Catherine’s erstwhile defense of religious toleration was not replaced with a justification of intolerance. What she now claimed to be doing was redressing the previous injustice done to the Orthodox. They had been forcibly converted to the Union by the Polish authorities, and now she was merely trying to bring them back to their ancestral faith. The return to “the faith of fathers and forefathers,” as the conversion campaign was called in official pronouncements of the Russian church and state, proceeded with spectacular success in Right-Bank Ukraine, where almost no Uniate parishes remained
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