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The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute supported the collaboration of the authors and in 2012 sponsored a colloquium on dissimulation and memory that served as a springboard for this article. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous readers for their helpful comments and Professor Serhii Plokhii and Dr. Neva Viise (1931-2015) for their advice in shaping the manuscript. Additionally, Maria Ivanova is grateful for the support she received through the Polish History Museum Scholarship Fund (Warsaw), the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellowship in Ukrainian Studies, and the Advanced Academia Fellowship Programme for International Scholars (Centre for Advanced Study Sofia).
Introduction: Orthodox Christians in "the Age of Dissimulation"
The most well-known practitioner of dissimulation among early modern Christians of the Eastern Rite is Meletii Smotryts'kyi (ca. 1577-1633), the Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk (in modern-day Belarus), who was suspected of being a Uniate for several years before he was openly charged with apostasy during a council of the Orthodox hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania in August of 1628.1For the previous year Smotryts'kyi had lived a double life, outwardly an Orthodox archbishop but secretly a Uniate, having formally accepted the Union with Rome on July 6, 1627. In this period of clandestine Uniatism and the years leading up to it, during which he flirted with conversion, Smotryts'kyi fulfilled his official duties, playing a leading role in Orthodox synods and risking exposure that would bring public disgrace and even physical harm. Smotryts'kyi had a positive reason for keeping his conversion secret: he argued that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition should allow him to remain in office as an Orthodox bishop so that he might convene a council of the Orthodox hierarchy and elite and, "received as a schismatic [an Orthodox], would be able to set forth and to explain the twofold causes of the present discord of the Church & and to cause doubt for them in the schismatic faith (through the reasons that had taught him himself that there was no contradiction in thing [essence], only in words, between the holy Greek and Latin fathers)."2Smotryts'kyi concluded his request for secrecy by comparing his situation with that of Jesuits engaged in...