What do you get when you cross the fields of strategy, church-state studies, and Russian politics? You get Dmitry Adamsky’s latest book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy, which—despite the somewhat awkward title—is a tour d'horizon of the Russian Federation through the prism of these fields of academic inquiry. While not fitting neatly into any one of these fields individually, the work’s greatest contribution is its bridging of these too-often separated areas.

The nexus of Orthodox Christianity and Russian politics is a field that has been well-developed over the past decades, indeed even during the Soviet period when religion was officially banned. The field was quickly resurrected in the final days of the Soviet Union and then rapidly flourished through the 1990s, as did religious belief itself in Russia. Adamsky does a solid job tracing the literature on this phenomenon, though that is not the point of his book. Instead, the author investigates the nexus between Russian Orthodox Christianity and the Russian nuclear weapons complex.

Though certainly not the first to highlight the fact that military units have saints assigned to them by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), nor to ascribe significance to the phenomenon, Adamsky does, however, offer the most in-depth study of this relationship thus far. His study unfolds in three parts, one for each decade of the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. Likewise each part is comprised of chapters that investigate church-state relations, the faith-nuclear nexus, and strategic mythmaking. The chapters on what Adamsky labels the faith-nuclear nexus and strategic mythmaking are highly original and insightful, while the sections on church-state relations are useful to those unfamiliar with the subject and accompanying literature.

In regard to the intersection of faith and strategy, it would have been interesting if the author had explored the rich literature on Christianity’s initial engagement with nuclear arms from the time period of the end of WWII through the origins of the Cold War, for here faith and strategy certainly came head-to-head in the world. But his focus is on Russia and at the time the Russian Orthodox Church was fully subservient to the state and had no independent voice, making such an inquiry nearly impossible to conduct.

Adamsky makes the claim that the “church-nuclear bond dwarfs comparable developments” in other arms of the military. However, he fails to provide evidence in support of this assertion. Such would have required a comparable examination of other branches of the military, again, something beyond the scope of the current work.

In the end, Adamsky offers his readers an ambitious study that bridges—quite successfully—the fields of international relations/strategic studies, church-state studies, and Russian politics, and in so doing sheds new light on all these fields. It is a must-read for those who seek to understand the role religion can play in the field of strategy in general and nuclear strategy in particular.