The authors of Russian Orthodoxy resurgent describe what they consider to be the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church during the period 1991 – starting with the attempted putsch against Gorbachev in August which led later that year to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the Communist party – through to 2007. Unfortunately the authors treat the reader to a great deal of starry-eyed tosh: the late Patriarch Alexi ii (who died on 5 December 2008 after this book was written) is described as a chudotvorets (wonder-worker) who may even soon be canonised. According to the Garrards's interpretation, Alexi helped decisively in the defeat of the 1991 putsch, although a reliable scholar on the subject, Jane Ellis, argues (see The Russian Orthodox Church: triumphalism and defensiveness) that he took a cautious stance, only acting once he saw which way the wind was blowing and initially making a statement which was not as forceful as it could have been. The separation of Church and State in the Russian constitution is presented as fact, although the position of the Russian Orthodox Church today is de facto that of an established Church with many advantages over all other Christian denominations. The Garrards's text is overloaded with a host of historical digressions, which are often fascinating and reveal the authors' scholarship. Nevertheless, their scholarly solidity is dented when we are told that, for example, Lenin's famous letter of 19 March 1922, written during the Bolshevik campaign to confiscate church valuables, and for long kept secret, ‘is known only through samizdat’ (p. 191 n. 14). In fact Lenin's letter was published in two Russian émigré publications in 1970 and 1971 and then in English in the Keston Institute's journal, Religion in Communist Lands, in 1979. It is also surprising that the authors, whose translations of Patriarch Alexi's addresses in 1991 are included as an appendix, give the wrong Russian term for a local council, an example of which was summoned in January 2009 to elect a new patriarch. The Garrards translate this as ‘Mestny Soviet’ (p. 184), making it sound like part of the structure of the Communist party, when any specialist on Russian church affairs would know that it is a ‘Pomestny Sobor’.