03 — Priesthood under the Soviet State

Men was ordained deacon on 1 June 1958 and priest on 1 September 1960, and spent his entire ministry in country parishes of the Moscow region — Akulovo, Petrovskoye-Alabino, Tarasovka, and from 1970 until his death the Church of the Meeting of the Lord at Novaya Derevnya near Pushkino. He was under KGB observation for most of that time, was searched, denounced in the press, and repeatedly interrogated, and was never arrested.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

Thirty-two years as a parish priest, all of them within a hundred kilometres of Moscow and none of them in a prominent post: that is the outward shape of Men’s career. He was never a bishop, never a rector of an academy, never a member of a synodal department. The books were written in the evenings after the Liturgy and the funerals; the catechesis was done in a wooden church and in Moscow apartments. It is a fact worth holding onto, because the polemical literature both for and against him tends to treat him as a movement rather than as a priest with a parish register.

The two files below take the two halves of that life. The first traces the ordinations and the parishes, with the dates and places pinned. The second describes what the Soviet state did about him for three decades: the surveillance file, the 1974 memorandum in which the chairman of the KGB named him to the Central Committee, the interrogations, the press attacks, and the pressure that stopped short — always, and for reasons never fully established — of arrest.

Section Contents

• Ordination and the Country Parishes — deacon 1958, priest 1960, and the parishes he served
• Novaya Derevnya and the KGB — twenty years at one church, under continuous observation

See Also

• 02 — Formation in the Underground Church — how he got there
• 05 — The Evangelist of the Intelligentsia — the ministry conducted from these parishes
• The Divine Liturgy — the service at the center of a parish priest’s life