The largest evangelical church in Europe today started in Kyiv" (p. 210). This eye-opening quotation from Catherine Wanner's latest monograph may seem somewhat striking for the Western audience, which used to think about the post-Soviet religious landscape as rather homogeneous and predominantly Orthodox. The biggest megachurch Wanner refers to is the "Embassy of God" founded by pastor Sunday Adelaja from Nigeria. It is really an impressive phenomenon of an extremely active and robust Evangelical community missionizing not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the USA and Argentina. Their progress is just one example of the groundbreaking post-Soviet religious revival noticed by sociologists and anthropologists. 1 Wanner's monograph is not her first book on the issues of the post-Communist religiosity. She has co-edited volumes on morality, communities, and identity transformations, 2 which have earned her a high reputation in the field. Still, her own scholarly interests rest mostly on Ukraine and its numerous Protestant denominations. 3 What is so peculiar about churches in Ukraine that evokes Wanner's scholarly interests and definitely fascinates her? Apparently, it is religious pluralism caused by a historically high level of religiosity and the absence of a single dominant Orthodox Church that made Ukraine "one of the most active and competitive 'religious marketplaces' in Eurasia" (p. 132). In
This review's title is deliberately at variance with Andreas Kappeler's 2003 article on the position of Ukrainians in the ethnic hierarchy of the Russian Empire. This informal order in Russia, as in other premodern multiethnic empires, was based on criteria of political loyalty, estate, and social and cultural affiliation. The stratification of Ukrainians made it possible to attribute them to different categories: khokhly, mostly peasants; malorossy, Russian-speaking Ukrainians loyal to the Romanov dynasty; or Mazepists (mazepintsy), those forging Ukrainian cultural and national identity. Kappeler noted that all these categories were interwoven, and the position of Ukrainians in the Russian Empire was therefore extremely complex. 1
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