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Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. By John Anderson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xi, 236 pp. Index. Tables. $54.95, hard bound; $18.95, paper.

As a noted British scholar long affiliated with Keston College, the sole English-based research institute on religion and communism, John Anderson is well positioned to write this book. In his goal to provide a "more systemic account of policy" in the postStalin era, he succeeds grandly. This study represents a major contribution to our understanding of the Soviet policy-making process in general and of religious policy in particular. The insights offered stem both from the author's source base and theoretical focus. He extensively employs published sources—including the most recent Russian scholarship on the topic—and considerable newly released documentation from party and state archives in Russia. The study not only gives an accurate overview of policy during the periods of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, but evaluates the development and success of state policy. Church responses to this policy are of decidedly secondary interest to the author, seen as primarily informing regime choice. The sweep of the task at hand produces unavoidable asymmetries. When analyzing the pre-Gorbachev era, Anderson is primarily interested in testing the inherited wisdom and shedding light on the "black box" of policy, particularly during the Khrushchev era. The focus shifts during the post-1985 period to the impact of political change on the churches and their role in this process. The source base reinforces this asymmetry: archival material from the pre-1960 period is more accessible to scholars in Moscow than that from more recent periods. In theoretical terms, Anderson focuses on applying the model of bureaucratic politics to the formulation of religious policy, testing the accepted wisdom of Soviet religious policy as informed by an atheistic ideology and implemented uniformly along lines of democratic centralism. Some of his findings serve to reinforce those of previous scholarship. For example, he demonstrates the counterproductive effect of the Khrushchev repression in causing a rise of religious dissent under Brezhnev. In examining the primacy of ideology in policy, he mines the public and archival record for evidence of bureaucratic differences, confirming with rich documentation that "nuances" did indeed exist, in particular between the CPSU Central Committee and the council on religious affairs (and its predecessors). These differences in policy formulation were quite limited prior to the advent of Gorbachev. He concludes cautiously that, although "limited and licensed debate" was permitted on this issue, the crucial preconditions for bureaucratic politics—expert opinion, organizational stakes, institutional representation—were absent.