According to the Sir Hubert Wilkins Foundation, ''Wilkins was engaged by the Society of Friends to write about and film their famine relief program then in operation in Soviet Russia...Not only the Quakers wanted information, though; the British government quietly asked Wilkins to supply them with information on just how bad the situation was within the new Communist country...Wilkins and his Quaker companions travelled from Moscow across the Volga and out onto the vast steppes, they found a barren wasteland of the dead and dying where Wilkins was once more reminded of the havoc that weather could wreak...Wilkins recorded it all in four films for the Quakers, collectively known as New Worlds for Old.''