In this groundbreaking book, James Kapalo provides us with the first monograph on the quasi-monastic, utopian religious community which emerged in response to the charismatic ministry and apocalyptic preaching of the Moldovan monk Inochentie Levizor (1875–1917), born in the shifting borderlands of nineteenth-century Bessarabia, today's Moldova, Transnistria and Ukraine. He traces how an initial movement of mass pilgrimage in the years immediately prior to the 1917 Revolution came to be branded by Orthodox hierarchs as a heretical sect for the belief that Inochentie was an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Inochentie's followers developed into a self-sufficient agricultural commune characterised by ascetic practices, ecstatic prophesying, exorcisms, celibacy and innovative women's roles, eventually becoming an underground, repressed network in interwar Romania and the USSR of the 1950s–60s. Hagiographical narratives, visionary texts, vernacular iconography and photographs from within the community are persuasively woven together with historical accounts, official missionary and press reports vilifying the movement from the outside. Drawing extensively on archival security police reports of the Communist period, as well as ethnographic interviews among contemporary Inochentists, Kapalo has produced a compellingly argued narrative which presents Inochentist identity as a liminal phenomenon not only suspended on the geographical periphery, but also on the borderlands between heresy and institutional Orthodoxy. While highlighting the commonalities with previous dissenting communities within the Russian Empire such as Old Believers and Khlysty, Kapalo's obvious sympathy with the movement means he staunchly defends Inochentist practices and belief as an authentic and unique religious worldview.

This sympathy, however, leads him to draw too stark a distinction between Inochentism and mainstream Orthodoxy, which is portrayed as too homogenously bureaucratic, overcentralising and restrictive of popular piety. The book itself belies this portrayal as it underlines the similarities between Inochentism and the spiritual movement surrounding the charismatic yet establishment figure of Fr John of Kronstadt (1829–1909) in St Petersburg. There is also no discussion of the potential influence of the monastic hesychast revival under Paisii Velichkovsky (1722–94) in precisely the same Moldavian/Ukrainian borderlands. It seems inappropriate that Inochentism is presented as a new religious movement when this hesychast revival led to a widespread reemergence throughout the Russian Church of spiritual eldership (starchestvo) and lay ascetic practices, frequently at the margins of institutional Orthodoxy similarly to the Inochentists. Despite fascinating analysis of popular apocryphal texts, the possibility that canonical Orthodox liturgical and biblical texts may have inspired Inochentist practices and beliefs, especially in a context where Slavonic texts were used by Moldovan speakers, is left unexplored. While Kapalo describes the role of printed texts in the spread of the movement and its prayer life, there is little discussion of the significance of popular education, literacy and the interaction of oral and literary cultures in the growth of the movement. Nevertheless, the book makes a weighty contribution to scholarship on vernacular religious practice and belief on the Russian imperial, Romanian and Soviet peripheries, on spiritual eldership and dissenting movements within Orthodoxy, and will have wider interest for scholars of charismatic, monastic and apocalyptic movements.