In 1969, Anglican priest Michael Bourdeaux and his colleagues established the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism (CSRC) - later Keston College - which is often mentioned as playing an important role in drawing attention to religious believers in the Soviet Union. Yet, its role has thus far not been analyzed extensively. This article considers the role played by Bourdeaux and his colleagues on the "religious front" of the Cold War, both before the establishment of the CSRC and in its early years. A historical contextual analysis of Bourdeaux's portrayals of internal church conflicts in the USSR in the 1960s indicates that his work occasionally reinforced a dichotomous conception of the Soviet Christian 'other' as either sufferer or collaborator. The article argues that from 1959 to 1975, an everincreasing westward flow of Soviet samizdat from religious believers allowed Bourdeaux and his organization to disseminate largely accurate information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union to a wide audience of journalists, scholars, and Christian churches in the West.

Keywords: Cold War, human rights, dissent, religious liberty, Russian Orthodox Church, Evangelical Christians-Baptists, Michael Bourdeaux, Keston College.

French E. Michael Burdo and the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism in the Context of Protecting Religious Freedom (1959-1975) / / State, Religion, Church in Russia and abroad. 2017. N 1. pp. 216-243.

French, April (2017) "Michael Bourdeaux, the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism, and the Defense of Religious Liberty, 1959-1975", Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom 35(1): 216-243.

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In May 1974, the British Christian publication Life of Faith published a brief article. It discussed the Soviet press's close attention to the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism, a British organization that mainly studied violations of the rights of believers in the USSR and Eastern European countries. The publication mentions the article "Agitator", written by A.V. Belov and D. A. Shilkin, which, in particular, states::

Center for the Study of Religion and Communism ... It serves as a gathering place for militant churchmen in the name of fighting communism... It is no coincidence that the center is headed by Michael Bourdeau , a slanderer and lampoonist, the author of several books and articles that give a distorted view of the situation of religion and the church in socialist countries. It is precisely because of this that the BBC and Radio Liberty use Bourdeau's services and quite often broadcast his speeches addressed to Soviet listeners.1
This report shows not only the close attention of the Soviet press to its Western counterparts and, conversely, the Western press to the Soviet publications of the detente period, but also indicates that by 1974 the organization, which existed for less than five years, had already managed to arouse the ire of members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (hereinafter - CPSU). This is not surprising, given the CPSU's penchant for monitoring the anti-communist and anti-Soviet activities of foreign religious and human rights organizations.2 What do we know about the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism (which became known as Keston College after it moved to Keston in 1974) ? Were Belov and Shilkin right in claiming that the Center was waging a war on communism and calling Bourdeau, an Anglican priest and founder of the Center, a "slanderer and lampoonist"?

1. "Soviet Attacks on CSRC", Life of Faith, May 25, 1974, archived at the Keston Center for the Study of Religion, Politics and Society (KCRPS), Box W-88.1 "Bourdeaux Writings and correspondence, etc. "/ Folder"Writing - Life of Faith". Life of Faith apparently got this information from the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism. This is a reverse translation from English.

2. See for example: RGANI F. 5, Op. 33, d. 233 (1966-1968, on the intensification of religious activities hostile to the USSR abroad); F. 89, Op. 37, D. 50 (1976, on the anti-Soviet campaign inspired in the West against the use of psychiatry in the USSR for political purposes); F. 89, Op. 32, d. 13 (1979, on the Vatican); F. 89, Op. 11, D. 46 (1986, on the Vatican).

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Although Bourdeau and his organization are often cited as drawing attention to the problems of believers in the USSR, their role has not yet been thoroughly investigated. 3 This article examines the role of Michael Burdo and his colleagues on the" religious front " of the Cold War, both before the creation of the Center and in the early years of its existence, up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.Burdo and the Center tried to determine the actual situation of believers both in the Soviet Union and in the rest of Eastern Europe. This article presents a brief historical and contextual analysis of Bourdeau's writings on the internal conflicts in the Russian Orthodox Church and Evangelical Baptist Christians in the sixties. The ever-increasing flow of Soviet religious samizdat to the West allowed Burdo and his organization to draw the attention of a wide audience of journalists, academics, and members of Christian churches to human rights violations in the USSR.

