Sergei I. Zhuk. Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 457. $60.00

Religion and empire have emerged as correctives of twentieth-century historiography of Russia's pre-Bolshevik past since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Sergei I. Zhuk pulls these two strands together to present a vivid study of Protestant sectarianism in the multiethnic regions of southern Russia and Ukraine. He covers the period from the 1780s to 1917, within a broad comparative context from the German Reformation to American evangelical movements. Zhuk argues that “Russian religious dissent … was an integral part of the universal development of the Reformation, which had begun in the sixteenth century in Western Europe and reached the southern provinces of the Russian Empire only in the nineteenth century” (p. 399). He demonstrates that active and conscious faith defined rural communities among German colonists, displaced Russian and Ukrainian former state peasants and serfs, Cossacks, and New...