Non-Russian speakers have had to wait twenty years for Sergei Golitsyn's autobiography to appear in English. When it came out in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union in 1990 it had already languished for thirty years unpublished in a deep drawer. The author prepared it for publication, but died before it was printed. In Russia it was a seminal work, an essential tool in the demolition of the edifice built by Lenin and Stalin. Golitsyn committed a crime at the instant of his conception: he was closely related to the doomed royal family of the last tsar. A deeply humble, honest, religious man, his whole life he fought to extricate himself from his origins – not by denouncing anyone, but by trying to make a contribution to the new society. In this he was doomed to failure, though at one point he became a minor surveyor on some of Stalin's grandiose projects. He could never become a published author while the old system persisted. However, he did use his considerable literary gifts to record the death of the old Russia in prose which occasionally attains the heights of lyricism. Unlike the many memoirs of the gulag, this is not a book of horrors. As the title tells us, Golitsyn was a survivor. He lived to the age of eighty, having suffered only one short period of imprisonment and interrogation. He resisted constant pressure to denounce his friends and emerged with his integrity untarnished. The rich tapestry he weaves is modulated and free of self-pity. Golitsyn was one of the last to cling openly to his religious faith when all the churches and monasteries were closed before the Second World War. This is not an official history of the death of the Russian Orthodox Church: in some ways it is more valuable than that, an eye-witness of its death-throes. No pages are more poignant than the author's description of his visit to the far north of Russia where he saw the Monastery of St Cyril of the White Lake after the monks had been expelled, but before the ravages of time and Soviet desecration had taken their toll on this magnificent lakeside complex (now happily restored in recent years). Pages 291–3 describing this excursion form one of a number of magnificent set pieces which distinguish the book. One learns new facts, too. It is not generally known that church weddings persisted in Moscow until 1929, when Golitsyn was able to stand as a ‘No.1 groom’ (best man) for the last time. This volume stops short at the outbreak of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (1941). Perhaps somewhere, unpublished, there is a sequel? However, the appearance of the Russian original was a literary – and political and religious – event in Russia. Its belated publication in London is worth the wait, for, barring a few idiosyncrasies, it is well translated and becomes a work of Russian literature in its own right.