The Open Orthodox University and the Works of Mercy

In 1990, the last year of his life, Men helped found the Russian Bible Society, launched the journal The World of the Bible, established the Open Orthodox University — whose first lecture he gave on 8 September, the evening before his death — and organized one of the first Sunday schools in the USSR together with a charitable group serving a children’s hospital. The institutions outlived him; the university now bears his name.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

What He Founded in 1990

The Russian and English sources agree on the list, all of it dated to 1990:

the Russian Bible Society (Российское библейское общество), refounded that year with Men among its founders;
the journal Мир Библии (The World of the Bible);
the Open Orthodox University (Общедоступный православный университет — literally the “generally accessible Orthodox university”), whose inaugural lecture Men delivered on 8 September 1990.

(English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”: “Founded Russian Bible Society (1990), Open Orthodox University (1990), and ‘The World of the Bible’ journal (1990)”; Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень,” on the Bible Society; the Open Orthodox University’s own notice that the lecture of 8 September 1990 was its first.)

To these OrthodoxWiki adds that he opened one of the first Sunday schools in the USSR and founded a charitable group (OrthodoxWiki, art. “Alexander Men”: “baptizing thousands and establishing an Orthodox Open University, charity work, and youth programs”; English Wikipedia: “He also secretly baptized many people and opened one of the first Sunday schools in the USSR and a charity group”). The charitable work is consistently associated in the Russian accounts with a Moscow children’s hospital, where volunteers from Men’s circle undertook the care and accompaniment of sick children and their families. [Disputed: the specific institution is commonly named as the Republican Children’s Clinical Hospital (РДКБ) in Moscow, and the group’s formal organization is usually dated to the period around and just after Men’s death; the sources consulted here do not fix the founding date or the institutional details precisely, and they are reported as approximate.]

Why He Built All of This in One Year

The timing is not accidental and it is not, as it can look, a burst of hyperactivity. Every one of these institutions is the legalization of something Men had already been doing illegally for twenty years.

The Bible Society publishes and distributes Scripture. Men had spent two decades getting Scripture and biblical handbooks into people’s hands by samizdat, and had compiled a whole encyclopedia of biblical studies for a country where the discipline did not exist (see In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press).
The university teaches Christianity to adults with no religious formation. Men had been doing that in apartments since the early 1970s (see The Small Groups and the Baptisms).
The Sunday school teaches children — the single activity most explicitly criminalized under Soviet law.
The hospital charity is organized mercy, which the state had monopolized and forbidden to the Church; Men’s parish groups had been visiting the sick, the elderly and the housebound informally for years (Direction 26, no. 1, on the congregation’s mercy ministries).

The 1990 foundations are therefore best read not as new projects but as a man rapidly building legal containers for practices he had been carrying on without them. He had, at that point, about eight months.

The Open Orthodox University

Of the four, the university is the one that bears his name today. It was conceived as an institution offering theological, biblical and cultural education to any adult who wanted it, without the entrance requirements, the clerical orientation or the state supervision of a seminary — the point of obshchedostupny, “generally accessible,” being precisely that it was for everyone.

Its first lecture, on 8 September 1990, was Men’s “Christianity” — the text in which he said that Christianity had taken only its “first, timid steps in the history of the human race” (see The Public Lectures and Television). He was killed the following morning, and the university opened without its founder.

It has continued, under the name the Alexander Men Open Orthodox University, publishing his lectures and conducting educational work. Its survival is a large part of the answer to the question of what Men actually left behind: not a school of theology in the academic sense, but a set of working institutions for adult Christian education.

The Publishing Afterlife

Two further posthumous facts belong here, because they measure the same thing.

First, Men’s works were published in Russia in quantity after 1990 — the Moscow editions of the six-volume history of religion appeared in 1991–1992, and Son of Man and the biblical handbooks followed (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). A body of writing that had been criminal for twenty years became, almost overnight, the standard introduction to Christianity for a great many Russians.

Second, and more striking given the controversy around him: the Moscow Patriarchate has been publishing his collected works in fifteen volumes (OrthodoxWiki, art. “Alexander Men”). [Disputed: the exact publishing arrangements and the extent of the Patriarchate’s institutional involvement in this edition are not established in the sources consulted here; the fifteen-volume collected edition is reported by OrthodoxWiki and is widely referred to, but the imprint and its dates are not documented in this file.] Whatever the precise arrangements, the fact that a collected edition exists at all, and that Men’s works circulate freely in Russian Orthodox bookshops, is a datum about his standing that has to be set beside the criticism (see The Question of Glorification).

The Alexander Men Foundation

A foundation bearing his name was established in December 1990, three months after his death, at Riga (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”). It has since engaged in publishing his work and in charitable activity, and it is credited with bringing out the posthumous Bibliological Dictionary. Together with the Open Orthodox University and the annual “Men Readings” conference (see The Question of Glorification), it constitutes the institutional form of his memory.

A Sober Note

It is easy, listing four foundations in a year, to give the impression of a man building an empire. He was not. These were small, under-resourced ventures started in the chaos of 1990 by a parish priest with no money and no staff beyond his own spiritual children, in a country whose economy was collapsing. Two of them — the Bible Society and the university — took root. The measure of Men here is not institutional achievement but the accuracy of his judgment about what was needed, at a moment when almost nobody in the Russian Church had a plan for the freedom that had just arrived.

References

English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (Russian Bible Society, Open Orthodox University and The World of the Bible, all 1990; the Sunday school and charity group; the Alexander Men Foundation established December 1990 in Riga.)
OrthodoxWiki, art. “Alexander Men.” (The Orthodox Open University, charity work and youth programs; the fifteen-volume collected works published by the Moscow Patriarchate.)
Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (The Russian Bible Society; the Moscow editions of the history of religion, 1991–92.)
Open Orthodox University of Alexander Men, public page notice on the lecture of 8 September 1990 as the university’s first.
“An Evangelical in the Russian Orthodox Church: Fr. Alexander Men (1935–1990),” Direction 26, no. 1. (The congregation’s mercy ministries to the sick, elderly, housebound, disabled and alcoholics.)