A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy

Nathaniel Davis's A Long Walk to Church, A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy was first published by Westview Press in 1995, reviewed in the American Historical Review, and reprinted with a further edition in 2008 that extended the account past the Soviet collapse; the source record's 2003 date reflects one of the book's later printings rather than a separate work. Davis, a former US ambassador and historian, drew on formerly secret Soviet government archives to trace the Russian Orthodox Church from near institutional extinction in the 1930s through its wartime revival and into the post Soviet period. Its strength is that archival access and the book's standing as one of the first Western histories to use it. Its limit is that it is a single scholar's synthesis of a still contested period, and Davis writes as a historian rather than as an Orthodox insider, so claims about internal church doctrine or liturgy are better checked against a source written from within the tradition.