Confession in the Russian Orthodox Church was an arduous business, as Nadieszda Kizenko documents in her magisterial new book. A gruelling three days of fasting, attendance of the liturgy, followed by confession to a priest and finally communion was required of all the faithful at least once a year, preferably during Lent. The whole process was known in Russian as govienie, which has no exact equivalent in English, but embodies the notion of cleansing or purification. Despite its physical and spiritual rigour, Kizenko argues that confession in the Orthodox Church was neither timeless nor sui generis. It was recognisably part of the wider Christian tradition of confession and, indeed, was frequently influenced by developments in both the Catholic and Protestant worlds. The book follows a chronological pattern, beginning in the seventeenth century in the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and ending with the revolution of 1917. It is based on an impressive array of archival sources belonging to both the Church and the State, supplemented by diaries, letters and memoirs. The author situates the book firmly within modern scholarship on confession in the wider Christian world, enabling the reader to see both the commonalities of confession in the Russian Orthodox Church and its differences from the other Christian traditions.

There is a tendency to view the Orthodox Church as exotic and fundamentally different from Western Christianity. The Russian Orthodox Church's unstinting support for the present war in Ukraine will only exacerbate that tendency. However, one of the many strengths of Kizenko's work is exposition of the level of interaction between the Western Churches and the Russian Orthodox Church, mediated through Kyiv. Influences from the Counter-Reformation penetrated Russian Orthodoxy at all levels, including the rite of confession. This was particularly true after the annexation of Kyiv in the seventeenth century. Orthodox theologians, heavily influenced by Jesuit teachings of the Counter-Reformation, brought these ideas to Moscow. Later, especially during the reign of Peter the Great, Protestant understandings likewise influenced the practice of the Russian Orthodox Church, being particularly congenial to both the Church and the State, which shared a desire to discipline their flocks spiritually and politically.

Fundamental to this new drive to discipline the faithful was the rite of confession. Discipline by both Church and State of its flock was the key element in changes wrought in confessional practice. Kizenko argues this was in line with similar desires in the West and was indeed influenced by them. Among the innovations was the demand for at least annual confession. More a pious hope at the time of its introduction in the seventeenth century, it became a reality by the nineteenth when Church and State together were able to track attendance at annual confession by the faithful and make life uncomfortable for those who missed their obligations: a formidable achievement for a country with such a rudimentary bureaucracy

To outsiders much of the Russian Orthodox tradition of confession is shrouded in myth and misunderstanding. Nowhere is this more true than in the notorious injunction on priests to break the seal of confession if the penitent revealed treasonous activities. The penalties for failing to do this were severe. Established by Peter the Great's Spiritual Regulation 1722, this instruction has shrouded confession in the Russian Orthodox Church in a sinister light. Kizenko makes clear that the reality was more complicated than this. Firstly, she argues that in the Western tradition the seal was not as absolute as is often maintained (although no evidence is provided for this) and, secondly, priests did not routinely break the seal of confession and indeed faced stiff penalties if the church authorities felt that they had unjustifiably broken it. Not surprisingly priests themselves were often unsure where to draw the line. In the early days, state officials and priests erred on the side of caution, the former seeking information on all sorts of matters (including insurance fraud) and the priests volunteering information that patently did not threaten the security of the state. Later, however, the situation stabilised and, as Kizenko shows, priests and the church hierarchy took their obligations regarding the seal of confession seriously.

Another of the book's great strengths is that we gain some insight into the minds of the laity, even the lower classes, although the evidence for these is much less than for the elites. By the nineteenth century the upper classes had internalised the practice of govienie and no longer needed compulsion to fulfil their annual confession. Indeed govienie had become a part of a shared identity among the elite, providing a universal bonding experience. This component of the shared identity had extended to the lower classes by the second half of the nineteenth century. We learn of the redoubtable Ekaterina, an urban lower-class woman, from a letter to her father confessor, listing her habitual sins (including plotting to murder her son's fiancée whom she regarded as no more than a hussy) and her repeated desire for repentance. Only with industrialisation and revolution did the Church begin to seriously worry about confession, particularly among the working-class. In this once again, the experience of the Orthodox Church has much in common with the Western Churches.

This book represents a significant advance in our understanding of confession in the Russian Empire. It has no equivalent in either English or Russian and it opens up to the English-speaking world the hidden world of Russian confession, showing its peculiarities and its convergence with Western traditions.