Old Belief (taroverie) or Old Ritualism (staroobriadchestvo) constituted the largest and most important mass movement of religious dissent in Russia. Rejecting the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (1652–8), the Old Believers established their own communities where they tried to maintain the pure Christian faith. Persecuted by State and Church, the Old Belief splintered into many different sects, but the movement has survived to the present day. Almost every aspect of Old Belief – including its size, origin and significance – has been subject to vigorous historical debate. In this lively collection of essays, Robert Crummey, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California Davis and a distinguished historian of Muscovy, returns to the subject of his first, path-breaking book, The Old Believers and the world of AntiChrist (1970), which is still one of the best works on the Old Belief available in English. In the opening and closing chapters, Crummey deftly explains what is at stake in the study of the Old Belief. For populist historians, such as Afanasii Shchapov (1830–76), the Old Believers constituted a ‘democratic opposition to the administrative structure of the state’ (p. 10). In reaching this conclusion, however, Shchapov and other populists dismissed the theological and liturgical questions that the Old Believers themselves emphasised. By contrast, official nineteenth-century ecclesiastical historians (including P. S. Smirnov and N. I. Subbotin) took these issues seriously, although they ‘paid little, if any, attention to the political circumstances in which Old Belief developed’ (p. 8). Was the Old Belief primarily a movement of political and social opposition to an aggrandising elitist state, as the populists thought? Or was it a much smaller group of poorly-educated commoners obsessed by obscure points of dogma? The final chapter celebrates the remarkable work of the Novosibirsk school and its doyen, N. N. Pokrovskii (1930–), which, through rigorous analysis of both the intellectual and social history of Old Belief, combines the best qualities of the populist and ecclesiastical schools of thought. In the ten remaining essays, Crummey explores various aspects of Old Believer history, from the radically ascetic movement of the monk Kapiton (d. c. 1660) to the cultural worlds of Andrei Borisov (d. 1791), a leader of the monastic community at Vyg in the Russian north. Drawing from western theorists such Clifford Geertz and Brian Stock, Crummey explores the ‘cultural systems’ of the Old Believers, which he sees as a ‘textual community’ that contains ‘a multitude of interconnecting cultures’ (p. 22). Always rigorously faithful to his sources and sensitive to the religious worldview of the Old Believer writers, Crummey rightly questions those who propose a sharp dichotomy between popular and elite religion. At the same time, he emphasises the significance of cultural history, for the cultural system of Old Believer movement ‘provides the most important explanation for its remarkable staying power’ (p. 84). Russianists, anthropologists and historians of religion will all benefit from reading these engaging essays.