While establishing the centrality of saints in the worship of the Russian Orthodox Church and the significance of a saint's bodily incorruptibility in Orthodox spirituality, the first half of this study (1861 to the Revolution) is long-winded and repetitious. The second half is more interesting. It describes early Bolshevik anti-religious policy involving the exhumation of many saints – their so-called unmasking as ‘fraudulent’ relics – and popular resistance leading to the policy's eventual failure, which was accepted by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Many carefully staged ‘relic inspections’, often filmed for propaganda purposes, were carried out with clergy dragooned into uncovering and revealing a saint's remains. Some Orthodox lost their faith when they saw ‘twelve pounds of rotten bones, eaten away by moths and maggots,’ as E. M. Yaroslavsky (future leader of the League of Militant Godless) described the relics of St Innokenty of Irkutsk, but more often relics, set up as exhibits in anti-religious museums, continued to attract the faithful who would sometimes light candles and kneel before them. Far from dampening down religious fervour, Bolshevik policy provoked many forms of resistance: women formed a barricade at the entrance to the Trinity St Sergius Monastery to prevent St Sergius of Radonezh being exhumed, petitions signed by thousands were written, protest sermons preached, round-the-clock prayer vigils organised in churches where a saint could only be exhumed, according to regulations, if the church was empty. According to the testimony of Hieromonk Dosifei of the Donskoi Monastery, some saints had their feet kissed so often that the monks had to change the relics' slippers and stockings every month. Although Greene establishes that the campaign of exhumation was discontinued in 1921 with Lunacharsky admitting that it ‘meets with such unpleasant surprises’, he does not mention Lenin's intensified attack on the Russian Orthodox Church inaugurated in 1922 when in a secret letter (19 March) he wrote: ‘we must ruthlessly give battle against the reactionary clergy and overcome their resistance with a harshness which they will not forget for a few decades’. Compared to later persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, the years before 1922, when officials were even sometimes enjoined to avoid insulting believers, seem relatively mild.