It is unusual to look at Russian Orthodoxy through the eyes of an American Calvinist and especially, as in this case, when the eyes are somewhat starry. John Burgess spent the years 2004 to 2005 and 2011 to 2012 in Russia, immersing himself totally in the Russian Orthodox Church's worshipping life, on one occasion, the Feast of the Theophany, stripping off and plunging ‘into the body-numbing waters’ (p.221) and then seeing droplets of water on his body turning to ice as he dried off. His love of Russian church bells reveals a most attractive quality – the author's poetic sensibility: ‘Sometimes they tolled deeply, slowly, and steadily … For a few magical minutes, eternity was again breaking into ordinary human time’ (p.193). He clearly ‘caught’ Orthodoxy with its vision of heaven on earth, and sometimes leaves behind the critical faculties of his Protestant formation. He has not read the writings of the Orthodox priest Fr Pavel Adelheim (d. 2013), whose analysis of the Russian Orthodox Church's ills would have acted as a corrective to Burgess's over-positive account. Fr Pavel describes the lot of a parish priest in the hands of an all-powerful, and in his case malevolent, bishop as that of a mouse in the paws of a cat, with the comment ‘What for a cat is fun, is death for a mouse.’ Fr Pavel demonstrates that the Moscow Patriarchate's governance is tending towards ever greater centralisation, with the laity disenfranchised and a structure of ecclesiastical courts which support an oppressive administrative system. Its governance, Fr Pavel observes, is based on fear and subservience rather than on love and freedom.

There are lacunae in Burgess's knowledge of twentieth-century Russian church history: he describes the Christian Church in the Communist period as having survived underground. This term can only be accurately applied to the True Orthodox Church or the Catacomb Church, which was uncompromisingly opposed to the Moscow Patriarchate and its rapprochement with the Soviet state, and to the outlawed Greek Catholics who were forcibly annexed by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1946. After the death of Stalin and Khrushchev's rise to power, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox did not live a secret life underground, but campaigned to be registered and thus to be able to lead a legal existence with state authorisation. It is also misleading of Burgess to claim that the Russian Orthodox Church experienced a renaissance only after the change in Communist Party policy towards the Church in 1988, following Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985; in fact, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s there had been a remarkable revival of commitment to Orthodoxy among the intelligentsia – the extensive writings of Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, Boris Talantov, Alexander Ogorodnikov and Irina Ratushinskaya are evidence of this. The burgeoning of Orthodoxy in the 1990s and the years when Burgess was in Russia was built on the religious searching of earlier decades, when belief in Marxism-Leninism disintegrated.

The commemoration of Russia's twentieth-century martyrs by the Church is an important factor, underpinning Orthodoxy's growth, as Burgess demonstrates, but his adulation of St Tikhon's Orthodox University, which has pioneered research on these martyrs, fails to take into account this university's lack of interest in those Orthodox believers who, during the post-Stalin period, criticised their Church for its pusillanimous response to state pressure. The exhibition on the Russian Orthodox Church under Communism, organised by St Tikhon's Orthodox University at Moscow's Museum of Modern History in 2012, was an interesting illustration of this institution's selective memory. That exhibition focused on the 1920s and 1930s with little on the post-war period and Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign. There was no mention of the Catacomb Church, or of the Orthodox who took part in the dissident movement, many of whom suffered in prison.

Burgess's admiration for the Sretenskii Monastery in Moscow and its current incumbent, Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, also fails to take account of certain facts: when Fr Georgii Kochetkov was ousted as priest-in-charge of the Sretenskii Cathedral in 1994, it was not ‘Bishop Tikhon's Sretenskii Monastery’ (p.180); Fr Georgii had in fact built up a vibrant congregation at this church, had pioneered religious education as well as liturgical innovation, and founded the Transfiguration Brotherhood which continues to support many clergy and members of the laity.

Burgess examines certain aspects of today's Russian Orthodox Church, its educational work, social work and parish life, and makes the perceptive observation that in these areas the church ‘offers Russians a “free space” for civil society’ (p.22). However, his observations are based on his experience of the Church in only a limited number of places, and are focused particularly on Moscow and St Petersburg with a foray up north to the Solovetsky Monastery and to Kineshma on the Volga in the Ivanovo oblast. He has not experienced the Russian Orthodox Church in Siberia, which is being overtaken in some areas by the growth of the Protestant charismatic movement, let alone the Church in the Far East of Russia. In the many new dioceses carved out of what are now termed Metropolias, examples of the teaching expertise, enlivened parish life and numerous social work projects which Burgess witnessed are often still in their infancy. In Magadan, in Russia's Far East on the Sea of Okhotsk, where a vast cathedral has been built on the foundations of a Palace of Soviets, many different departments have been created within the diocesan administration, but there are not enough clergy to fill these posts, so that the bishop's press secretary doubles up as head of the Information Department and head of the Culture Department. In this distant part of the Russian Federation an enormous Pentecostal church with a large congregation dominates the skyline, while a lively Roman Catholic parish runs numerous social work projects. Russian national identity and much of Russia's culture, as Burgess argues, may indeed be Orthodox, but at the same time it should not be forgotten that the Russian Federation is also multi-denominational and multi-ethnic with areas which are predominantly Buddhist or Muslim.