An important and little known period in Western intellectual history is explored in this study of the Russian émigré journal, The Way, which was published in Paris during the years 1925–40 and edited by Nikolai Berdyaev. Antoine Arjakovsky's scholarly history, translated from Russian, demonstrates convincingly that The Way was one of the most brilliant journals ever produced by Russian theologians and thinkers. It was published by the Academy of Religious Philosophy, of which Berdyaev was the director, and was associated with the St Sergius Institute (founded 1925), whose members also all belonged to the Russian Student Christian Movement (founded in 1923). Among its contributors were names which have long been familiar to theologians in the West: George Florovsky, Sergei Bulgakov, George Fedotov, Nikolai Lossky to mention a few. The suppression of theological debate within the Orthodox Church in the USSR, forced into submission to the Communist system in 1927, contrasts sharply with the scintillating intellectual debates within the Russian émigré community which find their voice in The Way. What a tragedy for Russia was Lenin's expulsion in 1922 of the many intellectual stars who enriched theological debate both in Paris and the West as whole. Within the Paris émigré community, Russian Orthodoxy's openness to ecumenism before the Second World War is striking, and very different from the antipathy evident within the upper echelons of the Orthodox Church in Russia today: inter-confessional theological discussions were held in France under the auspices of the Academy of Religious Philosophy in 1926–8, and in 1927 the first world conference of Faith and Order was held in Lausanne and the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius founded. The arrival of the Germans in Paris in 1940 brought to a close this extraordinary period of Russian religious thought, when both the Academy of Religious Philosophy and the St Sergius Institute closed and The Way ceased publication. And yet this was by no means the end for many of the ideas explored and debated by the Russian emigration. Arjakovsky's history includes at the end an important though all-too-brief study of the emigration's relevance within Russia during and since perestroika. Enormous print runs of Russian émigré publications have been devoured by a Russian public that was deprived of lively theological debate for many long years. This famine led Fr Alexander Men to describe The Way thus: ‘It is not a journal; it is a treasury of thought! Its sixty issues are truly a treasure, a legacy which we are now receiving.’ This legacy, these treasures, are now within the reach too of an English readership.