For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills – from the Mongol yoke, to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, Soviet atheism, the chaotic 1990s and now two decades of Vladimir Putin.

In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population in a way never seen before. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes are trying to drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.