The Public Lectures and Television

On 11 May 1988 Men gave his first public lecture, in the hall of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. Over the following twenty-eight months he lectured continuously to overflowing halls, appeared on television and radio, and published in the mass-circulation press. His last lecture, “Christianity,” was delivered on the evening of 8 September 1990, hours before he was killed.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

11 May 1988

Men’s first public lecture was given on 11 May 1988 in the hall of the Institute of Steel and Alloys in Moscow (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”; Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович,” giving the same date and venue).

The date sits precisely at the turn. The millennium celebrations of the Baptism of Rus’ fell in June 1988; the meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Patriarch Pimen that signalled the change of policy had taken place in April. Within weeks of that signal, Men — a village priest with no official position and a thirty-year KGB file — was standing in a Moscow technical institute lecturing publicly on Christianity to an audience of Soviet engineers and students.

He had been rehearsing that lecture for twenty years in apartments.

The Scale

What followed is the phase that made him a national figure. Randall Poole’s summary is that Men became a “stadium figure” with massive popular appeal, the most prominent religious voice of the late Soviet period (Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026). He lectured, by all accounts, several times a week and often to halls that could not hold the people who came; he spoke on radio and television; he published in the mass press; he answered questions for hours after each talk.

The subjects were the ones he had spent his life on: the origins of religion, the world religions, the Bible and how to read it, the person of Christ, Russian religious philosophy, and Christianity’s relation to culture and to freedom. A series of his lectures on Russian religious philosophy, delivered in 1989–1990, has been published in English translation (Russian Religious Philosophy: 1989–1990 Lectures, London: Frances Boutle, 2015).

The political register of these lectures is worth pinning, because it is often misdescribed. Men was not a political dissident and had never been one. But in the lecture-hall period he argued explicitly for a set of positions with obvious political consequence: that the subordination of the Russian Church to the state, from Peter the Great’s abolition of the patriarchate onward, had been a catastrophe that helped make Soviet atheism possible; that the remedy was a strict separation of Church and state protecting freedom of conscience, which he called “the holy of holies within man”; and that democracy rests on “consciousness of the high value of the individual, which is nourished on the soil of religious personalism” (Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” quoting Men’s lectures and writings of this period).

This is a distinctive position and it should be attributed to Men rather than to the Church: an Orthodox priest arguing, in 1989, for the separation of Church and state on theological grounds. It is one of the reasons his memory is contested in a Russia whose Church has since taken a different course (see The Church under Kirill).

Television and the Mass Press

Men appeared on Soviet television and radio in the last two years of his life, and the appearances mattered disproportionately: a country in which religious broadcasting had been illegal within living memory was watching a priest explain the Gospel on the state channel. The Soviet press, which had denounced him in Trud in the spring of 1986 (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”), was by 1989 printing him.

[Disputed: precise details of Men’s television appearances — which programmes, which dates, how many — are not established in the sources consulted here. That he appeared on television and became widely recognized through it is uniformly reported; the broadcast record is not documented in this collection.]

The Last Lecture, 8 September 1990

On the evening of 8 September 1990, Men delivered a lecture entitled “Christianity” (Христианство). It was, by design, the inaugural lecture of the Open Orthodox University he had just founded — and it was the last public act of his life; he was killed the next morning (Facebook page of the Open Orthodox University of Alexander Men, “8 сентября 1990 года протоиерей Александр Мень прочитал лекцию ‘Христианство’, которая стала первой лекцией Общедоступного университета и последней”; the text of the lecture is published in the collection Радостная весть and circulates in the Russian religious libraries).

[Disputed: the venue of the last lecture is given variously in the sources — most often as a Moscow house of culture or technical-books club; the accounts consulted here name a hall on Volkhonka. The venue is not securely established.]

The lecture is his best-known single text after the books, and one passage from it is quoted more than any other:

“Only short-sighted people can imagine that Christianity has already been, that it has already happened — in the thirteenth century, or the fourth, or at some other time. It has taken only the first, I would say timid, steps in the history of the human race.”
— Alexander Men, “Christianity,” lecture of 8 September 1990

The formulation is characteristic and, for his critics, symptomatic. It is characteristic in that it locates the Church’s fullness ahead rather than behind, and refuses to treat any past era — Byzantium, Muscovy, the Fathers’ century — as the norm from which everything since is decline. It is symptomatic, to his critics, in exactly the same respect: a theology in which Christianity is “an arrow aimed at the future,” in his other phrase, can look like a theology in which the deposit of faith is still being assembled. That charge, and the answer to it, belong to The Charges and the Defence.

What no one disputes is the timing. A priest who had spent thirty years unable to publish a word in his own country told an audience in Moscow that Christianity was only beginning, and was killed before dawn.

Assessing the Public Phase

Three observations, offered as assessment and not as fact.

He was, briefly, the most audible Christian voice in Russia. Michael Bourdeaux’s description of him as the late Soviet Church’s “unofficial patriarch,” and Mikhail Epstein’s ranking of him as the most prominent Orthodox Christian thinker of the 1970s–80s, both refer to this standing (as summarized in Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought”).

The visibility was very short. Twenty-eight months. Almost everything a general reader knows about Men comes from this window, which is a poor sample of a thirty-two-year ministry conducted almost entirely in private.

The visibility made enemies. Men’s public prominence coincided exactly with the emergence into the open of Russian ultranationalist and antisemitic organizations, for whom a Jewish-born, ecumenically-minded priest with a mass following was a natural target; and it coincided with the disintegration of the security apparatus that had watched him for thirty years. Both facts are part of the context of his death, and neither is evidence of who killed him (see The Investigation and the Theories).

References

English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (First public lecture, 11 May 1988, at the Institute of Steel and Alloys; the 1990 foundations.)
Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (Same; the 1986 Trud attack.)
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 as a “stadium figure”; his critique of Church–state subordination from Peter the Great; “freedom of conscience… the holy of holies within man”; the personalist argument for democracy; Bourdeaux’s “unofficial patriarch” and Epstein’s assessment.)
Men, Alexander. “Христианство” [Christianity], lecture of 8 September 1990; published in Радостная весть and available in the Russian religious text libraries (e.g. lib.ru/HRISTIAN/mennhr.txt). (The quoted passage on Christianity’s “first, timid steps.”)
Open Orthodox University of Alexander Men, public page notice: “8 сентября 1990 года протоиерей Александр Мень прочитал лекцию ‘Христианство’, которая стала первой лекцией Общедоступного университета и последней.” (The lecture as the university’s inaugural and his final one.)
Men, Alexander. Russian Religious Philosophy: 1989–1990 Lectures. London: Frances Boutle, 2015.