The book followed a tradition of studying the repressive systems organized by the State and the Church in Russia against religious nonconformity and freethinking; such tradition was laid by A.S. Prugavin the early twentieth century (Prugavin А.S. In the Casemates. Essays and Materials on the History of Russian Jails. St. Petersburg, 1909).
In his book, G. argued that the beginning of inquisition in the Oriental Church had been shaped as early as in Byzantium, and later inquisition functioned in the medieval Rus’, and later in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He took for inquisition those forms of persecution and punishment people, who had manifested the ideas of religious freethinking, anticlericalism, and enlightenment, by Orthodox Church.
The author described the apparatus of inquisition of Orthodox Church, reprisal with participants of people anti-feudal movements, which took the form of heresies, the struggle of the Church against the people’s education, and against the development of materialistic science. He put special attention to the history of trials against witches, inquisitional methods of fight against Old Believers, and to the history of prisons in monasteries, and their usage as a tool against anti-clerical and revolutionary movements.
The author evaluated excommunication, and anathematization as forms of inquisitional practice. Some chapters of the book were centred at the role of the Church in provoking national and religious intolerance, and to persecution of enlightenment and science by the Church supported with the State.