The Small Groups and the Baptisms

From the early 1970s Men’s parish at Novaya Derevnya became a destination for religiously searching Muscovites, and he baptized adults in very large numbers — the sources say “thousands” over his ministry. Converts were gathered into small household groups practising common prayer, Scripture study, shared communion and works of mercy. All of it was illegal, and it reproduced, for a new constituency, the method of the catacomb church in which Men himself had been raised.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

What Was Actually Illegal

It is worth stating the legal position precisely, because it is the difference between admiring Men’s energy and understanding his risk.

Soviet law on religious associations, as consolidated in the 1929 legislation and tightened in 1961, permitted a registered religious society to conduct worship in a registered building and forbade essentially everything else: religious instruction of minors, catechetical classes for adults, study circles, libraries, excursions, mutual-aid funds, and charitable activity. A priest’s lawful function was to perform services. Anything resembling a parish life outside the church walls was, at minimum, grounds for the local commissioner to move against the parish, and at maximum a criminal matter.

Men ran adult catechesis, household study groups, a distribution network for religious literature, and organized works of mercy, continuously, from a parish under KGB observation, for twenty years.

The Traffic to Novaya Derevnya

From the early 1970s onward Men became a known figure among the religiously curious in Moscow, and his parish became a place people went. Every account agrees on the pattern: an intellectual in his twenties or thirties, formed in Soviet atheism, encountering a religious question he could not dismiss, being told by a friend that there was a priest at Pushkino, and taking the train out on a Saturday.

The visitors came in numbers, and they came from a definable milieu — the scientific, literary and academic intelligentsia of Moscow, a large proportion of them of Jewish background like Men himself (Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026, noting that Men addressed Moscow intellectuals “including many Jewish converts”). The Soviet newspaper Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya labelled him, in denunciation, a modern-day apostle to the Soviet intelligentsia; the phrase stuck because it was accurate.

The Baptisms

The scale is reported consistently and imprecisely. The standard formulation in the literature is that Men baptized thousands of people over the course of his ministry (as summarized in the accounts collected on OrthodoxWiki, art. “Alexander Men,” and in Christian History Institute, “Who Wanted Godly Alexander Men Dead?”). One concrete data point from the last period: the Direction journal profile records that he baptized sixty adults in the four months before his death (Direction 26, no. 1, “An Evangelical in the Russian Orthodox Church”).

[Disputed: no parish register or reliable tally of Men’s baptisms is available, and “thousands” is an estimate repeated across the secondary literature rather than a documented figure. Many of the baptisms were performed privately and deliberately left unrecorded, since a written record would have exposed both priest and convert. The order of magnitude is not seriously contested; the number is not established.]

The secrecy is itself significant. A baptism entered in a parish register was reportable to the state commissioner, and for a Soviet professional a documented baptism could end a career. Men therefore baptized quietly, often in apartments or at the parish house rather than in the church, and often without paperwork — a practice with obvious pastoral costs, and an exact continuation of what had been done for him in 1935.

The Method: Small Groups

Men did not stop at baptism. Converts were gathered into small household groups — the Russian sources and the Western profiles agree on the pattern — organized around four things: common prayer, the study of Scripture, shared communion, and works of mercy toward the sick, the elderly, the housebound, the disabled and alcoholics (Direction 26, no. 1, describing the four practices of his congregation and its mercy ministries).

Several features of this deserve notice.

It was a reconstruction of the catacomb church for a new constituency. Men had been formed in exactly this: a hidden community meeting in a house, with an ascetic guide, prayer, and instruction, without institutional cover (see The Catacomb Community). What he built in the 1970s was not an innovation imported from Western Christianity, whatever his critics have said about the resemblance; it was the only ecclesial form he had ever seen work.

It was sacramental, not merely educational. The groups were tied to the parish and to the Eucharist; the point of the study was communion, and the members came out to Novaya Derevnya to receive. This is the answer Men’s defenders give to the charge that his was a bookish, Protestantized Christianity of study circles: the circles existed to bring people to the chalice.

