Recent work on the Russian Church in the century before the Revolution has suggested that the pressure for reform of the Church might have led to schism, had it not been cut short by the October Revolution (Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the eve of the Revolution, 2004). When the Revolution struck, a reforming council of the Russian Church was already in session. It is this council that is the subject of this book, by the director of the Centre Istina in Paris. While there is plentiful literature on the ferment in the Church at the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been little detailed discussion of the council itself. This book fills a gap, and does it superbly. After a historical section, tracing the movement of reform (and the reactions) from the beginning of the century, through 1905, to 1917/18, the procedures and achievements of the council are discussed in detail, followed by an assessment of the application of the conciliar decrees and the reception of the council in the Russian diaspora. This occupies just over half the book; the rest comprises a French translation of the documents of the council. The council's most manifest achievement was the restoration of the patriarchate, suppressed by Peter the Great. A complex synodal structure, with democratic elections, and significant lay representation, was also envisaged. Under Communism, some of the decisions of the council were put into effect, and the fall of Communism provided an opportunity to complete this process, which has only very partially been taken up. In the diaspora, the 1917/18 council was the inspiration behind the structures of the Archdiocese of Western Europe for Parishes of the Russian Tradition, one of the groups of exiled Russians that broke away from Moscow after the Revolution. Destivelle discusses these structures, but not the similar attempts by the British Diocese of Sourozh and the Orthodox Church of America, the latter granted autocephaly by Moscow in 1970. He does, however, discuss the reactions to the council of the émigré theologians Afanasiev, Schmemann, Meyendorff and Florovsky, and reveals a wide disparity of views. Some of these saw the council as a turning-point, marking the end of the Petrine era; others felt that an opportunity had been missed (rather in the way many Anglicans felt that an opportunity had been missed with Archbishop Fisher's reform of Anglican canon law), and that basic issues such as the relationship between Church and State had not been faced. The history of the Russian Church since the fall of Communism tends to support this latter view. In this connexion, Destivelle does not mention the one émigré theologian who had been at the council, Bulgakov, who shortly aftewards wrote Sous les remparts de Chersonèse, which was published posthumously and recently has been translated into French. In this work representatives of the various views engage in dialogue one with another. This could have provided a valuable foil to the discussion of the council's reception among theologians. Nevertheless, Destivelle's book provides an indispensable contribution to our understanding of an as yet unfinished episode in the history of the Russian Church.