1. Two months before Aleksandr Menn was felled by an ax, he was asked in a radio interview broadcast across Russia, "Does one need to be a Christian, and if one does, then why?"

"I think there is only one answer, and it is as follows," he said:

Man always seeks God. The normal state of man is, to some extent, to be connected with a higher power, even when the higher power in the human mind is distorted, and turned into something secular. Eras of Stalinism . . . and all other isms seek some false god even if God is taken away. This turns to idol worship, but still the inner instinct of seeking God is there.

One can imagine Menn, in the austerity of the Moscow studio, drawing closer to the microphone as he continued, on the spot, his careful answer:

The question is totally different when it is put this way: Why Christianity? Is it because of the sacred scriptures? No, every religion has sacred scriptures, and sometimes with a very high quality of spiritual content. . . . Then why Christianity? Morality? Certainly. I am happy that in our society the high moral values of Christianity are accepted, but it would be totally erroneous to maintain that there are no moral values outside Christianity. . . . Then why Christianity? Should we embrace . . . a position that God is revealed and therefore can be found in any kind of religion? No, because then the uniqueness and absolute character of Christianity will disappear. I think that nothing will prove the uniqueness of Christianity except one thing--Jesus Christ Himself.

In the reflex of an Orthodox priest to the name of Jesus, Menn placed his right hand-his fingers tapered like a concert pianist's--across the crucifix suspended over his chest, below his gray--streaked beard.

Many religious teachers, I'm sure, have a degree of truth in what they preach, but let's listen to them: Buddha said that he could reach the state of absolute nothingness only after long and hard exercise. Can we believe him? We can. He is a good man. He reached what he worked hard for. Greek philosophers tell us how difficult it is for the mind to reach the idea of God and the truth. Mohammad says he felt miserable before God. He felt like nobody, but God simply revealed Himself to him. Mohammed was like a little fly before God. Can we believe him? Yes.

Among these religious teachers there is only one who says, "And I say to you," as if he is speaking on behalf of God.

Menn's fingers curl around his crucifix in a gesture that sets his Semitic features into sharp relief.

As the Gospel of John would say, "I and the Father are one." Among the great teachers of world religions, nobody ever said anything like that. This is the only instance in history when God so fully revealed himself through a man--Jesus Christ, the God-man.

It is a historical myth that Jesus simply preached morals. He could not be crucified for just doing that. Someone might say, "He called himself Messiah." Yes, but . . . [t]here were many false messiahs. Why was he so loved and hated? He said, "I am the door"-the door into eternity.

I believe that everything that is of value in Christianity is valuable only because it belongs to Christ. If it doesn't belong to Christ, it belongs to the same degree to Islam or Buddhism. So every religion is an attempt to reach God. But Jesus Christ is the only answer.

The Moscow State Radio interviewer must have nearly tipped over in his chair. But Menn went on, quietly driving the point home: "On one hand He is the framework of history. On the other He is totally unique. Christianity is unique because Christ is unique."

That was Menn's answer, pared down, given under the constraints of an interview to which the KGB was listening, as he was aware. And he was not finished; that was only the opening. He spoke with the same alert eloquence for another half-hour. It was July 19, 1990, and the disassembly of the Soviet system was nearly complete, or so consumers of television and newsweeklies in the United States would have said.

But before glasnost and perestroika were bywords on the nightly news, Menn was known across the Soviet Union as a beacon of spiritual reform. In his humble church in a Moscow suburb, where intelligentsia flocked, even unlettered workers could understand Menn's plain sermons and lecture presentations of the gospel. That gospel teaches how particular talents are given to believers; but the honed clarity that Menn exemplified does not drop from the stars.

2. Menn was born in Moscow in 1935. Both parents were Jews. His father, an engineer, was an official atheist and a nonpracticing Jew, but sympathetic to the Jewish community. In the early 1930s, during a period of anti-Christian purges, Menn's mother, Elena, met Father Serafim Batukov, a priest in the underground church. As a child, Elena had been a seeker after truth, and as a young woman, she became active in the Russian Zionist movement. Now she happily received Father Serafim's teachings.

