Moscow 1935: The Men Family

Alexander Vladimirovich Men was born in Moscow on 22 January 1935 to Vladimir Grigoryevich Men, an engineer, and Elena Semyonovna Men (née Tsuperfain), in a Jewish family of the Soviet technical intelligentsia. His mother’s turn to Christianity, and the presence in the household of his aunt Vera Vasilevskaya, made the family a religious anomaly in the Moscow of the Terror, and their two memoirs are the principal documentary source for his childhood.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Date and the Place

Men was born on 22 January 1935 in Moscow (Orthodox Encyclopedia, art. “Men, Aleksandr Vladimirovich”; Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, 2016; Yves Hamant, Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia, 1995). The date is uncontested across Russian and Western sources, and it is worth fixing at the outset because it locates him precisely: he was an infant during the Great Terror, a child during the war, a schoolboy under late Stalinism, a student under Khrushchev, and a priest for the whole of the Brezhnev period. He never lived a day outside the Soviet Union, and he died fifteen months before it did.

The Family

His father, Vladimir Grigoryevich Men — born Wolf Gersh-Leibovich Men in 1902 — was a textile engineer, a Jew by birth and, so far as the record shows, not a religious man; the sources describe him as remaining aloof from his wife’s Christianity without obstructing it (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович,” citing family memoirs; Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 1). [Disputed: his birthplace is given as Borodyanka in the Kyiv region by the Russian-language sources and simply as Kyiv by the English Wikipedia article; the discrepancy is minor and both point to the same region.]

His mother, Elena Semyonovna Men, née Tsuperfain (1908–1979), is the decisive figure. She was born in Bern, Switzerland, where her parents — Semyon Ilyich Tsuperfain and Cecilia Vasilevskaya — had met as chemistry students at the university, part of the substantial cohort of Russian Jews who studied abroad because the imperial quota system limited their access to Russian universities (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 1). The English Wikipedia article records simply that she “was drawn to Christianity from a young age.” That attraction, in a Jewish family in the Soviet 1930s, was doubly transgressive: it set her against the expectations of her own community and against a state that was at that moment closing and dynamiting churches by the thousand.

Elena’s sister, Vera Vasilevskaya, was also drawn to Christianity and was likewise baptized; she became a scholar of psychology and, in the household, a second formative religious presence for the boy. Both women left memoirs, and it is those two texts — his mother’s and his aunt’s — together with Men’s own scattered autobiographical remarks, that supply nearly everything we know about his childhood; Wallace Daniel’s biography is built substantially on them (Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, preface and ch. 1; reviewer’s summary in European History Quarterly 47:2, 2017).

This should be said plainly, because it bears on how much weight the childhood narrative can carry. The sources for Men’s first decade are family sources, written by devout women about a son and nephew who had by then become a famous priest, and they are shaped accordingly. They are not thereby untrue; they are simply of a genre in which the retrospective significance of small incidents is easily heightened. The dates, the names, and the fact of the baptism are secure; the anecdotes of precocious piety are family testimony and are reported here as such.

A Jewish Family and a Christian Household

The formula “born into a Jewish family” is used by every source, including the Moscow Patriarchate’s own Orthodox Encyclopedia, and it is not a euphemism. Men’s Jewishness was a matter of descent, of the internal Soviet passport’s “fifth line,” and of a cultural world; it was never something he repudiated. He came to hold — and to write about, controversially — a strong doctrine of the continuing significance of Israel in the divine economy, and of the Old Testament as the living substructure of Christian faith rather than a superseded prologue (see In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press). That, in turn, became one of the specific grounds on which he was attacked, both by theological critics and by antisemites, and the two must be distinguished carefully (see Ecumenism, Scripture, and the Antisemitic Attacks).

The household into which he was born was therefore doubly marginal. It was Jewish in a state that had officially abolished antisemitism while practicing it, and it was Christian in a state that had declared war on religion as such. Neither marginality was chosen for advantage. Elena Men’s baptism in 1935 could have cost her family everything.

The Boy

Men’s schooling was ordinary Soviet schooling — Moscow School No. 554 — and the one documented extracurricular detail is characteristic of the man he became: he studied drawing under the animal painters Vasily Vatagin and Vadim Trofimov, and a lifelong interest in natural history followed him into his choice of higher education (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; cf. Hamant, Alexander Men, ch. 1). The boy who drew animals became the student who enrolled in a fur institute to study biology, and the priest who wrote a six-volume history of religion beginning with a volume on the natural sciences and the origins of religious consciousness. The breadth was not an affectation acquired later; it was there from the beginning.

He read early and enormously. Every account of him — friendly, scholarly, and hostile alike — agrees on the scale of his reading, and it is the one point on which even his sharpest Orthodox critics do not contest the record: they contest what he did with it. Michael Bourdeaux’s description of him as the late Soviet Church’s “unofficial patriarch,” and Mikhail Epstein’s ranking of him as the most prominent Orthodox Christian thinker of the 1970s–80s, both rest on an intellectual formation that began in this household (as summarized in Randall A. Poole’s account of Men and Russian religious thought, Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature and Religious Thought, 2026).

Why the Family Matters

Three things in this first chapter shaped everything after it.

First, the conversion was his mother’s before it was his. He did not come to Christianity as an adult intellectual choosing among options; he was given it as an infant, by a woman who had chosen it at real risk. His later evangelism among adult intellectuals was accordingly never contemptuous of the searching adult — but it was also never the evangelism of a man who thought faith was primarily a conclusion.

Second, the Christianity he was given was catacomb Christianity. It came to him through a hunted priest and a hidden community, not through an institution (see The Baptism by Fr. Seraphim (Bityukov)). He learned very early that the Church could exist without buildings, without permission, and without safety — which is exactly the Church he would have to build again, in apartments and at kitchen tables, thirty years later.

Third, he was a Jew. This gave him access to a particular constituency — the largely Jewish Moscow intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom he baptized — and it gave the antisemitic fringe of Russian nationalism a target. Both consequences were fully in play on the morning he was killed.

References

Православная энциклопедия [Orthodox Encyclopedia], art. “Мень Александр Владимирович” (pravenc.ru/text/2562996.html). (The Moscow Patriarchate’s reference article: birth date, family, secret baptism in 1935.)
Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. (The principal English-language scholarly biography; built substantially on the memoirs of Elena Semyonovna Men and Vera Vasilevskaya.)
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995. (Biography by a French scholar who knew Men personally.)
Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (Family names and dates: Vladimir Grigoryevich Men b. 1902; Elena Semyonovna Tsuperfain 1908–1979, b. Bern; Vera Vasilevskaya; School No. 554; drawing under Vatagin and Trofimov.)
English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (Birth to a Jewish family; mother “drawn to Christianity from a young age.”)
Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (Assessments by Michael Bourdeaux and Mikhail Epstein; Men’s intellectual sources.)
Review of Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, in European History Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2017): 335–36. (On Daniel’s use of the family memoirs.)