In the Current Issue: "Post-Soviet Orthodox Liturgies in Ukraine at War"

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Rites for Wounded Communities,” guest-edited by David Hogue, explores a wide range of responses in which churches and chaplains have engaged in order to help people affected by disasters and violence come to terms with the after-effects and the on-going trauma. This excerpt is from Nadieszda Kizenko, a historian who writes about the liturgical practices of conflicting factions in Ukraine, a nation traumatized by the on-going invasion and devastation wrought by Russia. This informs our understanding of the very real political implications of what we do as Christians in worship. The full essay is accessible through institutional and individual subscriptions. –– Melinda Quivik

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It might seem obvious that the war in Ukraine has affected Orthodox Christian liturgy in the country. But that is not in fact something that should be assumed. Although it might seem paradoxical in the context of a collection on trauma and liturgy, it’s worth asking whether liturgy should respond to war or other kinds of national trauma at all. Perhaps believers would rather liturgy provide a respite from the violence they are experiencing and serve as a source of seemingly unchanging stability. But in Orthodox Christian tradition, liturgy has usually engaged warfare head-on rather than being a “safe space” ignoring it.

Orthodoxy has a long tradition of praying for the ruler, for the commonwealth, for the empire. From the seventh century, under the Emperor Heraclius, hymnbooks began for the first time to exhort God to “grant victory to the emperor” (or, after 1453 or after 1917, to Orthodox Christians) “over their enemies.” At the same time, Orthodox liturgy began vilifying Ottomans, Swedes, or whomever else the emperor happened to be fighting. During the Great Northern War (1700-21), for example, a Russian liturgical service written by a Ukrainian bishop described Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa (who had defected to the Swedes) as a second Judas and Charles XII of Sweden as the Antichrist. Every Orthodox liturgy includes litanies “for this country, its civil authorities, and its armed forces.” Russian churches have prayed for victory whether Russia was attacked by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Japan, or Hitler. When historically majority Orthodox countries go to war—even when they go to war against one another, as opposed to a non-Christian “infidel”—Orthodox churches do not sit on the sidelines.

But the ferment in Ukrainian liturgy, and Ukrainian liturgical responses to trauma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries started well before the present war. To understand the crisis in Ukrainian liturgy, we need to go back further than Russia’s attack on February 24, 2022. For, before the war began, in Ukraine, not one, but several, churches claimed to be the most authentic expression of Orthodox Christian tradition. (This was not typical in historically Orthodox countries in contrast to countries like the United States where Orthodoxy was established as much by diaspora emigrants as by missionaries.)

Here I will focus on the two largest competing denominations: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (until 2019, this was the only Ukrainian church recognized as being canonical by the other Orthodox and the Catholics), and, created after Constantinople’s intervention in 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Their different liturgies show different notions and different experiences of history, identity, memory, victimhood, and sacrifice that the war has only exacerbated. But the core issue, one inflamed by the war, is this: Does a church claim to be the most authentically Ukrainian expression of Christianity, emphasizing the nation’s long colonial victimhood at the hands of its imperial and Soviet-era Russian masters, as does the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church? Or, like the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, does a church instead focus on its supposedly more canonical Christianity, on the elements it shares with its Orthodox coreligionists, and—at least until Russia’s attack on Ukraine—on Ukrainian contributions to both the Rus and the Russian imperial tradition?

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Nadieszda Kizenko is professor of history and Director of Religious Studies at the University at Albany and a Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her books include A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (Penn State, 2000); Good for the Souls. A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2021); and (co-edited with Thomas Bremer and Alfons Brüning) Orthodoxy in Two Manifestations? The Conflict in Ukraine as Expression of a Fault Line in World Orthodoxy (Peter Lang, 2022).

Nadieszda Kizenko, “Post-Soviet Orthodox Liturgies in Ukraine at War,” Liturgy 39, no. 2 (2024): 37–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2024.2330841.