Seminar
Mykola Zerov Centre for Ukrainian Studies
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology
School of Historical Studies
Professor Serhii Plokhy
Monash Dnister Visiting Fellow in Ukrainian Studies
“In the Shadow of Yalta: The Religious Division of Europe, 1945-46”
Thursday 28 May, 3.00-4.30 p.m.
Room W310, Building 11, Clayton Campus, Monash University
Professor Plokhy holds the Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi Chair in Ukrainian History at Harvard University. His many publications include The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (University of Toronto Press, 2005) and The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Abstract:
After the end of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a special envoy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Edward J. Flynn, left the Crimea for Moscow to meet with Stalin, Molotov and the newly elected patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church to discuss the treatment of religion by the communist authorities. Less than a month after Flynn concluded his talks in Moscow and went to Rome to see the pope, the Soviet authorities arrested the entire hierarchy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the newly acquired western provinces of the Soviet Union. In the following year the five-million-strong church, which had been under the jurisdiction of Rome, was liquidated, its faithful persecuted and forced underground. Did these acts of violence have anything to do with the decisions made at Yalta and Flynn's trip to Moscow? The lecture engages this and other related questions, elucidating previously unknown aspects of the division of Europe into spheres of influence. It draws on a chapter of Serhii Plokhy's forthcoming book, Yalta: The Price of Peace, to be released by Viking Press in January 2010.
Ticketed parking is available at the venue. Please consult the downloadable map.
Professor Plokhy’s visit to Monash University is generously sponsored by Dnister Ukrainian Credit Co-operative Limited.
