Многолетняя изоляция Церкви разрешилась в 90-е годы всплеском активности униженных и оскорблённых, ощутивших запах свободы. Церковный народ занялся конкретными проектами: создавали церковные школы, сиротские приюты и материальную базу для этих проектов.Многолетняя изоляция Церкви разрешилась в 90-е годы всплеском активности униженных и оскорблённых, ощутивших запах свободы. Церковный народ занялся конкретными проектами: создавали церковные школы, сиротские приюты и материальную базу для этих проектов.

In the mid -1970s when this book was written it was intended primarily for the Russian Orthodox emigration and also for the relatively small number of church people in Russia who had access to illegal literature. The actual circle of readers turned out to be considerably wider, extending far beyond the bounds of the Church as such. Moreover it was not only the relations of the Russian Orthodox Church and the state or the moral assessment of the revolution which attracted attention, but also purely internal church problems, which the book discusses in detail. This fact may be seen as evidence of the strong public interest in the Orthodox Church itself, its structure, self-consciousness and ways of dealing with internal conflicts. It has been demonstrated yet again that the illusion of an ideological and disciplinary monolith does not arouse sympathy, but rather repulsion in the man of today who is accustomed to see coercion and insincerity behind any monolith.

20 years have passed since the terrible murder of the priest Alexander Men, a gifted preacher and missionary, who called people to a spiritual quest and spiritual transformation, and called the church to cleanse itself of the many remnants of paganism, superstition and prejudice. Just two months before the murder of Father Alexander,  to the Saint Petersburg cathedra Metropolitan Ioann (Snychov) was appointed, the holder of great-power, nationalist, anti-semitic convictions, an ideologue of a kind of “Orthodox Taliban”. They are full spiritual antipodes!