You could not make it up! Until the 1980s the military command carried out the Kremlin's policy of viciously persecuting and hounding any recruit who harboured a religious inclination. A decade later they had done a volte-face and after that virtually every commander encouraged and facilitated the installation of an Orthodox church or chapel. By the 2000s this change was in full spate and it became state policy to inculcate Russian Orthodoxy into every soldier. It is not known, nor does this book tell us, what happened to Muslims (who represent about 14 per cent of the national population) or to Protestants. It would have been interesting to hear from a military leader who had to adopt the change.

Dmitry Adamsky's meticulous research tells us the extent to which the Church (or at least the Moscow patriarchate) colluded with the Kremlin in promoting this new policy. President Putin and Patriarch Kirill acted on a common agenda, which could read, ‘Make Russia a great Christian state again.’

A popular nineteenth-century saint, Seraphim, no less, became the torch-bearer of the new policy. It was surely a coincidence, but one of supreme irony, that the Sarov monastery complex, where he had lived and which had become the keystone of his image as a figure of national devotion, was appropriated in Soviet times as a closed and secret centre of research on the atomic bomb. The destruction of the places of devotion and the barring of access to pilgrims became a model in the Soviet campaign against religion. As recounted in the recently published Chronicles of Seraphim-Divyeyevo Monastery (Cambridge 2019), Stalin's choice of this place as the centre of top-secret research led to the destruction of the Christian complex and the concreting over of what was left. Reparation was eventually made and the church complex rebuilt with money from the state. In 1992 the Church could re-possess its heritage and in 2006 monastic life resumed there. Russian nuclear Orthodoxy presents ample further insight as to how this came about.

By this time the inroads of Russian Orthodoxy into the military sphere were pervasive and the book boils over with examples of how and where this happened. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, submarines offered space to portable chapels and here chaplains, in a situation of close confinement, had the opportunity of offering spiritual advice to the submariners. They even had access to military secrets when allowed into the actual weapons chambers.

Chaplains did not ascend into space with the astronauts, but the latter did receive abundant reassurance from the Church. As Adamsky states: ‘When toward the end of the decade the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests and exercises intensified, clergy began participating in the launches and conducting pastoral conversations with the mobile units during patrol breaks (often deep in the forests) and with the silo operators in their underground modules.’ Concrete examples follow.

Priests sprinkled rockets with holy water as a matter of course and the space station received fragments of the relics of St Sergius. One of the most significant moments in the anti-religious campaign had been the triumphant words of Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space: ‘There is no god’. He is now converted, post-mortem, to the status of ‘true believer’, with a whole reinterpretation of his life attached (p. 155). A military chaplain, Fr Yoav, claimed that Gagarin's mother had been close to a nun, Makaria, whom Gagarin also met. He, allegedly, had his niece clandestinely baptised and he even petitioned for the rebuilding of Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral, which Stalin had destroyed.

Bearing in mind that ‘Vladimir’ means ‘ruler of the world’, Patriarch Kirill called Putin the ‘second Vladimir’, the first having been the baptiser of Russia (p. 211). Stalin's role in history is now reassessed and the view promoted that his defence of the Soviet Union was divinely inspired. Patriarch Kirill's admiration for Putin knows no bounds and vice-versa, the latter's Christian leadership and assertion of traditional moral standards being loudly proclaimed. In this context, the plan to depict Putin and Stalin together in the mosaic of a new cathedral in April 2020 was understandable, but public disapproval prevented this from happening.

All this represents a new direction in Russian policy, international as well as domestic. Yet political commentators to date have failed to register it. For example, Catherine Belton's definitive account of Putin's people (New York 2020), despite scattered references, does not come to grips with the role of the Church or its patriarch in Russia's domestic and international policies.

So, one returns to the first sentence of this review. Can all this have been made up? The answer is a resounding no. Proof of the author's assiduity is to be found in the comprehensive research which underlies this book. This is underpinned by no fewer than 1,203 footnotes, some of them very long, and filling eighty pages of the 354 in the book.

This is clearly an illuminating contribution to the study of contemporary Russia and its impact is no less in view of its dry but clear style. Dmitry Adamsky could have overstated his case. Rather, he steps back from it and presents it dispassionately. He does, however, have a few quirks. For example, some readers will not easily assimilate the word ‘temple’, which he constantly uses for church or chapel. It is also annoying to read ‘episcop’ and ‘archiepiscop’ which he uses for ‘bishop’ and ‘archbishop’. This is strange, because there is little jargon elsewhere, despite the frequent use of clichés such as ‘part and parcel’. The chapter heading, ‘Faith–nuclear nexus’ is not especially clear, nor is the title of the book, Russian nuclear Orthodoxy, particularly compelling. There are no illustrations, but the bald combination of missile and Orthodox cross on the front cover grabs the attention.

The author, professor in the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel, propounds the thesis that Church and State now collude in promoting Russia's diplomatic and moral world leadership. Any study of the reaction to this, internal in Russia or internationally, should be the subject of debate and Adamsky's scholarship has laid the groundwork for it.