(Italian Association of Polonists (AIP), 2022) Avramchuk, Oleksandr
This article discusses a little-known episode of collaboration between Ukrainian intellectuals at Harvard and Pope John Paul II Universities. Based on Polish, Ukrainian and American archival collections, the author shows the degree of entanglement between purely scholarly celebrations of the Millennium of Christianity in Rus’-Ukraine and the new realities of the Vatican’s Eastern Policy under the Polish Pope. The preparations of the conference in Ravenna in 1988, organized by Ukrainian scholars together with Polish and Italian, are contextualized within the evolving geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the growing cooperation between Polish and Ukrainian intellectual elites.