This article claims that Bourdeau and his young organization spread generally truthful information in the West about violations of the rights of believers in the Soviet Union and in Eastern European countries. Although this information partly contributed to the spread of the incomplete, dichotomous concept of the "other," that is, the Soviet Christian, as either a sufferer or an opportunist, Bourdeau and his colleagues were unwavering in their mission to serve as the "voice" of believers from communist countries.

Michael Bourdeau and the early history of the Center

The Center for the Study of Religion and Communism (later known as Keston College)was established as an independent educational organization in 1969.4 As an independent organization, it had a much broader reach than international confessional organizations such as, for example, the Lutheran World Federation. Also, though

3. Среди недавних исключений - Hurst, Mark (2016) "From Toothache to Keston, via Moscow: Michael Bourdeaux and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism", British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985, pp. 115-46. London: Bloomsbury; Leuhrmann, SonMa (2015) "Counter-Archives: Sympathy on Record", in Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge, pp. 134-161. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

4. Ksenia Dennen, interview with the author, London, September 2, 2016.

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although he had a number of religious patrons, including the successive Archbishops of Canterbury and the Archbishops of Westminster, as well as Immanuel Jakubowicz, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, 5 his researchers were not pressured by a host of founders with opposing political views, as was often the case, for example, with the World Council of Churches (WCC)6.

The history of this organization begins with Michael Bourdeau (born in 1934), who received a bachelor's degree (1957) in the program of Russian and French studies (Russian and French studies), as well as a master's degree in theology (1959), both at the University of Oxford. In 1959, Burdo turned down the opportunity to spend a year in Serbia as part of the World Council of Churches in order to be part of the first group of hastily assembled graduate students sent to the Soviet Union by the British Council under the recent cultural exchange agreement between the two countries. Of the seventeen British exchange students, Bourdeau was the only one interested in Russian history, human rights issues, and the Russian Church.7 Shortly after arriving in Moscow, where he stayed in a Moscow State University dorm, he purchased the very first edition of the journal Science and Religion, which he called " the flagship of the anti-religious campaign." He read every new issue that came out that year. Here are the words of Burdo himself about the time spent in Moscow:

I ended up in Moscow ... at the same time that Khrushchev was launching his anti-religious campaign. What did the world know about this campaign? Absolutely nothing. I was told - and that was the only thing I was told - that things were going better with Khrushchev, that he was the new face of the Soviet Union.... It took me a long time ... to understand the seriousness of the anti-religious campaign.... What did I know about the anti-religious campaign in 1959? ... [If for-

5. Michael Bourdeau, interview with the author, Iffley, September 6, 2016. These patrons did not provide financial support, but their names were mentioned in some publications of the Center and Keston College.

6. См., например, Gill, Jill K. (2003) "The Decline of Real Ecumenism: Robert Bilheimer and the Vietnam War", The Journal of Presbyterian History 81(4): 242-63; Lodberg, Peter (1999) "World Council of Churches", Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 12(2): 527-36; Ucko, Hans (2010) "Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue", in Leo Kenis, Jaak Billiet, and Patrick Pasture (eds) The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe (1945-2000), pp. 221-35. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

7. Interview with Burdo (2016).

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to look at my diary from that time, it's really strange how little I knew ... although religion in Russia was a secret area of my research 8.

