Novaya Derevnya and the KGB

From 1970 until the morning he was killed, Men served the Church of the Meeting of the Lord at Novaya Derevnya near Pushkino, and for most of that time he was under KGB observation. His house was searched in 1964–65 over his acquaintance with Solzhenitsyn; in 1974 the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, named him to the Central Committee as the head of a group of “pro-Catholic-minded priests”; he was interrogated in 1984 and threatened with a ban from his parish, and attacked in the national press in 1986. He was never arrested.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Parish

The Sretenskaya (Meeting of the Lord) Church at Novaya Derevnya, on the edge of Pushkino some thirty kilometres north-east of Moscow, was Men’s parish from 1970 until 9 September 1990 — twenty years, the whole of his mature ministry (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”). It is a small suburban church on a suburban railway line. That last fact is the operative one: it was reachable in an hour or so from a Moscow terminus, which meant that a Muscovite with a question could get there and back in a day without explaining himself to anyone.

What happened at Novaya Derevnya was, by the standards of the late Soviet Church, extraordinary. A steady traffic of visitors from the capital — students, scientists, translators, musicians, dissidents, Jews, the merely curious — came out on the electric train to a village church, and a great many of them were baptized there (see The Small Groups and the Baptisms). None of this was permitted. Soviet law confined religious activity to worship inside registered premises; catechizing adults, running study circles, and organizing charitable work were offences. Men did all of it for twenty years.

The Surveillance File

The KGB watched him from early on. According to the account assembled by Lenta.ru on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, drawing on materials from the case file and from published archival research, Men had been under surveillance since the early 1960s under the operational codename “Missionary” (Миссионер), and was classified as a long-term observation target; the agency ran informers within his parish and arranged hostile press coverage of him (Lenta.ru, “Сионисты, алкоголики и фанатики…”, 9 September 2020). [Disputed: the KGB files on Men have not been declassified in full, and the published descriptions of their contents rest on partial disclosures and on the recollections of investigators; the outline above is what the Russian press reporting states, and it cannot at present be checked against the primary documents.]

The documented episodes are these:

1964–1965: searches over Solzhenitsyn. Men’s home was searched and he was investigated in connection with his acquaintance with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”; Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень,” which describes searches connected with the Solzhenitsyn acquaintance). Men is described in the literature as a spiritual adviser or counsellor to Solzhenitsyn among other writers; the relationship is attested in general terms and its depth is not documented in detail here.

1974: the Andropov memorandum. In 1974 Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB, wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party about “a group of pro-Catholic-minded priests, headed by A. Men,” accusing them of producing works illegally exported abroad (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” summarizing the memorandum; Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). This is the single most important document in the surveillance record, and for two reasons.

First, it establishes that Men had come to the personal attention of the head of the Soviet security service — that he was not a local nuisance but a named subject at the top of the system. Second, it shows the charge the state had settled on: not simply religion, but pro-Catholic religion, and the illegal export of manuscripts. Both halves of that charge were, from the state’s point of view, accurate in substance: Men’s books were indeed going abroad for publication (see In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press), and the Brussels house that published them, Zhizn s Bogom, was a Catholic-sponsored Russian-language press.

It is worth being exact about what this does and does not show. That the KGB called Men “pro-Catholic” in 1974 is a fact about the KGB’s categories. Some of Men’s Orthodox critics have since made a materially similar charge in a theological register (see The Charges and the Defence). The convergence is real and should be noted; it is not an argument, in either direction, and this collection does not treat a KGB memorandum as theological evidence.

1984: interrogation and the threat of a ban. Men was interrogated in connection with his student Sergei Markus and was threatened with being banned from his parish (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” which gives the year 1984 and the name; Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень,” which gives the same episode). The threat of a zapreshchenie — suspension from priestly function — was the state’s most effective instrument against clergy, because it could be procured through the Council for Religious Affairs without any judicial act.

1986: the press attack. In the spring of 1986 Men was attacked in the national newspaper Trud for alleged “anti-Soviet underground” activity (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). A separate Soviet press item, in Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya, labelled him a modern-day apostle to the Soviet intelligentsia — intended as a denunciation and received by his admirers as a description.

By the accounts of those close to him, the interrogations at various periods were frequent, and the Christian History Institute’s summary states flatly that the secret police “had harassed Men for years, sometimes interrogating him on a daily basis” (Christian History Institute, “Who Wanted Godly Alexander Men Dead?”). [Disputed: “daily” interrogation is reported in popular accounts and reflects the recollection of people around him; it is not documented in the archival record available, and the intensity of the pressure evidently varied greatly by period.]

He Was Never Arrested

This is the anomaly of Men’s life under the state, and it must be reported honestly because it has been used against him.

Men was never arrested, never imprisoned, never exiled, and never suspended from his priesthood. Contemporaries of his who did comparable things did go to prison: Fr. Gleb Yakunin, listed among Men’s students, was imprisoned for his human-rights work in the Church. Men was pressed, watched, threatened, and denounced — and left in place.

Several explanations circulate. That he was scrupulously non-political, confining himself to catechesis and refusing the dissident platform, and thus gave the authorities no prosecutable material. That an arrest would have created a cause célèbre among precisely the Moscow intelligentsia the state was trying to keep quiet. That he was more useful under observation, as a magnet drawing the religiously curious into view. And — the insinuation made by his most hostile critics, and by nobody with evidence — that he was tolerated because he was in some way useful to the organs.

That last insinuation should be named and dismissed with the reason for dismissing it. There is no evidence for it. It rests entirely on the inference he was not arrested, therefore he was protected, which is not an inference at all: very large numbers of active Soviet believers were harassed for decades without arrest, and the KGB’s own 1974 memorandum treats Men as a problem to be countered, not an asset to be run. This collection reports the insinuation because it exists in the polemical literature and readers will meet it; it does not entertain it.

What the Pressure Produced

The Soviet state’s twenty-year campaign against Men had one clear achievement: it kept him out of print in his own country until the very end of his life. Nothing else worked. The books were written anyway, published abroad anyway, and came back in samizdat anyway; the visitors kept coming out on the train; the baptisms continued; the small groups met. When the restrictions finally lifted in 1988 he was ready, with a completed corpus and a trained network, and he moved into the public sphere faster than anyone else in the Russian Church (see 06 — The Glasnost Years).

And then, sixteen months after his first public lecture and with the state that had watched him for thirty years visibly disintegrating, someone killed him on the way to the train.

References

Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (Searches of 1964–65 over the Solzhenitsyn acquaintance; the 1974 Andropov memorandum; the 1984 interrogation over Sergei Markus and the threat of a parish ban; the spring 1986 attack in Trud.)
English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (“In 1974, Yuri Andropov wrote to the Communist Party Central Committee about ‘a group of pro-Catholic-minded priests, headed by A. Men,’ accusing them of creating works ‘illegally exported abroad’”; the 1984 interrogation; Gleb Yakunin and Georgy Chistyakov as his students.)
Lenta.ru, “Сионисты, алкоголики и фанатики: 30 лет назад убили одного из главных священников России — Александра Меня. Дело так и не раскрыто,” 9 September 2020. (KGB surveillance from the early 1960s under the codename “Missionary”; agents in the parish; orchestrated press attacks; the files remaining classified.)
Christian History Institute, “Who Wanted Godly Alexander Men Dead?” (The long harassment and frequent interrogation; the KGB’s interest in his conversions.)
Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995.