Paul Froese explains that his book supplies no new information about the ‘Soviet secularisation experiment’, but aims to see how what is already known sheds light on current theoretical debates in the social scientific study of religion, in the context of classical and revised theories of ‘secularisation’. This is obviously a useful task and one which has not yet been tackled enough. Froese looks at six basic sociological assertions about the rise or decline of religion that he argues were tested by the Soviet experiment. One central question is whether you can best extinguish religion by cutting off supply or by reducing demand: the Soviet Union tried both at different times. He also assesses the post-communist period in the light of Soviet policies and argues that the latter, ironically, produced conditions both for religious revival and for the fact that revival has seen the return to centre stage of pre-communist traditional faiths rather than a plurality of new religions. Froese's sources are mainly English-language ones. His generalisations are mainly accurate but one has the feeling that there is too much material that he could potentially marshal, and the writing sometimes meanders. There are some inaccuracies, such as his statement that Patriarch Tikhon was executed, and omissions, such as any consideration of the Renovationist movement in the Russian Orthodox Church and its significance in Soviet religious policy. At the same time, his broad perspective leads him to some novel and interesting insights in the context of the overall purpose of the book. And perhaps inevitably he raises as many questions as he answers. He does not, for example, go into the implications of the fact that in the Soviet Union secularisation was forced, whereas classical secularisation theories assume that the process is natural and inevitable. And this leads him to the somewhat paradoxical speculation, which seems to question his own scepticism about secularisation as a process, that a better Soviet policy than persecuting religion would have been to support one state-sponsored religion; people would then have stayed away from it as the state Church, and religion would have withered as the Soviet authorities wished it to do. In his last chapter he looks at China, where he finds that current religious policies ‘most closely resemble those of the Soviet glasnost period’; he expects ‘that if the Chinese government can allow and support certain expressions of spirituality, it may succeed where the Soviet Union failed. The result may be a weak religious economy similar to that of Western Europe – where individuals are spiritually content yet religiously apathetic’. Froese's overall conclusion is that human beings have a natural instinct for faith in a transcendent God, and as well as ascribing the ultimate Soviet failure to eradicate religion to a failure to understand this fact, he also seems to be criticising standard theories of secularisation for the same failure. All in all, this book is a stimulating and much-needed opening-up of what will surely be a productive area for more future scholarship.