Helene Iswolsky was concerned about the survival of the Russian church in Stalinist Russia. After decades of religious persecution, she reports, "the walls of the Russian church have not crumbled." When in 1937 Stalinists admitted the failure of their brutal tactics and resorted instead to "godless propaganda," the Russian church was still very much alive. She discusses the history of the church and its central role in the lives and traditions of the Russian people. She became a personal friend of Alexander Kerensky, whose democratic provisional government in 1917 guaranteed full religious freedom for all faiths, until it was overthrown by Lenin's Bolsheviks.

After her conversion to Roman Catholicism, the author became especially concerned about Christian disunity, "the great quarrel between East and West." A follower of ecumenist Vladimir Solovyev, she worked for many years to heal the rift in favor of universal "oneness in Christ." ( )