Seven months after her first son, Alik, was born, Elena took him secretly to Father Serafim's house in Zagorsk. There she and her infant were baptized. She joined Father Serafim's community and moved to Zagorsk. Seven years later, as the elderly priest lay dying, he said to Elena, "Thanks to what you are enduring and to the serious way you are raising him, your Alik will someday be a great man."

Young Menn received the nurture of Father Serafim until the priest died, and then turned to Boris Vasilev, a scientist and theologian who was also a member of Serafim's church. At the age of 13, Menn knocked on the door of the Moscow Theological Seminary, located in Zagorsk, and asked to be admitted. He was turned down, but the dean of students was so impressed by the abilities of this prodigy-Menn had already begun to master Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as several modern European languages--that he became Menn's lifelong confidant.

Menn's younger brother, Pavel, an Orthodox believer who later taught Hebrew in Moscow, says Menn felt called to the ministry when he was 12 years old. "He sought out religious literature wherever he could find it. I can still see him in a Moscow market, poring over books by great religious philosophers. 'They inoculated me against the pestilence of Stalin,' he once told me. 'I trembled as I read.' "

At the age of 14, Menn began writing a life of Christ. Within the year, he finished a first draft--a book that eventually became the first volume in a series on the history of world religions. Menn loved the natural world and hoped to know it better, so he studied biology-first in Moscow, then at Irkutsk, in Sibera. He later said that because of his training under Vasilev he never sensed any contradiction between faith and science.

His roommate at Irkutsk was Gleb Yakunin, a biology student and an atheist. Menn persuaded Yakunin to rejoin the Russian Orthodox Church, where he had been baptized. (Yakunin was later ordained a priest; he became an outspoken defender of human rights in the Soviet Union and, after the overthrow of communism, served as a deputy in the Duma, the lower house of Russia's Parliament.) The year Menn was to receive his degree in biology, he was expelled from the institute as "a practicing church member."

Since he had sensed his call earlier, he entered the seminary at Zagorsk. The call was confirmed, he felt, in 1948, when Israel became a nation. He believed that if Jesus was the Messiah of Israel, the people of Israel would someday acknowledge that. Once they did, and were gathered from diaspora with a national identity, he believed they would begin to study what he called their "Jewish legacy-the New Testament." The need for Jewish preachers of the gospel at that time, he felt, would be momentous.

In 1958 he married, and that summer, on the feast of Pentecost, he was ordained a deacon. Two years later he was ordained a priest. He served parishes near Moscow, but only as an assistant because of the popularity of his ministry. Worship services, once attended only by elderly women, began to overflow with crowds attracted by his preaching. Menn baptized the songwriter Aleksandr Galich, the memoirist and cultural commentator Nadhezda Mandelstam (the widow of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a Soviet labor camp), and the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who was later to spend nearly seven years in the gulag.

Menn was a spiritual adviser to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov. Parishioners and friends, saved souls, described him as a man of joy, with unusual gifts of discernment; he seemed to sense spiritual needs intuitively, and he conveyed to others the love of Christ--a light-hearted spiritual healer. In nearly every photograph he is smiling the broad, clear smile of one whose joy springs straight from the heart.

Menn read all he could, and his memory was encyclopedic. He wrote a six-volume history of religious and philosophical thought in Eastern and Western cultures before Christ-beginning with the volume he had first drafted when he was 14, his life of Christ. The series ended with the New Testament teachings of Christ being spread throughout the world. In its entirety, that work, according to his biographer, Yves Hamant, exceeds 4,000 pages. In addition to another massive encyclopedic work, a seven-volume dictionary of biblical studies, Menn wrote many other books and essays, including books on Orthodox worship and on how to read the Bible--a necessity in tradition-fogged, officially atheist Russia.

The vibrancy of Jesus as revealed in the Gospels, Menn felt, had to reanimate the 1,000-year-old Orthodox church. And he was aware that its Russian branch had undergone compromises with the Soviet regime merely to exist. His books, circulated in samizdat, undid the Soviet claim that atheism was a science; they advanced Christianity as the true intellectual Way. These writings, Michael Meerson says, breathe out the appealing person of Christ. They brought about revival in the Orthodox church; thousands of young people were converted through Menn's work.

Menn's popularity aroused the IRE not only of government officials but also of clerics in the established church. They moved him from Moscow to the small parish of Novaya Derevnya.

