The Old Believers in Imperial Russia provides a fascinating and sound study of how, despite being continuously subjected to shifting forms of state persecution, the Moscow Rogozhskoe Cemetery community of priestly Old Believers managed between 1771 and 1917 to construct, sustain, and define itself and to attain a leading position within Russian Old Belief. The author argues that critical to this success was the ability of the community, in part through skillful leadership, to take advantage of opportunities that arose as social, economic, cultural, and political circumstances changed. For example, by offering to provide a place of burial for Old Believers and quarantine facilities and charitable services to the general population during the Moscow plague of 1771, the community gained both officially sanctioned physical space and greater latitude for its religious activities. The economic utility of the community's leading families to the state during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its expanded charitable work in response to the devastation in Moscow caused by French occupation and the fire of 1812 gained the community still greater latitude, as well as an enhanced status both among priestly Old Believers and within Russian society more broadly. The community even found ways to improve its situation during a period of increased state persecution of Old Believers after 1825, first by helping to establish the Belokrinitskaia Old Believer hierarchy—which helped to satisfy its need for ordained priests—and then by breaking with long-standing tradition and publicly pledging its loyalty to Alexander III after his father's assassination. The state's granting of wider religious toleration in 1905, finally, greatly expanded the community's opportunities for personal and public religious expression, while also enabling the public promotion of Old Belief, efforts to organize Old Believers politically, and other forms of civic and political activism by the community's leading members. The community thus was not static and backward looking but evolved continuously during the imperial period through interaction with its changing environment.

A number of mutually reinforcing forces, according to De Simone, held the community together and defined its identity, both for its members and for others in Russian society. Chief among these were the religious practices, rituals, imagery, symbols, and beliefs shared by members of the community and represented physically and symbolically in its architectural structures, interior designs, and iconography. The ties and identity fashioned through these media were reinforced by the community's extensive engagement in charitable and educational activities. This combination underlay the community's publicly expressed self-identity as a true Orthodox Christian community that, by adhering to pre-Nikonian rituals and symbolism, was also preserving authentic Russian cultural traditions and values. Members of the community employed this moral-religious and national-patriotic self-identity to distinguish themselves particularly from the nobility, which was perceived as having been corrupted by western culture. In the last years of the empire, it also informed efforts by well-educated and entrepreneurially successful younger members of several wealthy families within the community to define a distinctive path of socio-economic development that would avoid the social problems arising from western capitalism by wedding modern technology and business methods with Orthodox social and moral ideals. Finally, De Simone contends that the Rogozhskoe Cemetery complex itself was an important source of unity and identity, providing a physical space for religious and social interaction that for members of the community materially and symbolically demarcated a sacred and protective inner world from the profane and threatening one outside its walls.

Although De Simone discusses the composition, organization, governance, and resources of the community, these topics are treated frustratingly briefly, perhaps due to a lack of sources. For example, while De Simone states that the community grew larger over time, it is not clear by how much or whether this growth also entailed changes in the social composition or other characteristics of the community's membership. Similarly, while the important shift in governing structure that took place after 1905 is explained, how the community was governed and administered prior to then is noted only briefly. The book also would have benefitted from more discussion of daily and seasonal life within the compound itself, and how these may have changed across time. Nonetheless, by tracing the evolution and activities of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery Old Believer community from its establishment in 1771 to 1917, De Simone makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of not only the experiences of Old Believers in Imperial Russia, but also the important role played by religion during this period in the formation of community and identity and in the adaptation to social and cultural change.