Rogers's book focuses on three centuries of social and economic transformation in Sepych, a Russian town located on the western border of the Perm region, in the Ural Mountains. The town is significant because it existed on the heavily travelled road connecting central Russia and Siberia, and because of its settlement in the late seventeenth century by Old Believers, religious dissenters who fled persecution by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government. Sepych thus serves as a prism for examining ethical aspirations and practices, for taking a close look, under concrete conditions of how townspeople constructed an ‘ethical repertoire’, defining their relationship to one another, to materials and to the state. Rogers, an anthropologist, opens up a world too rarely studied under such intimate conditions. Through a multiplicity of sources – archives, interviews, conversations, chance encounters – both local and in Moscow, he develops perspectives that can only be gained by living in a place for a lengthy period of time and having a keen ear to discourse. In Sepych, as Rogers observes, ethics consisted of a fluid subset of culture. Whereas in the first centuries of the town's existence, Old Believers believed that salvation mainly came through observing a narrow ‘elaborate arrangement of rituals, texts, and social structures’, this picture would greatly change after 1861, the period of the Great Reforms, when capitalist relationships challenged patriarchal authority, forcing local communities to reformulate their values. While the Soviet period again recast society and economy, fostering not the accumulation of capital but the accumulation of people, the post-socialist world of Sepych forced an even greater reformulation of ethical relationships. Rogers shows the importance of moonshine and moonlighting, of new inequalities and new social distinctions that have again led to a struggle over how to build a moral community. Rogers's work is not easily accessible to non-specialists, particularly the early parts of the book, but Russian scholars will find the book to be of much value. His study advances two tectonic shifts in interpreting the recent history of Russia. First, by taking a long-range view, Rogers deepens our understanding, as we begin to identify better the ‘continuities and discontinuities’, the carryovers from the past and the ‘responses to new circumstances’. In Sepych, Rogers discovers both actions taking place. His approach leads to a much clearer and more accurate understanding of present-day Russian society than the stereotypical claims that Russia is evolving into a capitalist society, or, conversely, retreating into its previous authoritarian structures. Second, by focusing on ethics, Rogers changes the lenses through which western scholars have long interpreted Russia. He avoids using such terms as ‘socialist’ or ‘capitalist,’ which conceal seminal elements that forged people's lives. By taking a close-up view of the ethical transformations and dilemmas over defining a moral community, this study yields a much more complex picture than is often presented. Debate and contention over ethical issues were constant features of the landscape. As Rogers admirably shows, Sepych suggests a world whose ethical boundaries have not settled into a stable framework, a world still in the process of formation, whose struggles relate to specific circumstances, which our abstract formulations fail to see.