Some factions in Russian Orthodoxy not only view Orthodoxy as the true Church, but its Russian expression as the only uncorrupted tradition. Such views are given an apocalyptic expression, ascribing to Russia a messianic role. The idea that sixteenth-century Muscovy was the only true Orthodox kingdom found articulation in the idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’. This complex of ideas is one of the key threads in Petrenko's monograph, although under the ill-defined umbrella of ‘authority’ he also includes the struggle between collective and autocratic church governance, the authority of tradition, and even that of the charismatic spiritual elder. He seeks to trace the development of these various notions of authority from the origins of Christianity throughout Russian history up to the contemporary period. The ambitious result is sometimes provocative and insightful, but frequently unconvincing.

More than one-third of the book is spent on early Christian and Byzantine views of Church, State and Empire. Petrenko argues that Eusebius of Caesarea developed a Christian imperial ideology that inherited the belief in Rome's universality and eternality that, after Constantine, would play a providential role in Christianising the world. Petrenko argues that, for Eusebius and his Byzantine successors, the empire was regarded as the Messianic Kingdom; because Church and the State were coterminous, the distinction between the two was lost. Petrenko gives a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the Byzantine concept of the symphonia of Church and State as implying this confusion of identity and the domination of the former by the latter. On this basis he later asserts that Soviet control over the Church was also ‘symphony’ in continuity with the entirety of Russian history (pp. 199–200). In fact the Soviet period was the exact opposite of symphony; not only does the concept imply the distinction and equality of Church and State, it also presupposed a harmony of interests and aims between the two. Such was hardly the case in the Soviet Union.

In the pre-Nicene period the apocalyptic strain of Christianity was typically hostile to the Roman Empire; Petrenko argues that Byzantine apocalypticism accepted the basic tenets of the Christian imperial ideology. Particularly important here is the notion of the translatio imperii, the apocalyptic reading of the succession of empires drawing particularly from Daniel. Petrenko argues that Byzantine apocalyptic writers came to identify the Empire with Daniel's ‘fourth kingdom’, as ‘God-protected’ and the force which restrains the coming of the AntiChrist. In the aftermath of the union of the Council of Florence and the fall of Constantinople, and the simultaneous independence of the Muscovites from Mongol rule and the Russian Church from the Greek, Russian authors transferred these ideas to Muscovy. This, according to Petrenko, is the genealogy of the idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, which holds that Muscovy itself assumed universal significance as the only ‘true’ Christian kingdom on earth. In the monk Filofei's infamous letter of the early sixteenth century, an apocalyptic element is added: a ‘fourth’ Rome ‘there will not be’.

Following the genealogy and history of the ‘Third Rome’ idea is the most interesting part of the book, which might have been more successful had it focused only on that issue. Even here, however, there are problems. For one, Petrenko fails to discuss key elements of that genealogy such as the ‘Tale of the white cowl’. Moreover, he claims that the ‘Third Rome’ idea became part of ‘state ideology’ (p. 141) and ‘became characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy for centuries to come’ (p. 264), neither of which is accurate. As Marshall Poe and others have pointed out, the idea rarely found expression in official state documents; indeed it was important primarily to churchmen (alongside other equally important ideas such as envisioning Moscow as the ‘New Jerusalem’). It became ‘official’ at the time of the establishment of the Russian patriarchate in 1589, but was formally repudiated less than a century later and would practically disappear from Russian consciousness until the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Poe suggests that the idea was much more important in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than it ever was in medieval Muscovy.

One of the central arguments of the book is that Russia has always been antisemitic and anti-Western, that antisemitism ostensibly derives from Russia's belief in itself as a chosen nation and people. In fact pre-modern Western Christianity had far more expressions of ‘anti-Jewish sentiment’ and actions than Russia (before the partitions of Poland brought Jews into the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century). Antisemitism only becomes significant in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy, although it has enjoyed some revival in the post-Soviet period. Similarly, Russian Orthodoxy has not always been anti-Western, for Kievan Rus interacted in many positive ways with the West.

Petrenko frequently challenges accepted ideas about the nature of religious authority and its relationship to the state, for example in his interpretation of Patriarch Nikon or Peter the Great's church reforms. Although tantalising, he does not support his arguments with a convincing use of the evidence. The charismatic authority of spiritual elders is a rich and complex topic, as recently demonstrated by Irina Paert, but Petrenko's brief treatment of the topic with a focus on the aberrant case of Rasputin is less than helpful.

In all, though Petrenko makes some intriguing and provocative arguments, the book covers far too many topics and too great a historical expanse to be convincing in any. In many ways this book reads as though the author were trying to argue that contemporary Russian Orthodoxy's authoritarian structure, messianic nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Westernism and close collaboration with the state, are all ‘characteristic’ features throughout its history (and indeed inherited from Byzantium), but in doing so he seems to share the same presuppositions of Russian Orthodoxy's ‘essential characteristics’ as messianic nationalists who oversimplify most historical developments.