The phenomena of religious life that Bourdeau was able to observe in Moscow inflamed his curiosity and prompted further research. After returning to England in 1960, he was ordained in the Church of England and began working as a parish priest in Middlesex, North London. In 1961, he published his first article in The Observer, where he described his observations made while communicating with young Christians in Soviet Russia.9 In the same year, he visited the Soviet Union again, coming to the British Trade Fair in Moscow. By 1964, Bourdeau had completed the manuscript of a book on religion in the Soviet Union, which one publisher was willing to publish, provided it was supplemented with more up-to-date information. At about the same time, Professor Nikolai Zernov (1898-1980) asked Bourdeau to come to Oxford, where he showed him several letters in Russian that had just been received through communication channels with Russian emigrants in Paris. The letters-eyewitness accounts written for believers in the West by two women named Barabbas and Pronina-described in detail the situation faced by the monks of the Pochaev Lavra in Ukraine. Bourdeau recalls that when he read the letters, he thought to himself: "You can't just sit in a parish and wait for something to happen. I have to start doing something. " 10
In August 1964, Bourdeau took another opportunity to visit Moscow with a group of American tourists. On his first night in Moscow, he went to see the ruins of the recently destroyed Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord.11 There, he noticed two women trying to peer through a hastily erected fence at the ruins. Bourdeau approached the women to ask what was there

8. Ibid. For the history of the early stages of the anti-religious campaign (1958-1964), as they concerned the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, see T. A. Chumachenko State, Orthodox Church, believers, 1941-1961. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999.

9. Bourdeaux, Michael (29 Jan 1961) "A Student in Moscow: Russia's Young Christians", The Observer, KCRPS, Box W-88.1 / Folder "Writing: Observer".

10. Interview with Burdo (2016).

11. This church was destroyed on July 18, 1964 under the pretext of building the Kirov line of the Moscow Metro. It was recently restored. Patriarch Kirill consecrated the new church in May 2015.

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happened. When they realized that he was a foreigner who wanted to learn more about the situation of believers in the Soviet Union, they asked him to follow them. As soon as they arrived at the house on the outskirts of Moscow, a conversation ensued. As it turned out, both women arrived in Moscow that day from Ukraine in search of a foreigner to whom they could tell about the situation in the Pochaev Lavra. It was the same Theodosia Barabbas and her friend, Anastasia Pronina! They gave Bourdeau their new letters, and he asked what else he could do for them, to which they replied, " Be our voice. Speak for us. " 12 Considering this a clear case of divine intervention, Bourdeau recalls:

This has become the guiding principle of my life: to speak not in my own voice, but in theirs. This was the credo from which Keston was born a few years later: to represent objectively and fairly the voice coming from the Soviet Union, which I heard more and more clearly. There and then I decided that I should give up my work in the parish. If God has shown me so clearly what I must do, I must make a sacrifice 13.

When Bourdeau returned to London, he quit his job and finished his book, Opium of the People. At the end of this work, published in 1965, he analyzed the relationship between the WCC and the Russian Orthodox Church, criticizing the editors of the WCC bulletin "Current Developments in the Eastern European Churches" for failing to respond to "a single 'current process' of extreme importance, the most important since the publication of the first edition of the Russian Orthodox Church." issues of the bulletin [1959]: new persecutions to which Christians in Russia are currently subjected". And then: "Reading about the scale of anti-religious propaganda should not be a substitute for finding facts about the real state of affairs." 14 In conclusion-

12. Interview with Burdo (2016).

13. Ibid.

14. Bourdeaux, Michael (1965) Opium of the People, p. 230. L.: Faber & Faber. This early criticism of the WCC calls into question Mark Hurst's claim (From Toothache to Keston, via Moscow, p. 141) that Bourdeau did not oppose the WCC until his Sir Daniel Stevenson lecture at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in October 1984. This was the moment when tensions between Bourdeaux / Keston College and the WCC peaked. Bourdeaux, Michael (1985) "The Russian Church, Religious Liberty, and the World Council of Churches", Religion in Communist Lands 13(1): 4-27.

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nie Bourdeau strongly criticized the Soviet policy on religion:

The persecution that is currently being attempted to eradicate organized religion in the USSR is the greatest stain on the reputation of a nation that has many remarkable qualities and infinite potential... The Soviet government wants to have a phantom Church: without followers inside the USSR, but with strong international connections that can be used to support Soviet strategy. We need to let them know that we've figured out their plans, and we're not impressed 15.

