In this volume, Lucian Leustean discusses the interplay between the Romanian Orthodox Church and politics during the first stages of communist rule. Arranged chronologically, the chapters examine religion and politics from the moment the Romanian Communist Party was co-opted into government at the pressure of Moscow until 1965, the year when Romania's Stalinist ruler Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej unexpectedly died. In contrast to scholars who believe that the Orthodox Church collaborated with the communists and scholars who insist that it resisted communist policies, Leustean asserts that his research presents a “third perspective,” claiming that the church collaborated, although “some actions of the patriarch and other church hierarchs could be interpreted as resistance toward communism” (190).

The study opens with a discussion of symphonia, the Byzantine doctrine allowing the Orthodox Church to collaborate with the political power, “the will of God,” regardless of the latter's ideological and policy commitments. Symphonia entails no partnership of equals, but a marriage in which the state determines the church's actions and ambitions. The Orthodox Church sought to preserve the clout it lost to the state by gaining advantages over other religious denominations. Chapter 2 provides the historical background of pre-communist church-state relations, paying attention to Alexandru Ioan Cuza, who in 1859–1866 tilted the balance of church-state relations in the state's favor, and King Carol I, under whose rule political control over religious life acquired a nationalist dimension.

Chapters 3 to 7 form the core of the book, surveying church-state relations during the first stages of communist rule in Romania, from King Michael's abdication and the formation of the first communist government to the end of Gheorghiu-Dej's rule in 1965. The picture Leustean constructs — based on church pronouncements and documents found in Romanian and British archives, including the Romanian secret political police, the Securitate — shows that Orthodox leaders toed the official line publicly while occasionally manifesting dissatisfaction with communist policies privately. The reasons why church leaders agreed to actively collaborate, tacitly endorse or simply accept policies detrimental to their church were doctrinal, personal, and political. They ranged from the endorsement of symphonia as a reasonable course of action; the desire to protect the church by averting the presumably harsher policies that resistance could unleash; and the wish to promote their individual careers, obtain permission to travel abroad, and live lavishly at a time when ordinary Romanians struggled to survive.

Notwithstanding the rich data provided on communist religious policy and the actions/reactions of the Orthodox Church, the volume would have benefited from a more careful theoretical and empirical approach. The lack of definitions of concepts like “collaboration,” of a theoretical model framing the analysis, of criteria for explaining a selective reading of documents, and of keys for interpreting secret archival materials detracts from the volume's overall merit. Reading like a history more than a work of political science, Leustean remains silent on the many studies of church resistance/collaboration under communism (in Romania and Eastern Europe more broadly) and oversimplifies arguments advanced by other studies of church-state relations in communist Romania. Surely, church collaboration/resistance does not imply that all church leaders and clergy have supported/rejected the communist regime at every turn, but that overall the balance of their actions and intentions tilted toward one side or the other. In this sense, the volume does not present a novel “third perspective,” but recognizes that the instances of the Orthodox Church's collaboration outnumbered its moments of resistance.

This is the first English-language volume to systematically shed light on the controversial figure of Justinian Marina (1948–1977), and to explain why Marina went down in history as the “Red Patriarch.” While Leustean's portrait of Marina is generally accurate, his interpretation of certain historical moments is questionable. For example, the appointments of former Iron Guard sympathizers in influential church positions stemmed less from Marina's hidden anticommunist convictions than from a desire to run the Orthodox Church as his personal fiefdom. In this respect, his Iron Guard protégés were the weakest link. Owing their livelihoods and possibly lives to Marina, they could hardly block his plans to personally control the church or to introduce his doctrinally questionable manifesto, Apostolat Social. Due to their tainted past, these individuals would have never turned into Marina's rivals and competitors, as they would never have gained the support of the communist authorities. Finally, these protégés were selected from among the lesser-known Iron Guard figures. The Red Patriarch persecuted Dumitru Staniloae, the most important Romanian theologian, who could have rejected Apostolat Social on theological grounds.

A welcome addition to the literature on the resistance and collaboration of churches under dictatorial regimes, this volume provides useful summaries of previously inaccessible Securitate archival documents, reviews of Romanian-language primary and secondary sources, and the first English-language analysis of the understudied case of the Romanian Orthodox Church. An easy read, it will be accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, and of interest to both observers of Romania and scholars interested in Eastern Europe.