Deprived by Soviet censorship of any publishing outlet for over seventy years from 1917, Russian theology lost three generations of writers and missed the twentieth century's immense strides in scholarship. Even the two journals permitted after the Second World War (one Orthodox, one Baptist) were censored and virtually unobtainable by the general reader. Mikhail Gorbachev's lifting of censorship in the late 1980s saw no theologians (apart from the redoubtable Orthodox writer, Fr Alexander Men’) competent to take up the challenge and subsequent studies have been slow to materialise.Therefore Andrey P. Puzynin's study of Russian Gospel Christians is notable. A word of warning is necessary, however. The reader needs a keen interest in the theological differences between ‘Gospel [more commonly in English: Evangelical] Christian’ and Baptist theology. Stalin's policy forced the two into a single union in 1944, to be joined by Pentecostals a year later. Puzynin concentrates on the Gospel Christians and, after an extended introduction, begins with the ministry of Lord Radstock, a British evangelist, in St Petersburg in 1873. This is a fascinating and under-researched subject, but this study, throughout, is disappointing. It concentrates exclusively on the theology to the exclusion of context, rendering the text arid and over-specialised. What motivated Radstock? How did he live? Where did he live? What was his circle of contacts like? How did he cope with preaching without any knowledge (as we are told) of Russian? On p. 8 there is a delightful page of simple prose, such a contrast to Puzynin's often convoluted style. However, it was written not by him, but was retrieved from an unpublished archive and written by Radstock's daughter, Daisy Bevan. There are studies of the later great names in this tradition, Vasilii Pashkov, Ivan Prokhanov and Ivan Kargel, but there is very little biographical or historical context. The reader looks in vain in this volume for an account of how, after a decade of relative favour, Stalin's henchmen set out to destroy the Protestant Church in 1927–8. What were the circumstances of Alexander Karev's imprisonment in the 1930s and his subsequent compromise with the Soviet authorities? This is important for an understanding of the Moscow leadership of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists even today. Surprisingly for such an academic book, there is no index, yet there are twenty-five pages of bibliography, listing many works which do not appear to have been utilised in the text itself. There is too great a readiness to quote authors without explaining why they are important, for example on p. 248 Murphy, Warfield and Hodge allegedly rely on ‘the Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and the inductive method of Francis Bacon, further developed by John Stuart Mill’. That is a little too much philosophy for one sentence. Andrey Puzynin's work originated, encouragingly, as a PhD dissertation for the University of Wales, Lampeter, but persecution devastated theology in the Soviet Union and catching up will take decades yet.