There is a new wave of scholarship on the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA. The J. M. Dawson Institute of Church–State Studies at Baylor University, where Wallace L. Daniel is professor of history, is a significant contributor to this and his new book is distinguished. Daniel was an exchange scholar in Moscow during the 1969–70 academic year and has more recently conducted a series of in-depth interviews with interesting and outstanding representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, following its emergence from seven decades of persecution. In six chapters he concentrates mainly on portraying individuals, rather than on the social analysis promised in the title, but in doing so he does present a faithful portrait of some of the most influential church people who work within the confines of the Moscow patriarchate. Would-be reformers such as Fr Georgii Kochetkov, who tried to introduce modern Russian into the liturgy, are disciplined, while others have elbow room to rebuild destroyed institutions. Such a person is Mother Serafima. This remarkable woman gave a generous lifetime of service to Soviet science, especially researching into the properties of rubber. Not retiring until her late seventies, she had time to take monastic vows and revitalise the desecrated Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow between 1994 and her death at the age of eighty-five in 1999. In chapter iv, after recounting a brief history of the monastery, Daniel goes on to describe how this ‘model’ Soviet citizen could nevertheless nurture a Christian faith under the most adverse conditions. Mother Serafima recalls how deeply she was influenced by her grandfather. Leonid Mikhailovich Chichagov was a military commander and author in the tsarist army. After his wife's death he was ordained in the Orthodox Church and, at a great age, he became a secret archbishop during the purges, which eventually claimed his life. This chapter is, among much else, a tribute to determined detective work and an illustration of what can still be discovered about the history of the Church in the communist period, despite the destruction of so many records. Daniel underlines the enormous task which Mother Serafima faced in the last decade of her long life and he marvels at the way in which her tiny frame buzzed with energy, commitment and the ability to galvanise others – lay and clerical – into action. She clearly inherited her grandfather's genes and left behind her a vital and committed community. Other chapters of the book are researched in similar detail. Fr Aleksandr Men was the last Christian leader to be murdered under the communist regime (1990), before this research began. (If Daniel had interviewed him he would not have called him a ‘dissident’ on p. 25, but I had no other quibbles with the book.) Nothing is simple in Russia today and the author shows the Moscow patriarchate at its best and worst. His book is beautifully produced, well written and extensively researched. It should be read – with pleasure – by anyone with even marginal interest in Russia today.