Michael Meerson once visited Menn there, at the house where he lived for more than 20 years:

I found him working in his garden, watering plants. He was reading a book held in his left hand, reciting something to himself, while watering with his right hand. "What are you reciting, Father?" I asked him. "Dante's Divine Comedy," he replied. "I cannot live without it, I know it almost by heart, and reread it several times a year to keep it in my memory." . . . Conversation with him was an intellectual feast: his language was picturesque, full of puns, literary allusions, and quotations from memory of poetry, of the mystical literature of East and West, and of the Scriptures, which he knew brilliantly.

Certain members of the hierarchy of the Orthodox church hoped to suppress Menn--denouncing him within the church, and even publicly, to the press and Soviet authorities. Those authorities, who had shadowed Menn for years, finally moved in. For six years, the KGB kept him under surveillance, and during 1985 and 1986 they subjected him to searches and seizures and harassment. During this time, Menn often had to meet with the KGB several times a week. They threatened him with deportation and prison, trying to force him to sign a public denunciation of his ministry.

He refused. He was somehow able to negotiate his own terms, finally stating only this: that in the past he hadn't always behaved with proper caution and had made mistakes-a rudimentary confession for any sinner redeemed by Christ.

Menn was asked how he felt about being called in by the KGB so often, facing questions and threats. He said, "I'm a priest, I can talk to anybody. For me it's not difficult." When the recent change began in Russia, he said to a group of young professionals, "People see perestroika as a kind of panacea. 'Ah! Here's the solution for everything!' But that's not the way it works. We are living with the consequences of a colossal historical pathology [communism]. Our Church, our Russia, have been virtually destroyed, and the damage lives on, in people's souls, in the work ethic, in the family, and in the conscience."

But as the restrictions on religion lifted, Menn moved more freely and broadened his ministry. He visited schools and spoke to students, he gave public lectures--often taking on 20 speaking engagements a month, besides Bible studies and prayer meetings and daily pastoral duties at his church. He put in regular appearances on radio and TV. He was instrumental in organizing an ecumenical institute in Moscow. Asked how he kept up, he said, "I volunteer; God provides the time."

In the eyes of the Russian public, he took on the dimensions of a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov. And when Solzhenitsyn, then in exile in the United States, said that the single greatest hope for Russia was its underground church, he probably had Menn in mind. To American journalists, Solzhenitsyn's statement simply confirmed the "reactionary" turn he had revealed in his Harvard address. Clearly, the old man was out of touch. As it turned out, Solzhenitsyn's words were among the most prophetic spoken about modern Russia.

To his brother, Menn confessed that, after all the years of restrictions and imposed silence, he felt like "an arrow finally sprung from the bow." But a darker shadow was dogging him now. Death threats arrived in the mail. They may have originated with the KGB, or a worse tyranny--one of the heart. Menn had been speaking more about an ecumenicity not compartmentalized by denominations--a faith of universal victory in Jesus Christ--and zealots in the Orthodox church began to vilify him as a secret Catholic and crypto-Jew.

Those close to him believe that an ultra-conservative element of the KGB, or the church, or the two in concert, stirred members of the nationalistic group Pamyat to action against Menn.

It is an article of faith with Pamyat that being a Jew is a curse, and the group blames all of Russia's troubles on the Jews. In some of the later lectures Menn was giving, there were disruptions, and one night a group started shouting, "Get out, you Yid! Don't tell us about our Christian religion!"

In September 1990, Menn was invited to host a regular television show, broadcast from Moscow, on religion and culture. He was also asked to assume the position of rector at the Moscow Christian University. Threatening mail arrived, and it was blunt: accept either position, and you're dead. Menn set these threats aside, or read them in public, trying to pass them off. But parishioners and friends started accompanying him home from public appearances, and somebody close to him suggested he should emigrate to the West.

"Why?" Menn asked. "If God hasn't turned away from me, I have to stay and serve Him. And if He has turned away, where could I hide?"

