland, the Ukrainian minority was resettled and dispersed across the formerly German territories but Greek Catholics refused to abandon their faith. Ukrainian Greek Catholics navigated a valuable but asymmetric relationship with the dominant Roman Catholic Church, withstood Poland’s unlikely instrumentalization of the Orthodox Church, and maintained a vibrant locus of faith for a vulnerable ethnic minority. In addition to discussing the experiences of individual Greek Catholics in this context, this talk considers what the UGCC’s survival in communist Poland tells us about religion and national politics in modern Europe.
Anna Bisikalo is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. Her primary research focuses on modern Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Her broader interests include social history, religion, secularism, Cold War dynamics and post-WWII political and cultural transformations. Anna’s dissertation is about the repression and revival of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and Poland between 1945 and 1995. In her comparative and transnational project, Anna investigates individual experiences and state policy. During 2023-2024, Anna conducted archival research and learned about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic community in Lublin, Poland with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Student grant. Before coming to Harvard, Anna received her BA in International Relations and Russian & East European Studies from Wesleyan University, where she wrote a thesis about women’s activism in independent Ukraine.
Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.
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LOCATION:IN-PERSON STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251104T170000Z DTEND:20251104T183000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR