For decades Lucy Ash has produced intrepid, pioneering radio broadcasts and essays. She has spent half her life in dangerous places, in particular Russia’s power centres and its most remote regions. Until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made it impossible for foreign journalists to work in Russia, she was interviewing beggars, questioning oligarchs and challenging priests and demagogues. Her extensive reading, linguistic gifts and objectivity make this an important book. The first half is a survey of Orthodoxy in Russia from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The second is a forensic examination of how the Orthodox Church was retrieved from the ruins by Stalin in 1942 in order to rally the nation and then given power and wealth when the USSR fell in 1991, becoming part of a corrupt autocracy run by secret policemen and mafiosi.

This is a history less of Russian Orthodoxy as a religion than of its close involvement in maintaining autocracy. True, most conversions of a pagan head of state or political elite to Christianity were, like Emperor Constantine’s, inspired by pragmatism rather than by faith in Christian salvation. In the tenth century, a Kievan Rus prince called Vladimir the Great became the first Russian ruler to embrace Christianity. Advancing on Byzantium, he stopped at Chersonesus in Crimea, where he agreed to convert to Christianity in exchange for a promise of free trade with the Byzantine Empire and marriage to the emperor’s sister. (Vladimir sealed the deal by slaughtering Chersonesus’s civilians and looting its treasures to furnish Kiev’s first cathedral.)

In the fiefdoms into which Kievan Russia splintered, the Orthodox Church became prosperous, if not politically dominant. With each transfer of power, it acquired enormous tracts of land and thousands of serfs. During the period of Mongol rule, from the 13th to 15th centuries, the Church exploited Mongol religious tolerance,