The Range of Topics Touched Upon in the Essays Is Broad. There Are
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The range of topics touched upon in the essays is broad. There are analyses of the impact of ideology on the discipline during the Soviet period as well as évaluations of the lives and work of some of the leading Soviet psychologists, including Vygotskii, Luria, Leont'ev, and Rubenstein. There are also discussions of major subfields in psychology. Individual chapters, for example, are devoted to industrial psychology, ethnie psychology, and comparative psychology. Among the more unusual offerings are essays discussing the relationship between psychological theory and practice in the USSR and in East Ger- many and the People's Republic of China. The intended audience for this collection is clearly Western psychologists rather than specialists on Russia. The longest chapter in the book is an introductory essay that pro- vides a very cursory overview of Russian history and psychology from the era of the "Great Reforms" to the middle of the 1990s. While fundamentally accurate, the authors' choices of examples are likely to strike many serious historians of Russian science as a lit- tle odd, and readers who have completed at least a university-level survey of Russian his- tory are unlikely to find themselves learning anything new. The introductory essay also includes an annotated bibliography of monographs written by Western scholars about Soviet psychology and a glossary of psychological terms. Both of these would doubtless be useful for Western psychologists desirous of learning about the Russian variant of their discipline; however, they are too cursory to have much utility for Russian specialists. The same is true of later chapters that describe the functioning of the Institute of Psychol- ogy, the harsh économie realities facing scientists in Post-Soviet Russia, not to mention Soviet era restrictions on international travel by Soviet citizens and on the photography efforts of foreign visitors. The most significant drawback to this volume is the brevity of the essays. The book in- cludes contributions from such well-known scholars of Russian/Soviet psychology as laroshevskii and Valsiner, whose essays are, not surprisingly, among the most thought- provoking pieces in this anthology. Nevertheless, these chapters are also too short to be completely satisfying. In sum, serious students of the Russian psychological sciences would do better to pass this volume by and immerse themselves in the monographs writ- ten by those two men or by some of the other scholars whose works are cited in the intro- ductory essay. Julie Vail Brown University of North Carolina at Greensboro Istorychnyi kontekst, ukladennia Beresteis'kykh unii i pershe pouniine pokolinnia. Materi- aly pershykh "Beresteis'kykh chytan"' L'viv, Ivano-Frankivs'k, Kyiv, 1-6 zhovtnia 1994 r. Edited by Borys Gudziak, co-edited by Oleh Turii. Lviv: Instytut Istorii Tserkvy Lvivs'- koi Bohoslovs'koi Akademii, 1995, x, 188 pp. (paper). One of the most remarkable events in the last years of the Soviet Union was the emer- gence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church from the underground and its reciaiming the majority of religious believers and its former churches in Western Ukraine. The Moscow Patriarchate fiercely opposed this process and the Vatican was ambiguous, but the Ukrainian Catholics found support in the large Ukrainian diaspora. Perhaps even more remarkable has been the resurrection of the pre-war Lviv Theological Academy. The So- viet authorities had permitted the Russian Orthodox Church to maintain a large religious plant in Western Ukraine (at one point 25 percent of ail Russian Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union were in the three Ga!!cian oblasts) partly as a means of Russification and partly to keep believers from joining the underground Ukrainian Catholics. At the same time, they destroyed not on!y the institution but even the library of the T heological Acade- my in Lviv and permitted no Orthodox seminary in this stronghoid of Ukrainian patrio- ' tism, preferring to have one in Soviet and Russified Odesa despite the large number of vocations in Western Ukraine. When one considers that the underground Ukrainian Catholic ciergy in this period were trained in conditions reminiscent of the !rish hedge schools, one can see how needed the restoration of high level training is. The Ukrainian Catholic centers in the West have p!ayed a major role in restoring the Church's academic traditions. The Harvard and Rome-trained Dr. Borys Gudziak, vice- rector of the academy and director of the Institute of Church History, has done much to give the academy an international standing in church history. It was he who conceived the ambitious program of "Brest Readings," six symposia, held between 1994 and 1996 to mark the 400th anniversary of the Union of Brest through which part of the Orthodox be- lievers of Ukraine and Belarus united with Rome. The innovative concept, particularly con- sidering the strong emotions that the Union still engenders, was to assemble an interna- tional team of scholars for each topic, organize a group of discussants, and hold each session in three cities with participation open to the general public. The papers and dis- cussions of the symposia are being published, the volume reviewed here being the first of the four that have appeared so far. The first symposium was devoted to the historical context of the Union of Brest and the first génération after the Union. The volume opens with a lecture given by Archimandrite Lubomyr Huzar at a festive concert at the Lviv Opéra House that initiated the ieadings. These reffective comments on the religious dimension of the Union demonstrate the intel- lectual régénération of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and they are of particular signifi- cance because Bishop Huzar has taken over the administration of the Lviv Metropolitanate from the elderly Archbishop Cardinal Myroslav Liubachivs'kyi. The four speakers in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Kyiv were Professor Vittorio Peri of the Vatican Apostolic Library, Dr. Mikhail Dmitriev, director of the Center of Ukrainian and Belarusian Studies at Moscow University, Dr. Borys Gudziak, and Sister Sophia Senyk, professor of the Papal Oriental Institute in Rome. Professor Peri spoke on the Roman viewpoint, which he saw as not a union of churches as it had been during the Union of Florence (1439), but as an accep- tance of Ruthenian bishops and faithfui by the Roman Church. Dr. Dmitriev discussed the concepts of union in government and church circles in the Polish-Lithuanian Common- wealth, iaying particular stress on the traditions of tolérance in the state and the Union as a reform program in the Kyiv Metropolitanate. Dr. Gudziak concentrated on the complex stage during which the hierarchy of the Kyiv Metropolitanate searched for proper relations with Rome and Constantinopie. Sister Sophia cornpared the second and third metropoli- tans of the Uniate Church, fpatü Potii and losyf Ruts'kyi, and their energetic programs to strengthen the Union. The volume contains extensive comments by discussants and the public and the an- swers of the speakers. It is obvious from the comments from the floor that the symposia in Lviv and !vano-Frankivsk attracted a wide generai public, while that in Kyiv was more an affair of cabinet académies. Uniformly, however, the quality of the discussion is high. While the primary audience ci the readings, scholars and the public in Ukraine, will be .