In January 1905 tsarist troops gunned down a demonstration of unarmed workers led by Father Georgii Gapon. The massacre of workers petitioning Nicholas ii to grant them political freedoms and social reforms – Bloody Sunday – ignited a revolutionary explosion throughout Russia. Opening her monograph with this vignette, Jennifer Hedda examines how the Orthodox Church reconciled traditional practices with modernity by offering a case study of parish life in St Petersburg between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I. Analysing how and why Gapon became involved in the organisation that led St Petersburg's workers, she underscores his beliefs grounded in religion, and offers a prehistory of the local clergy's role in the 1905 Revolution and the impact of that event on efforts to articulate a vision of Christian Socialism. Privileging sources created by the parish clergy themselves (memoirs, sermons, lectures, books, essays) and the records of the organisations they set up, Hedda contributes to a departure in the historiography that treats Orthodoxy as a lived religion that believers changed and adapted to meet their own needs and those of the times. This welcome trend casts the Church as a dynamic, rather than a static, institution. The study comprises nine sharply-focused chapters. In them, the author considers the environment and education of the St Petersburg clergy; how they saw their work in the Church; how they understood the Church's mission and their role in it; how the clergy responded to the challenges of the revolutionary upsurge at century's end (in particular those clergy and groups whose religious beliefs provoked them to question the regime); and the rise of the ‘Renovationists’ in 1905 who voiced a new vision of Christian politics – creating ‘the kingdom of God’ on earth – that differed from that offered by the autocracy and by the secular political parties. Hedda maintains that, in attempting to apply the teachings of the Gospels to solve modern social problems, the St Petersburg clergy had much in common with their counterparts who preached the ‘social gospel’ in the United States and England. However, the development of Christian Socialism in Russia was derailed by the Revolution of 1905, ‘which aggravated divisions in the church and alienated the clergy from many of their former supporters in the laity while also arousing the suspicions of the state against them’ (p. 199). Hedda admirably succeeds in showing how the redefinition of pastoral identity in the second half of the nineteenth century affected aspects of parish religious life, and in tracing the rise of Renovationism. Yet I am less satisfied with her attempt to replace one paradigm (static Church) with another (dynamic Church), for the rich but selective evidence she adduces suggests a complex scenario of negotiation between the two, especially if the situation outside St Petersburg – after all, Russia's most ‘European’ city – is considered.