Alexander Men was an Orthodox priest who spoke to people as if they had minds of their own. In the Soviet years his parishioners were physicists, biologists, painters, poets — an intelligentsia convinced that faith and science could not be reconciled. Men showed them otherwise.
He was born in Moscow in 1935, into a Jewish family, and baptized in infancy. He studied at the Fur Institute — the only school that would take him without obstruction — was ordained in 1960, and served in parishes outside Moscow.
Son of Man, his life of Christ, was written in the 1960s and passed from hand to hand in samizdat. Then came The History of Religion, in seven volumes, running from primitive cults to Christianity — an attempt to show that the religious quest is one of the central human occupations, not a relic.
The KGB kept him under watch. In 1990, on his way to church one morning, he was struck down with an axe. The murder has never been solved. He was fifty-five. Every Sunday, people still come to his grave at Semkhoz.