“The Essay” was compiled by Antonovich at the demand of the Kievan Archeological Commission. According the preface, its aim was to argue for the idea that ‘the Polish state had tried to force Orthodoxy out its borders and to replace it with ‘Latin faith’. “The novelty of “The Essay” was in the first attempt to gather and to systematize data on the confessional legislation of Rzechpospolita Polska in the sixteenth — eighteenth centuries. Not without an ideological touch, that essay was of some scholarly importance as a document of the epoch, which characterized the peculiarities of those research works on the Orthodox history made by Russian scholars of the period after the Polish January Uprising of 1863-1864. “The Essay” was summarized with a concept of ‘oppression of Orthodoxy’ (p.29) in Rzechpospolita Polska, which had been a result not of a private “arbitrariness, but of the state politics of Poland” where the Union had served as an instrument of enslavement of ‘common people’. Thus, the author justified the politics of Russian Empire aimed at the Greek Catholics, which actually outlawed them.

Source: Antonovich V. B. Essay on the Attitude of the Polish State to Orthodoxy and Orthodox Church. Kiev, 1866. 32 p.