His aim is to unravel why, in the 1960s, as the Soviet Union seemed about to beat the Americans to the Moon, its social indicators suddenly started to behave as if the country was succumbing to disease. Male life expectancy began to fall. The birth rate collapsed. Binge drinking skyrocketed, alcohol consumption climbed eightfold between 1940 and 1980. Bullough claims alcohol sales were so enormous that government revenues from them surpassed the Soviet defence budget in the early 1970s. 

As if covering up an epidemic, the authorities stopped publishing life expectancy figures in 1972. A few years later infant mortality dropped off the data too. The USSR was becoming violent. The crime rate soared, hitting eight times the Western European average — and these are only the official statistics. As the number of abortions, murders and alcohol-disfigured births (affecting as many as one eighth of the total in certain regions) increased, Brezhnev's authorities took refuge in denial, secrecy and shame. 

But on the drab edge of Moscow, a strange and charismatic Orthodox priest was slowly gathering ever more people into his semi-underground church. Railing against the wave of alcoholism, abortions and murders — which he blamed on "atheism" and the extinguishing of trust among normal Russians by the Gulag and the KGB — was Father Dmitry Dudko. As this multifaceted social plague, which Sovietologists later dubbed the "demographic crisis", was breaking out, Dudko was the only man in Russia denouncing it. 

Bullough travelled across Russia, seeking out the story of Father Dudko from his rotting native village to the slave camps he toiled in during the Gulag, creating a vivid travelogue out of Soviet sociological decay — something previously only explored in statistics or graph-heavy academic books.

It is a triumph of storytelling. The priest becomes a metaphor for a broken Russia, from his childhood during Stalin's terror famines practising the faith at night in the wheatfields to the moment he is hauled in by the political police for his sermons. The authorities could not tolerate his railing against vodka or his cultish flock. These were the years when the KGB chief Yuri Andropov — whom Vladimir Putin cites as an inspiration — was torturing dissidents by sending them to mental asylums, where they were injected with fevers and deliriums worse than anything out of 1984. The whole underground lived in fear of this treatment.