“Religion, nationality, or politics: Catholicism in the Russian empire, 1863–1905”

Focusing primarily on official sources, this essay examines perceptions of Catholicism and Catholics from the 1860s. Throughout this period, the Russian government almost instinctively understood “Catholic” and “Polish” as synonyms, even when it explicitly denied doing so. This conflation of religious and ethnic categories colored official policies toward other Catholics such as Belarusians and Lithuanians who ostensibly were potential allies against the Poles. Even measures such as the attempt to introduce Russian into Belarusian Catholic churches foundered in part on officialdom's profound distrust for Catholicism. This essay is a contribution to our understanding of religious and national categories in late Imperial Russia and also to the study of russification in this period.