Although the book was viewed fairly favorably by Western readers, it was also criticized. Among them was Patriarch Alexy I, who wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Michael Ramsay, complaining that Bourdeau was "falsifying and perverting the state of religion and church life in the USSR." 16 Although Bourdeau was unaware of this at the time, his loud statements against the Soviet state and the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church The churches in this book led to his "lifelong suspension from direct, direct participation in ecumenical processes." 17
Nevertheless, the book Opium of the People brought Bourdeau to the attention of others in the West who were interested in the position of religion behind the Iron Curtain. At the suggestion of Paul B. Anderson (1894-1985, former editor of the Paris YMCA Press and founder of the American quarterly journal Religion in Communist Dominated Areas), who had just read Bourdeau's book, the American scholar William Fletcher (1932-2014) invited Bourdeau to work as a part-time researcher at his new organization, the Centre de Recherches et d'Etude des Institutions Religieuses (Center for Research of Religious Institutions) in the same-

For a newspaper report and public discussion in the form of letters to the editor after the 1984 Bourdeau lecture, see KCRPS, Box W-86.1 "Keston Institute general files about center (1984-2005)" / GEN 15/11 Center for the Study of Religion & Communism, Folder 7 of 7.

15. Bourdeaux, M. Opium of the People, pp. 232-233.

16. Letter of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy to Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan / / Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1966. N 6: 3.

17. Michael Bourdeau, an unpublished memoir provided by Bourdeau to the author in 2015.

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the Neva River. Bourdeau worked for this organization remotely, from London, on a part-time basis, as a specialist on the Soviet Union. His job was to read hundreds of materials from the Soviet press: The most important publications are published in large magazines and provincial newspapers, and their systematic generalization and translation is carried out. It was painstaking work. Despite Bourdeau's doubts about whether to rely on anti-religious propaganda as a reliable source of information, this work gave him an even clearer understanding of how Soviet and party officials saw and portrayed believers.18
By 1966, the samizdat of Evangelical Baptist Christians was already making its way West. Fletcher introduced Bourdeau to one of the earliest documents. They sharply disagreed about how to treat samizdat. Fletcher doubted whether it could be used at all, but Bourdeau, who was able to verify the authenticity of some of the Baptist stories in the Soviet press and personally met with the authors of protest letters about the Pochaev Lavra, claimed to ignore "new and exciting information coming from Baptists" or situations similar to those encountered monks of the Pochaev Lavra, it would mean to miss the opportunity to get a complete picture of what is really happening 19.

Despite the general opinion that the anti-religious campaign was officially ended when Leonid Brezhnev came to power in October 1964, the violation of the rights of so - called "sectarians" - especially those who were not officially registered-continued for a long time. At the beginning of 1967, Burdeau, who was receiving more and more samizdat from Soviet Baptists, asked Ksenia Howard-Johnston (born in 1944, who had recently graduated from Oxford with a degree in Russian) to help him

18. Interview with Burdo (2016).

19. Ibid. The discussion on how to use samizdat has been going on for several years. In 1971, Radio Liberty hosted a round table in London where Michael Bourdeau, Peter Reddway, and Leonard Shapiro (along with several others, including researcher Max Hayward) discussed exactly how to handle and distribute the massive influx of samizdat from dissidents from the USSR. This discussion led to the creation of the now famous "Samizdat Archive". Boiter, Albert (1972) "Samizdat: Primary Source Material in the Study of Current Soviet Affairs", The Russian Review 31(3): 282-285. A recording of this round table entitled "The Future of Samizdat: Significance & Prospects" is available in the KCRPS archive, Box W-88.1, Folder "Writing: Radio Liberty General Correspondence".

