06 — The Glasnost Years

Men gave his first public lecture on 11 May 1988. In the twenty-eight months that remained to him he became one of the most visible religious figures in the Soviet Union: hundreds of lectures in halls that could not hold the crowds, appearances on television, articles in the mass press, and — in 1990 alone — a hand in founding the Russian Bible Society, the journal The World of the Bible, and the Open Orthodox University, whose first lecture he delivered on the evening before he was killed.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ in 1988 was the hinge. What had been criminal became first tolerated and then celebrated, and a Soviet public with no religious education at all suddenly had access to religious speakers. Very few people in the Russian Church were ready for that moment. Men had spent thirty years preparing for it without knowing it was coming: a finished corpus, a trained circle, and two decades of practice at explaining Christianity to people who knew nothing about it.

The two files below take the public ministry and the institutions. The first covers the lectures, the broadcasting and the press — the phase in which Men became, as one scholar puts it, a “stadium figure.” The second covers what he tried to build in the last year of his life, and what happened to it afterward.

Section Contents

• The Public Lectures and Television — 11 May 1988 to 8 September 1990, and the last lecture
• The Open Orthodox University and the Works of Mercy — the institutions founded in 1990: the university, the Bible society, the Sunday school, the hospital charity

See Also

• 05 — The Evangelist of the Intelligentsia — the same work, done illegally, for twenty years before
• 07 — The Murder — what ended it
• The Church under Kirill — the post-Soviet Russian Church whose formation Men did not live to see