Alexander Ogorodnikov was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag from 1978 to 1987 for demanding greater religious freedom after founding a network of study groups – all branches of what became known as the Christian Seminar – in different parts of the Soviet Union for people who were searching for Christian faith. This was an extaordinary feat in a political system which only allowed the expression of religious faith within a tightly controlled structure, within official churches which were strictly limited by Stalinist laws passed in 1929 and watched closely at all times by the government's Council for Religious Affairs. He emerged from prison still resolute, never to compromise his principles. The author of Dissident for life, Koenraad De Wolf, was deeply impressed by Ogorodnikov when he met him in 2007 and, although no Russian specialist, decided to embark on the daunting task of writing his life against the backdrop of contemporary Russian social and political developments. Unfortunately De Wolf sometimes gets his facts wrong. He states that the well-known dissident Russian Orthodox priest Fr Dmitri Dudko served in the church on Moscow's Preobrazhensky Square (p. 61). This church was blown up in 1964. Fr Dudko in fact served at St Nicholas in Preobrazhensky Cemetery. Anyone who knows Russia would hardly describe the ancient city of Pskov as ‘a village’ (p. 267). De Wolf also claims that the major part of the Keston archive at Baylor University has not been accessible to scholars since 2007 (p. 282). This is not true, as the many who have explored it will testify, and De Wolf would have done well to have consulted it, since this archive contains vital primary sources on the Christian Seminar. Ogorodnikov and other Russian Orthodox dissidents active under Khrushchev and Brezhnev still await a serious historical study. Unlike the persecution of the Church under Stalin, the period of Russian Orthodox Church history with which Ogorodnikov was so closely involved – the 1960s and 1970s up to the 1988 dramatic change in Communist Party policy towards religion under Gorbachev – is ignored in most official histories published by the Moscow Patriarchate and Ogorodnikov's role airbrushed out.