05 — The Evangelist of the Intelligentsia

For twenty years Men conducted, from a village parish and in Moscow apartments, an illegal catechetical ministry to the Soviet intelligentsia on a scale that has no obvious parallel in the late Soviet Church. He baptized very large numbers of adults, formed them into small groups for prayer and Bible study, and became the spiritual father of a circle that included writers, scientists, translators and future priests.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

This is what Men was famous for in his lifetime, and it was entirely against the law. Soviet legislation confined religious activity to worship inside registered buildings; adult catechesis, study circles, religious instruction and organized charity were all offences. Men ran all of them for two decades from the Church of the Meeting of the Lord at Novaya Derevnya, a suburban parish an hour by electric train from Moscow.

The section separates the method from the persons. The first file describes how the ministry actually worked — the visitors, the baptisms, the small groups, the pastoral style, and the discipline that kept it out of the hands of the KGB for so long. The second addresses the named individuals: who is actually documented as his spiritual child, where the popular attributions outrun the evidence, and what became of the circle after his death.

Section Contents

• The Small Groups and the Baptisms — the catechetical method and the scale of the ministry
• The Named Disciples — who is documented, who is only commonly said, and what became of them

See Also

• 03 — Priesthood under the Soviet State — the parish and the surveillance under which this was done
• 06 — The Glasnost Years — what happened when the same work became legal
• Fr. Alexander Schmemann — whose Radio Liberty broadcasts reached the same audience from the other side of the Iron Curtain