Geraldine Fagan has spent more than a decade in Russia as Moscow correspondent for the Forum 18 News Service. Her extensive experience informs this thorough and comprehensive review of religious policy in Russia since the fall of Communism. State policy on religion would merit little comment in a nation with a tradition of tolerance, but Russia has a grim history of religious persecution and the position of believers there today is a barometer of the nation's success in recovering from eighty years of Soviet totalitarianism. By that measure, according to Fagan, all is not well. In the early days after the fall of Communism, President Yeltsin introduced a constitutional commitment to religious freedom but by 1997 opponents had forced through a new law which reduced some of the rights granted only a few years earlier. An ongoing campaign to establish privileged status for ‘traditional religions’ – Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – has seen the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) increasingly stake its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of Russian Christianity at the expense of non-Orthodox groups. The desire by Russia's ruling elite to protect their position has resulted in a pragmatic partnership with the ROC as the latter have sought state support for their pursuit of privilege. Contradicting the impression held by some in the West that the relationship between President Putin and the ROC is close, Fagan explains that the president's motives are political rather than devout and, although he cultivates the support of ROC hierarchs, he has been wary of giving the ROC unfettered power; the 1997 law, for instance, has been applied inconsistently. In spite of this, she argues, the Kremlin's fundamental indifference to religious freedom ‘allows junior officials to pursue an Orthodox-centred religious policy in defiance of the federal standard’ and this has resulted in a pattern of widespread harassment and persecution of religious groups disapproved of by the ROC. The examples that she cites are numerous and depressing. Opponents of religious pluralism employ a number of non-legal devices to achieve their ends. The first of these, familiar to those who grew up in Soviet times, is ‘telephone law’, where a call from an influential local official is sufficient to sway a court decision or to cancel a contract to rent a meeting room. Others have resonances in Soviet disinformation techniques – the creation of certain concepts and phrases (‘totalitarian sect’, ‘spiritual security’ and ‘canonical territory’) and their continued use until they are wrongly assumed to have legal weight, whereupon they are adopted by journalists, officials and police to demonise and persecute non-establishment faiths and religious groups. It is no easy task to produce a readable account of a highly complex situation which is continually changing and incorporate extensive source material (over 1,600 footnotes) without obscuring the main themes in a mass of detail. The author manages to do this with great competence. Sadly, the picture we are left with is of a country where justice is arbitrary and religious freedom far from guaranteed.