3. The details of Menn's final hours can only be pieced together from fragmentary reports. The following account, set in reduced type, appears above Michael Meerson's chapter on Menn's life:

In the morning twilight, the village priest opened the door and headed for the train platform less than a half-mile away. It was Sunday, and Father Aleksandr Men' always caught the 6:50 a.m. elektrichka from his village near Zagorsk to his parish church in Novaia Derevnia, a small town outside Moscow. The priest kept walking along the asphalt path through the Semkhos Woods. Suddenly, from behind an oak, someone leapt out and swung an ax at Aleksandr Men'. An ax--the traditional Russian symbol of revolt, one of the symbols of the neo-fascist group Pamiat'. The blow hit Men' on the back of the skull. The wound was not very deep but it severed major arteries. The killer, police sources said, grabbed the priest's briefcase and disappeared into the woods. Father Aleksandr, bleeding, stumbled toward his home, walking a full three-hundred yards to his front gate at 3-A Parkovaia Street. Along the way, two women asked if he needed help. He said no, and they left. From her window, Natasha Men' saw a figure slumped near the gate and pressing the buzzer. She could not quite make out who it was in the half-light. She called an ambulance. In minutes, her husband was dead.

On the evening of September 8, the night before he was struck from behind with an ax, Menn gave a lecture in Moscow, with this at its very heart:

Some ants build; some ants sow and later reap the crop; and some apes fight and have wars although they are not as cruel as people are. But nothing in nature, except for man, ever tries to think of the meaning of life. Nothing climbs above its natural physical needs. No living creature, except for a man, is able to take a risk, and even the risk of death, for the sake of truth. Thousands of martyrs who have lived are a unique phenomenon in the history of all our solar system.

One pauses at that final sentence--so filled with implications. The conventional way to put it would be "martyrs who have died," and perhaps that was Menn's first choice. But he had just used "death" and, as a biologist, was speaking in a larger sense of life on the earth; so, "martyrs who have lived." But he understood the endlessness of every martyr's death; they live on in the memories of others and in their present-day effects on others' lives. But more clearly than most they live eternally in Christ.

As Menn had said about Jesus only two months before, responding to that Moscow radio interviewer, "Why was he so loved and hated?" After Menn's death, the highest officials in Russia, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, decried the brutality of his murder and demanded justice. But to this day, more than five years later, no one has been accused, and not even one person has been arrested. All official reports of the police claim that the motive for his murder was robbery.

How? What self-respecting thief, much less one willing to murder, would imagine a priest carrying a briefcase to a Sunday morning train a likely mark? No, what took place perhaps originated in the government itself; the hidden factions conferred and decided they had had enough. They were aware of the meaning for Russians of the icon and the ax: the one a symbol of enduring religion, the other brute force--and thus designated by Stalin to be used on Trotsky. They would smash Menn the icon with an ax.

It was probably actually a camper's hatchet, chosen for its suitability to their plan of stealth. They had shadowed Menn enough to know he walked alone on Sunday to the train to make his morning service. A central patch of the woods he passed through was deserted then. One of them--no, cowards must have company--two would loiter on the asphalt path, acting as lookouts and bait--and one for each arm if Menn should resist. They would look confused, act lost, perhaps hold a scrap of paper with a map scrawled on it.

Better, they would have a transcript of Menn's talk, distributed the night before, audaciously entitled merely Christianity. They would approach him with concern, saying, "Father, is it true you really said this?"--pointing to the central statement. "Martyrs who have lived?"

That was the cue for the man behind the oak, hidden in the spot where police found underbrush trampled--trampled first to silence his rush, then from the fellow's restless fear--primed-for-action by liquid courage, vodka, sweating as he writhed to bring himself under control yet remain hidden. But quiet, here he comes.

No one who leads a straightforward life imagines he'll be attacked from behind. Menn saw the pair ahead and braced himself, then noticed their bedraggled state, their worn clothes and scuffed shoes and slack-lipped look of apprehensive shame--more of the pitiable alcoholics who'd been bedding in Semkhoz park, homeless derelicts.

"Father?" one said, and seemed so sorrowful he had trouble swallowing. Since Menn had been appearing in papers and on television, strangers everywhere recognized and spoke to him. "Father, is is it true?" the other asked, and seemed unable to get his breath, his mouth hanging open. "Did you say this?" He held the printed pages up.

Menn set his briefcase on the walk, drew his reading glasses from a pocket of his windbreaker, and slipped them on. "Now, my friends, what?"

At his voice, the one hidden sprang and struck. Menn fell to the ground, silent. In the silence one grabbed his briefcase, snapping it open, and the assassin dropped the hatchet inside. The other snapped it closed--a sound like a pair of dull pistol shots in the morning woods--and walked off one way while the other two set off in separate directions of their own, as prearranged.