It scaled by delegation. Men could not personally direct several hundred people. Groups had leaders, and the more capable of his spiritual children took on the instruction of others; several were eventually ordained (see The Named Disciples). The structure is why the ministry survived his death.

It was risky in a specific way. A network of household groups is precisely the object a security service most wants to penetrate, and the KGB did place agents in his parish (Lenta.ru, “Сионисты, алкоголики и фанатики…”, 9 September 2020). Men’s response, according to those around him, was not conspiratorial technique but a refusal to be secretive about anything except the identities of individuals: he took no political positions, formed no organization, kept no membership lists, and gave the state very little to prosecute.

The Pastoral Style

The characteristics reported by everyone who wrote about him — friend and critic alike — are these: an enormous erudition worn lightly; a refusal to be shocked; a habit of meeting the questioner’s actual question rather than the question he ought to have asked; a marked personal cheerfulness; and an unwillingness to demand of a beginner the ascetic disciplines of an advanced Christian. He wrote of his own spiritual mother, the schemanun Maria, that she was free of “sanctimoniousness… and narrowness,” and it is plainly the quality he cultivated in himself (see The Catacomb Community).

That last trait is where the pastoral style and the theological controversy meet, and it should be reported as the two-sided thing it is. His admirers describe a priest who did not crush the newly-arrived under a discipline they could not bear. His critics describe a priest who left converts without repentance, ascetic labor, or the fear of God — the charge made explicitly by Tatyana Petrova in Blagodatny Ogon, who attributes her own subsequent capture by a sect to a formation under Men that emphasized intellectual breadth over repentance and ascetic practice (Благодатный огонь, “Куда способны увести наставления протоиерея Александра Меня”). This collection does not adjudicate between the two descriptions; it notes that they are descriptions of the same practice (see The Charges and the Defence).

The Wider Ecology

Men’s ministry was not the only thing reaching this audience, and it is a mistake to picture him as a solitary light. Religious samizdat circulated widely; the Moscow Patriarchate’s parishes, however constrained, went on baptizing; and Russian-language religious broadcasting from abroad reached listeners across the USSR. Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s Russian-language talks on Radio Liberty ran for some thirty years from 1953 and gained a broad following inside the Soviet Union despite jamming; his listeners included Solzhenitsyn (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, on the publication of A Voice for Our Time: Radio Liberty Talks, 2021–22; see Fr. Alexander Schmemann). Men, working on the ground near Moscow, and Schmemann, broadcasting from New York, were addressing overlapping audiences by different means through the same decades. [Disputed: that Men himself listened to Schmemann’s broadcasts, or that the two men were in contact, is not established in the sources consulted here; what is documented is that both were reaching the same late-Soviet religious search.]

References

OrthodoxWiki, art. “Alexander Men.” (Baptizing thousands; the Sunday school, charitable work and youth programs.)
Christian History Institute, “Who Wanted Godly Alexander Men Dead?” (The scale of his conversions and the KGB’s interest in them.)
“An Evangelical in the Russian Orthodox Church: Fr. Alexander Men (1935–1990),” Direction 26, no. 1. (Sixty adults baptized in the four months before his death; the four practices of the congregation — common prayer, Scripture study, shared communion, worship together — and the mercy ministries to the sick, elderly, housebound, disabled and alcoholics.)
Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (Men’s address to the Moscow intelligentsia, including many Jewish converts; the Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya label.)
Lenta.ru, “Сионисты, алкоголики и фанатики…”, 9 September 2020. (KGB agents within the parish.)
Благодатный огонь [Blagodatny Ogon], “Куда способны увести наставления протоиерея Александра Меня,” by Tatyana Petrova (blagogon.ru/digest/105). (The criticism that Men’s formation slighted repentance and ascetic practice.)
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, announcements accompanying A Voice for Our Time: Radio Liberty Talks, vols. 1–2 (SVS Press, 2021, 2022). (Schmemann’s Russian-language broadcasts into the USSR from 1953, over some thirty years, and their following there.)