Education and the Expulsion of 1958

Men enrolled at the Moscow Fur Institute at Balashikha in 1953, transferred with the institute’s relocation to Irkutsk, and was expelled in March 1958 — shortly before he would have graduated — on account of his religious convictions. Within weeks he was a deacon of the Russian Orthodox Church. The expulsion is the first documented instance of the Soviet state acting against him personally, and it converted him from a biologist who studied theology privately into a cleric.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Choice of Subject

Men went to university to study biology. The institution was the Moscow Fur Institute (Московский пушно-меховой институт) at Balashikha outside Moscow, where he enrolled in 1953 — the year Stalin died (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” which gives 1955 for his time at the Fur Institute, evidently referring to a later point in the same course of study).

The choice was not random. It continued the boy who had studied drawing under the animal painters Vasily Vatagin and Vadim Trofimov, and it prefigured the theologian who would open his history of religion with a volume on the natural sciences, on evolution, and on the place of the human person in the cosmos (see In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press). Men was one of relatively few twentieth-century Orthodox writers with formal scientific training, and it shows: his engagement with evolutionary biology is unembarrassed, and it is precisely one of the things his sharpest Orthodox critics hold against him (see The Charges and the Defence).

There is also a colder reading of the choice, and it is probably part of the truth. Theology was not available. In the Soviet Union of 1953 there were a handful of seminaries, admission to them was controlled, and a young man from a Jewish family with a catacomb baptism was not an obvious candidate. A biological institute in the Moscow suburbs was a place to be while reading, privately and continuously, for a vocation the state did not permit him to prepare for.

Irkutsk

The Fur Institute was subsequently reorganized and its faculties relocated; Men transferred with it to Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, where the relevant department was absorbed into the agricultural institute (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” which describes him as having “transferred to Irkutsk Agricultural Institute”). He was therefore several thousand kilometres from Moscow, from his family, and from the underground community, for the final phase of his studies.

He continued to read theology throughout, and he did not conceal his convictions well enough — or, more probably, did not attempt to conceal them at all.

The Expulsion

In March 1958, shortly before he would have completed his degree, Men was expelled from the institute because of his religious beliefs (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень,” which dates the expulsion to March 1958; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”: “expelled in 1958 due to his religious beliefs”).

The timing is the cruelty of it. He was within reach of the qualification for which he had spent five years, and it was taken from him. This was not an unusual Soviet practice — expulsion at the point of graduation maximized the loss and served as a warning to other students — and it belongs to the broader Khrushchev-era anti-religious campaign of 1958–1964, which closed thousands of churches, shut seminaries, and pressed believers out of higher education and the professions.

Men never obtained a secular degree. The consequence, in a society that regulated employment by qualification, was that his options narrowed sharply and immediately.

The Immediate Turn

What is striking is the speed of what followed. Men was expelled in March 1958. On 1 June 1958 he was ordained a deacon and assigned to the Church of the Intercession at Akulovo (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” giving the same date). Under three months separate the end of his scientific career from the beginning of his ecclesiastical one.

Two readings of that speed are possible and they are not exclusive. The first is that the expulsion decided a question he had been holding open, and that he took it as a providential shove. The second is more prosaic: a young man with no degree, a documented religious disqualification, and a family to support had few doors left, and the Church was one of them. Men’s own later remarks and those of his biographers incline to the first reading (Yves Hamant, Alexander Men, ch. 2; Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 2), and there is no reason to doubt them; but the second is a real feature of the situation and it is not discreditable.

The Theological Education That Followed

Having been expelled from a secular institute, Men then took the theological degrees that had not been available to him earlier — and took them in the only way a serving cleric could, extramurally:

Leningrad Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1960, the year of his ordination to the priesthood (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”: “ordained priest 1 September 1960 after graduating from Leningrad Theological Seminary”).
Moscow Theological Academy, by correspondence, graduating in 1965 (Russian Wikipedia; English Wikipedia, “Completed studies at Moscow Theological Academy (1965)”).

He also published, early and in the official Church press: some forty articles in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate between 1959 and 1961 (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). This is a point worth registering against the later polemical picture of Men as a marginal or crypto-heterodox figure. In his mid-twenties he was a regular contributor to the Russian Church’s own periodical, publishing under his own name with the approval of its editors.

What the Expulsion Cost and What It Did Not

The expulsion cost him a profession, a qualification, and — in a system where the trudovaya knizhka, the labor record, followed a person for life — a permanent black mark. It did not cost him his learning. The biology stayed with him, and it stayed visible in his writing: in the treatment of evolution in the first volume of the history of religion, in his refusal to set science and faith at war, and in a habit of mind that looked for development, continuity and process where much Russian religious writing preferred timeless assertion.

It also gave him something less measurable. From the age of twenty-three he knew concretely what the Soviet state would do to a believer who did not hide, and he had already lost something to it. For the next thirty-two years the state would search his house, interrogate him, denounce him in the press and cultivate informers in his parish — and it never got another thing from him (see Novaya Derevnya and the KGB).

References

Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (Moscow Fur Institute at Balashikha, 1953–1955; transfer to Irkutsk; expulsion March 1958; deacon 1 June 1958; Leningrad Theological Seminary, graduated 1960; Moscow Theological Academy by correspondence, graduated 1965; c. 40 articles in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1959–1961.)
English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (“Studied at Moscow Fur Institute (1955); transferred to Irkutsk Agricultural Institute; expelled in 1958 due to his religious beliefs”; ordination dates.)
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995. (The expulsion and the decision to seek ordination.)
Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. (Men’s student years and the turn to the priesthood.)
Православная энциклопедия [Orthodox Encyclopedia], art. “Мень Александр Владимирович” (pravenc.ru/text/2562996.html). (Theological studies alongside parish service from 1958.)