Russia's majority church, the Russian Orthodox, appears to support fully what is being perpetrated by Mr Putin and his associates. Amidst the sound of Russian sabre-rattling and The Leader's threats to restore a long-lost empire, it would be cheering to hear some criticism of government polices issuing from the mouths of Moscow Patriarchate church leaders. But no: all we hear is silence. At the same time the current role of the Russian Orthodox Church within Russian society remains something of a mystery to many in the West with little published material in English on the subject. The publication of Orthodox paradoxes is therefore to be welcomed. This is a collection of papers presented at a conference organised in September 2011 by the Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity in Amsterdam. Many important aspects of Russian Orthodoxy today are explored: theological debates, ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue, the role of the starets or elder, icon painting, the role of women, the controversy over translating sacred texts into Russian, eschatological sects, Church-State relations, the canonisation of twentieth-century martyrs, the significance of pilgrimages. Each essay is accompanied by an excellent bibliography.

Is the Russian Orthodox Church centrally controlled, is it the handmaid of the state, or, because of the ‘unclear lines of religious authority in Orthodoxy’ (p. 262), is it an institution which is free and flexible with room for debate? Per-Arne Bodin in his essay ‘The enthronement of Patriarch Kirill’, using such mysterious tools as ‘ritual studies’ and ‘event studies’, argues unconvincingly that the Church is independent, not subservient to власть (vlast’), the powers that be: ‘Medvedev and Putin in dark suits in this context could only symbolise impotence … Semiotically the Church's victory over the secular power was manifested’ (p. 69). Scott Kenworthy, in contrast, argues convincingly that the Russian Orthodox Church is not monolithic. He demonstrates in his essay ‘Debating the theology of the name in post-Soviet Russia’ how it is possible within this Church to disagree, in this case over the acceptance or rejection of the theology of a group of Orthodox believers called имяславцы (imyaslavtsy) – glorifiers of the Name. Be that as it may, the Russian Orthodox Church's rigidity and indeed conservatism is made clear in Wil van den Bercken's excellent essay ‘The polemic concerning Church Slavonic’ in which he examines the history of translating sacred texts into Russian from Church Slavonic, both before the Revolution and after. It is interesting to note the contortions of conservatives who attacked the translation work of Fr Georgi Kochetkov in the 1990s and had to justify their position in the light of the support given by Bishop Sergi (Stragorodsky), later Patriarch, to translating texts into Russian in the 1930s.

That Russia is fertile soil for sectarianism is amply illustrated by Aleksei Beglov's fascinating essay ‘Eschatological expectations in post-Soviet Russia’. We are treated to a wonderful array of examples from the early Soviet period, including the Fyodorovtsy who deified their leader Fyodor Rybalkin, the Nikolaevtsy who believed that the last tsar had embodied the Second Coming of Christ, and the Molchal'niki (the Silent) who in the 1950s locked themselves up in their homes, blocking the windows and cutting off all electricity. During the 1990s members of the White Brotherhood and the followers of the deified Sergei Vissarion who set up self-sufficient villages in Siberia awaited the end of the world believing that only those who were united round their leader would be saved. As late as 2007–8, a group of radical Orthodox believers in the Penza region burrowed underground and lived with their children in a dug-out. They too believed that the end of the world was at hand; they destroyed their passports and all official documents, rejected food with a bar code on the packaging, refused to read newspapers or to use electricity.

A significant gap in this collection is the absence of any material on the social work which is being organised by the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church (although the social work of the Romanian Orthodox Church is discussed) and the paucity of material on its youth work. Both these areas of activity are enabling the Church to integrate with Russian society, and therefore are subjects worthy of study. Ekaterina Khodzhaeva takes one example of youth work in her essay ‘Participating in the global community: the ‘Syndesmos’ experience of the Kazan Orthodox youth’ describing a parish which ran summer camps, a film club, catechism courses and encouraged its youth group to link up with the international youth fellowship, Syndesmos. This is far too narrow an approach when there is interesting youth work to be examined in a large number of Russian cities, in Volgograd, Krasnoyarsk, Kostroma, Vyatka, Kaliningrad, Astrakhan, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Volgorechensk to mention but a few. A comparative study of these varied examples of youth work would have given a more accurate picture of parochial life in Russia today. The same variety can be found in the many examples of social work being carried out by Orthodox parishes as they try to meet the needs of the world around them. Visit Kemerovo or Novokuznetsk in Russia's Kuzbass, or travel hundreds of miles north-east of Moscow to a small town called Sharya and you will see parishes where local clergy are transforming the lives of the house-bound and disadvantaged children.

Orthodox paradoxes is a mixed bag. In many cases the essays have been badly translated – unacceptably so for an academic publication – and would have benefited from some strenuous editing by someone whose mother tongue was English. For example ‘Trident Council’ (p. 330) should read ‘Council of Trent’; ‘Feofan the Recluser’ (p. 354) should read ‘Theofan the Recluse’; ‘their recluse lasted for about a year’ (p. 118) might make better sense with the word ‘seclusion’; землянка (zemlyanka) – a dug-out – has been translated as ‘a cave which they had dug out themselves’ (p. 107); and any competent editor of Russian publications in this specialist field should know that the correct English spelling for the transliterated surname ‘Бурдо’ is ‘Bourdeaux’ not ‘Burdo’ (p.72 n. 3).