In Menn, consciousness trembled to life. Like most who suffer a blow to the head, he had no memory of the moment leading to it. He was on his way to the train for morning services and somehow had fallen. He got to his feet, off-balance, feeling faint, and understood he should have . . . He couldn't draw the thought to completion. In the distance, he could hear the approaching train.

He started for it, his legs like molecular tree trunks shedding their substance and felt he was pouring sweat. He put a hand to his neck and in the dim morning light it came away black. Perceptions reversed. Or he cut himself when he fell. In a swirl of darkness he felt suspended across the distances of time and space he imagined Jesus occupying, and then he remembered his briefcase.

He swung around and when he came to the place where he'd started from, he wanted to lie down. Two women were approaching. Natasha? No. But now that was his purpose: to see her. He shoved his hand in his pocket and steadied his walk. "Are you hurt, Father? Do you need help?"

"No, fine."

He jolted above them like a striding colossus, the dissolving trunks of his legs spanning nebulae, and then his consciousness started fraying at its edges like a windowscreen being ripped to shreds. His heart hit his ribs so hard he had to admit he was dying. He squinted out one dim chink of consciousness left. In the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus . . . The words matched his gait, drawing him along a line he couldn't otherwise manage, and he repeated them until he could see his house ahead, a light in it, the gate.

He was there when he knew he wouldn't make it. He forced himself to take a last step and dove, striking the palings of a fence-bars holding him from the garden where his Savior suffered. He was jolted awake by that last vestige of pride, what he said to the women along his route who offered him help: No, fine. His body would not respond when he tried to move but finally he forced a hand as far as the bell. Then the subatomic insubstantiality of the world gave way, its veil parting, and he passed through the palings and everything he had known to exist into the solidity of everlasting light.

Natasha Menn saw a man slumped against the garden gate and phoned for an ambulance, assuming she was ministering to a drunk. When the man didn't move, she felt drawn to him, and cautiously opened the door. "Don't tell me," she said to the crowd already gathering, meaning she now knew.

At Menn's burial, in the churchyard of the parish he served for 22 years, a peasantlike crowd gathered with the intellectuals, and Gleb Yakunin delivered Menn's eulogy.

After the burial, a reporter for the "New York Times" found a woman praying at Menn's grave. She was in her eighties, a member of Father Serafim's catacomb church, as it turned out. She had known Menn since he was baptized. "The final path of this holy man was marked with his own blood!" she cried. And then, "I remember when he was a boy his mother showed me that he had written 'Defeat evil with good.' That is exactly how he turned out."

Four of Menn's television shows had been taped, but an unknown hand erased the tapes. In 1994, the Radio-1 Division of Russian State Radio began to air audiotapes of his lectures, and 70,000 letters from listeners arrived at the studios. The director of Radio-1, in a weekly report his duties demanded, wrote that, due to the response, the program was being moved from midnight to 10:30 p.m., and added, "The strength of the program consists in Aleksandr Menn's amazing understanding of the Russian soul and his remarkable intellect of truly global range."

When a parishioner of Menn's heard about this, he remembered that one of Menn's last sermons was taken from the first chapter of the Revelation of Saint John--when John beholds the glorified Christ. And the parishioner heard Menn's voice again as he placed an electrifying emphasis on this statement of Jesus, "I am he who lives and was dead; and behold, I am alive forevermore."

1. Michael Meerson, "The Life and Work of Aleksandr Men'," in "Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia," Ukraine, and Georgia, edited by Stephen K. Batalden (Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). I have also drawn heavily on Meerson's chapter for the facts of Menn's life; Meerson, from all that I have sorted through, seems (given my imperfect perspective) to be the most consistently accurate. Other aids included an article in "Frontier" magazine, January-March 1993; Mark Elliot's reports from the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Marxism, at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; News Network International reports; the Keston News Service, of Keston College, Kent, England; stories in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune; Lawrence Elliot, "Murder of a Russian Priest," "Reader's Digest," September 1991; and Yves Hamant, "Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia, a Man for Our Times" (Torrance, Calif.: Oakwood Publications, 1995), presently the only available biography of Menn.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 23

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