When the Bolsheviks began the anti-religious campaign to undermine popular Orthodoxy after the Russian Revolution, their first target was the cult of saints' relics. Though much about the campaign was misguided, they were not wrong in connecting popular piety with the cult of saints and their relics, as Robert Greene demonstrates so eloquently in this fascinating monograph. The monograph is divided equally between the cult of relics before the Revolution and the Soviet campaign against them. Greene argues against the stereotype of Russian popular religiosity as “ignorant” and “superstitious,” asserting instead that the faithful maintained their devotion to saints' relics because they believed that relics had demonstrated their usefulness through miracles. Further, he argues that the Soviet campaign against the relics ultimately failed to achieve its aim because anti-religious activists mistakenly believed that relics must be “incorrupt” and that, by exposing them to be (in many cases) mere bones, people would automatically lose their faith. They were proven quite wrong, however, for many Orthodox believers continued to venerate the relics of the very saints who had thus been “exposed.”

Greene's monograph is particularly refreshing because of his sympathetic reading of a practice that has become quite alien to most modern Western Christian traditions, and does an excellent job in showing what those religious practices meant to believers engaged in them. He explores how Russian Orthodoxy's ritualism and the physicality of its devotional practices are not a signs of “superstition,” but part of a larger belief system that “worked.” Russian believers regarded saints as those who were in the presence of God but who maintained a connection with the earthly communities of which they were a part and for whom that they served as heavenly protectors and helpers. Moreover, the saints' relics represented a particular point of contact with the saint, a kind of meeting point of heaven and earth, and therefore prayer in the presence of the relics, combined with physical contact, was the most efficacious way to have one's prayers answered. Greene argues that Russian faithful turned to saints with a proven “record” of working miracles and developed relationships particularly with local saints. Moreover, the cult of saints proved eminently adaptable to modernity as the faithful brought their “modern” problems. The relationship was a reciprocal one, and believers felt obliged to demonstrate their gratitude. The massive upsurge of pilgrimages in late nineteenth century Russia indicates that the cult of saints remained relevant to ordinary believers of all backgrounds—men and women, old and young, clerical and lay, upper and lower class.

Greene maintains that the clergy tried to shape popular devotion by encouraging believers to view saints as examples to be emulated and telling miracle stories that had a moral or didactic purpose. By contrast he asserts that “evidence from pilgrim narratives and miracle stories strongly suggests that most lay believers were more interested in the material benefits” and this-worldly concerns rather than spiritual ones (41). Although it is important that believers turned to saints with pragmatic concerns and were satisfied with the results, the argument also risks reinforcing the very stereotype of the “un-spiritual” Russian peasant that Greene is trying to challenge. It is a question of genre: naturally miracle stories are going to focus on “pragmatic” issues such as physical illness and ailments. Other types of sources, such as letters to confessors or spiritual elders, can yield a more holistic picture of peoples' concerns that included both the spiritual and the mundane.

There was a particular focus on “incorrupt” relics at the end of the nineteenth century, though it is not clear whether this devotion was something fostered by the clergy (as the first chapter seems to suggest) or something that welled up from below and to which the clergy were only responding—especially as many clergy, according to Greene, asserted that relics need not be incorrupt. There was also a spate of canonizations of new saints, and Greene persuasively counters the tendency to focus on the political aspects of these canonizations by demonstrating how the official canonizations were ultimately responses to persistent pressure from below by local communities.

Greene argues that the Soviet assault on relics was not just a sideline to the anti-religious campaign but was championed by leading Bolsheviks (including Lenin). Their basic argument was that relics—which they presupposed by definition to be incorrupt—were frauds perpetrated by the clergy to extort believers, and that if the regime could demonstrate that the relics were only “rotted corpses,” this would be the best means of driving a rift between clergy and believers. Greene shows how groups of believers resisted through a variety of means ranging from petitions to defending their churches. Moreover, though they were offended by such desecrations, believers were even more vehement in their protests against removing the relics from the churches—confirming Greene's overall argument that it was not the condition of the relics that mattered to believers so much as the miracles they produced, which presupposed their physical presence in the community.

Unfortunately Greene does not mention the very interesting process by which the Church regained the relics of its saints, and the subsequent revival of their cult, in post-Soviet Russia. The most interesting case here is that of St. Aleksandr Svirskii, whose relics were part of the “accidental” exhumation in October 1918 conducted by drunken soldiers who inspired the entire campaign after the Soviets claimed they found a wax dummy instead of a body, which Greene recounts without questioning (125). Yet a Soviet investigation shortly after the events (led by G. E. Zinoviev) and the Russian Orthodox Church's claims to have recovered the relics in 1998 contradict the “wax dummy” version of events, suggesting that it was the anti-religious activists who perpetrated deception (see Steve Smith, “Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Struggle Against Relics, 1918–1930,” Past and Present no. 204 (2009): 155–94).

This is an important book that will be of interest to anyone working on Orthodoxy, on religion and modernity, or on religion and revolutionary states.