The author conceived her monograph "Believing in Russia – Religious Policy after Communism" (Routledge, 2013) as a comprehensive navigational aid to the ambiguities and uncertainties surrounding post-Soviet religious policy, particularly its
nexus with notions of Russian national identity. Its research is grounded in her years based in Moscow as a journalist specializing in religious issues (1999-2011), encompassing hundreds of interviews with local representatives of religious organizations, government officials, and religious-affairs scholars. Many of these were conducted during extended field trips to more than 30 regional units of the Russian Federation.

The author’s findings dispute an array of assumptions and approaches formed in the salient scholarly field prior to her monograph’s publication. Four are most prominent: i) allocation of exclusive importance to the Kremlin’s relations with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC); ii) myopic attention to analysis of formal legal text and public pronouncements by seniormost state and/or religious personnel; iii) credence of the mutual sincerity of relations between state policymakers and the ROC, as well as the self-identification of a majority of the populace with Orthodox Christianity; and iv) acceptance that the key policy term “traditional religions” represents a government-led and law-based restoration of authentic pre-Soviet precedent. In response, the author contests that these misconceptions combine to generate simplified and skewed perceptions of the role of religion which obscure Russia’s true nature as a multifaith polity with a correspondingly multidirectional religious policy. This in turn results in a failure to recognize the potential viability as a policy model of a persistent yet understudied historical tradition characteristic of indigenous Russian religious dissent: the pursuit of an egalitarian religious policy paradigm in place of ROC hegemony.

In seeking to demonstrate her scholarship’s impact upon its field as requested by Prifysgol Bangor University, the author has additionally examined more than 100 extant post-publication citations of "Believing in Russia" in Google Scholar, as well as eight reviews of the monograph in academic journals. Her assessment of these texts identifies multiple shifts in scholarly appreciation of the four principal problematic areas listed above which track the innovative arguments advanced by her monograph. The author further establishes her work as a valuable contribution to the salient scholarly field by illustrating the prescience of its arguments in the light of the qualitative shift in Russian religious policy that occurred following completion of "Believing in Russia".