Ordination and the Country Parishes

Men was ordained deacon on 1 June 1958 for the Church of the Intercession at Akulovo, and priest on 1 September 1960 at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, being appointed to the Church of the Intercession at Petrovskoye-Alabino. He served subsequently at Tarasovka and, from 1970 until his death, at the Church of the Meeting of the Lord (Sretenskaya) in Novaya Derevnya near Pushkino. He held no other office in the Church.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Ordinations

Deacon: 1 June 1958. Three months after his expulsion from the Irkutsk institute, Men was ordained to the diaconate and assigned to the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God at Akulovo, a village parish in the Moscow region (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” giving the same date).

Priest: 1 September 1960, at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow — one of the few Moscow monastic churches functioning at that date — after which he was appointed to the Church of the Intercession at Petrovskoye-Alabino (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; the Direction journal profile of Men, which notes he was “ordained deacon at 23, priest in 1960 at Donskoi monastery”). At Alabino he served first as second priest and subsequently as rector (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”).

The ordinations fall inside the Khrushchev anti-religious campaign of 1958–1964, the harshest official assault on the Church since the war. Thousands of parishes were closed in these years, seminaries were shut, monasteries suppressed, and the registration of clergy tightened. To seek ordination in 1958 was to enter a profession the state was actively trying to shrink. Men’s whole ministry was conducted under the settlement that campaign left behind: a Church legally permitted to conduct worship inside registered buildings and legally forbidden to do almost anything else — no catechism classes, no youth work, no charity, no publishing, no teaching outside the liturgical service.

Everything Men is famous for was therefore, strictly speaking, illegal.

The Parishes

The list is short and provincial:

Years	Parish	Rank
from 1 June 1958	Church of the Intercession, Akulovo	deacon
from 1 September 1960	Church of the Intercession, Petrovskoye-Alabino	priest (second priest, later rector)
1960s	Tarasovka	priest
from 1970 to 9 September 1990	Church of the Meeting of the Lord (Sretenskaya), Novaya Derevnya, near Pushkino	priest, later rector

(Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”: “Served as second priest, then rector at Church of the Intercession in Petrovskoye-Alabino; subsequently at Tarasovka parish; based in Novaya Derevnya from 1970 until his death.”)

None of these is a cathedral, an academy chapel, or a Moscow city church. They are small parishes in the ring of settlements around the capital — accessible from Moscow by suburban electric train, which mattered enormously in practice, since it is how his Moscow visitors reached him, and which is also how he died.

There is a reason the postings stayed modest, and it is not obscure. Clergy appointments in the Soviet period required the acquiescence of the Council for Religious Affairs, the state body that supervised the Church; a priest under KGB observation for “pro-Catholic” activity, as Men was described in an internal memorandum of 1974 (see Novaya Derevnya and the KGB), was not going to be given a prominent church. Men was, in the administrative sense, contained. He was allowed to serve and prevented from rising.

He did not respond by seeking advancement. He responded by turning a village parish into something with no obvious parallel in the late Soviet Church.

The Shape of the Working Life

Three things ran simultaneously for thirty years.

The parish. Men was a working parish priest with the whole ordinary burden: the daily and Sunday cycle of services, confessions, baptisms, weddings, funerals, the sick, the village poor, and the parish’s endless negotiation with the local authorities over its permitted existence. His preaching at the Liturgy is preserved in the volumes of sermons published after his death, and the sermons are notably plain — expository, gospel-centered, addressed to a congregation of village women rather than to intellectuals.

The writing. In the evenings and on the free days he wrote the books: the life of Christ, the six volumes on the history of religion, the biblical handbooks and the dictionary of biblical studies (see 04 — The Writings). Between 1959 and 1961 he also published some forty articles in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate under his own name (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). The books, which could not be published in the USSR, went abroad and came back in samizdat.

The catechesis. And in Moscow, in apartments, and at the parish house, he taught, received, argued with, and baptized a stream of visitors from the capital — the ministry that made him a public figure (see 05 — The Evangelist of the Intelligentsia).

He also completed his own theological studies while doing this, taking his Leningrad seminary diploma in 1960 and his Moscow Theological Academy degree by correspondence in 1965 (Russian Wikipedia; English Wikipedia).

Family

Men married Natalia Grigorenko (d. 3 July 2021). They had two children: a daughter, Elena (b. 1957), who became an iconographer, and a son, Mikhail (b. 1960), who became a politician and served as governor of Ivanovo Oblast from 2005 to 2013 (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). It was his wife who drove him to hospital on the morning of the murder (see The Morning of 9 September 1990); his son has spoken publicly, over many years, about the unsolved case.

Why the Ordinary Career Matters

Two corrections follow from keeping the career in view.

Against inflation. Men is sometimes written about as though he were a movement, a school, or an office. He was a priest of the Moscow diocese with a parish, a wife, two children and no title beyond archpriest. His authority was entirely personal and entirely unofficial. He had no power to impose his views on anyone, and he never held a position from which the Church taught through him.

Against marginalization. Equally, he was not a fringe or irregular figure. He was ordained canonically, served in registered parishes for thirty-two years, contributed to the Patriarchate’s own journal, was never suspended or disciplined by his bishop, and was buried by the ruling metropolitan of his diocese (Orthodox Encyclopedia, art. “Мень,” which records the funeral on 11 September 1990 celebrated by Metropolitan Yuvenaly (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy and Kolomna). Whatever one concludes about his theology, his canonical standing was never in question in his lifetime and has never been questioned since.

References

Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (Ordination as deacon 1 June 1958 for the Intercession Church at Akulovo; priest 1 September 1960 at the Donskoy Monastery, appointed to Petrovskoye-Alabino; transfer in 1970 to the Sretenskaya Church, Novaya Derevnya, near Pushkino; family; c. 40 articles in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1959–1961.)
English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (Ordination dates; second priest then rector at Alabino; Tarasovka; Novaya Derevnya from 1970.)
Православная энциклопедия [Orthodox Encyclopedia], art. “Мень Александр Владимирович” (pravenc.ru/text/2562996.html). (Parish service from 1958; funeral on 11 September 1990 by Metropolitan Yuvenaly at the Sretenskaya Church; burial beside the church.)
“An Evangelical in the Russian Orthodox Church: Fr. Alexander Men (1935–1990),” Direction 26, no. 1. (Ordination as deacon at 23 and priest in 1960 at the Donskoy Monastery; the parish ministry at Novaya Derevnya.)
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.