In this groundbreaking historical ethnography of ethics among Russian Old Believers, Doug Rogers traces how the townspeople of Sepych have striven to lead lives that are “good, proper and virtuous” as they have encountered emancipation, socialism, and the risks of global capitalism. Rogers tracks what he calls the “ethical repertoire” of Sepych residents. He coins this concept to avoid the reductionism found in analyses that take “culture” or “tradition” as their object of study in order to pinpoint the “continuities in ethical dilemmas, moral communities, and materials of ethics.” The focus on ethical practice, he suggests, enables him not only to bridge academic literatures that tend to treat “religion” and “rural economy” separately, but also to render more accurately townspeople's own sense of the inextricability of the Old Faith and the cultivation of land.

Part I discusses how an exceptionally ascetic group of priestless Old Believers (dissenters who broke with the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century) elaborated ways to reproduce themselves through the strict separation of laypeople and elders in the context of serfdom and a post-emancipation market economy. Part II examines how Soviet collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, resettlement, and projects to cultivate a New Soviet Man impacted townspeople's ethical repertoires and attempts to maintain moral communities. Although the practice of priestless Old Belief (particularly the importance of old books) made elders vulnerable to persecution during the religious campaigns of the 1930s, its decentralized form, particularly the strong generational split, allowed it to regenerate and persist in the post-World War II and late Soviet periods. Part III analyzes not only how Soviet forms of patronage and mutual aid have persisted and mutated in Russia's new postsocialist capitalist economy, but also how they created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new priestly Old Believer church and community.

Rogers takes a highly innovative approach to combining archival research and ethnographic fieldwork which scholars working in other geographical regions should be certain not to miss. What is particularly interesting is how Rogers draws inspiration from, and shifts between, townspeople's epistemology of history and other more academic, professional ones. The book impresses not only in its effective weaving together of a range of archival and ethnographic materials, but also in how it engages in multiple conversations about history with townspeople, Russian archaeographers, anthropologists, and Russian and Soviet historians. The result is an extraordinarily nuanced historical account that never takes for granted what is old and what is new in townspeople's ethical practice at any given point in time.

This book is also an important intervention in an emerging social science literature on ethics and morality. Rogers conceptualizes ethics as a field of practice, inspired in part by recent work on Aristotle's practical ethics. It is this close attention to practice that enables him to demonstrate with such precision how it is that certain ethical sensibilities and moral communities persist or recede. Using the example of a funeral, he vividly illustrates how, in everyday life, people make decisions about “the good, the proper and the virtuous” that often contradict dominant ethical regimes and new confessional fault-lines of priestly and priestless Old Belief. Further, Rogers' insistence on the relevance of social distinction (age, gender, status) and social relations to ethical practice counterbalances a tendency in some of this literature to focus on discourse, narrative, and the self. Finally, the book's engagement with multiple debates about postsocialism pertaining to life cycle rituals, property, privatization, labor, gender, generation, value-creation, and forms of exchange make it essential reading for scholars of this region.