Reunion church projects of 1914-1915 in Galicia and transcarpathia according to memoirs of Georgy Shavelsky

The article is devoted to those fragments of the memoirs of the last army Protopresbyter Georgy Shavelsky in which the author talks about the so-called reunion projects of 1914-1917, aimed at the merger of the Orthodox and Uniate Churches. The emergence of such ideas has been connected to the occupation of large areas of Carpathian Rus' by the Russian Army during the military campaigns of WWI, which was presented by Russian propaganda as the liberation of a brotherly Slavic people from the yoke of the Habsburgs. As seen from the memoirs, the political elite of the Russian Empire took the indigenous population of these lands as Rusins, who were coercively «pulled from the bosom of Orthodoxy» as a result of political intrigues. Shavelsky analyzes the ways of «reunion» and talks about the confrontation between supporters of the moderate and hard line within the Orthodox Church; he shows how the internal church debates concerning this issue affected the relations between the various groups of courtiers; he gives vivid profiles of the main participants of the events.

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