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process documents and translate them for possible publication. The two of them started working on the samizdat materials, including the entire transcript of the 1968 trial of Aida Skripnikova. The transcript consisted of several long handwritten strips of cloth that must have been smuggled out of the Soviet Union wrapped around the foreigner's waist.20 Bourdeau and Howard-Johnston have published the fruits of their work in four books.21
In the meantime, Bourdeau established contacts with Sir John Lawrence (1907-1999, a diplomat who spent several years in the Soviet Union and made an important contribution to the creation of the European Branch of the Air Force World Service in 1939), Peter Reddway (born 1939, then a young lecturer at the London School of Economics and a specialist in the emerging Soviet dissident movement) and Professor Leonard Shapiro of the London School of Economics (1908-1983, expert on Soviet communism). In 1969, Bourdeau met with Lawrence, Reddway, Shapiro, and Howard-Johnston, and they decided to create an independent organization in Britain that would study religion in the Soviet Union. Bourdeau recalled :" I was absolutely convinced that the idea of an objective study of religion in Russia ... it's good, but [Fletcher] went in the wrong direction. " 22 The five founders formed the original Board of Management of the organization, with Sir John Lawrence at its head; the charter was approved in 1970. The new organization began its work with a very limited budget. Bourdeau, who was appointed director of the Center, and Howard-Johnston worked at the kitchen table at his home in Chislehurst, London, while Bourdeau's wife, Gillian (d. 1978), worked part-time for them as a secretary and assistant. 23 Bourdeau and Goh-

20. Ibid.; Dennen, interview (2016).

21. Bourdeaux, Michael (1968) Religious Ferment in Russia: Protestant Opposition to Soviet Religious Policy. London: Macmillan; Howard-Johnston, Xenia and Harris, Rosemary (ed.) (1969) Christian Appeals from Russia, with an introduction by Michael Bourdeaux. London: Hodder and Stoughton; Bourdeaux, Michael (1971) Faith on Trial in Russia. New York: Harper & Row; Howard-Johnston, Xenia and Bourdeaux, Michael (ed.) (1972) Aida of Leningrad: The Story of Aida Skripnikova. London: Mowbrays.

22. Bourdeau, interview (2016)

23. At the end of 1967. Ksenia Howard-Johnston went to study at the London School of Economics to get a master's degree in Russian politics, then she began working part-time for Michael Bourdeau and part-time for Leonard Shapiro. She worked with them until 1981.-

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During the years of thinking about and planning the Center's ideas, Ward-Johnston delivered numerous grueling lectures, traveling all over the UK to communicate with church and university groups and share with them the stories collected during the processing of samizdat materials, to enlist the necessary support for the organization.24
In the five years leading up to the Center's founding, Bourdeau worked as an independent publicist, covering the deteriorating situation of believers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In a situation where the theory of secularization dominated among scholars, so that these scholars ignored the importance of religion as such, when organizations such as the World Council of Churches made programmatic statements about religious freedom, but did not take any official position on human rights violations in the USSR, this was a difficult task25. In 1968 alone, Bourdeau produced twenty-seven separate radio programs about religion in the USSR on Radio Liberty. They were translated into Russian and broadcast to the Soviet Union on Radio Free Europe every two weeks, alternating with a different program - Father Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) .26 Given the clearly anti-communist nature of Radio Free Europe, these broadcasts were one of the reasons why Communist officials considered Bourdeau a " slanderer and lampoonist". He has also written and presented hundreds of articles for Desyat-

gda gave birth to her first child. Although she left her position at Keston College, Ksenia Howard-Johnston remained a member of the Keston Board of Founders, and in 2002 became head of the Keston Institute. Dennen, interview (2016).

24. Ibid.

25. For the WCC's many policy statements on religious freedom in 1968, see Wood, James E. Jr. (1968)" Religious Liberty in Ecumenical and International Perspective", Journal of Church and State 10(3): 421-36. For a growing criticism of the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in the WCC during the Cold War era, including accusations that the WCC was manipulated to keep the Council from taking a public position on violations of the rights of believers, see Simon, Gerhard (1974) Church, State, and Opposition in the USSR, translated by Kathleen Matchett in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 117-125; Cviic, K. F. (1979) "The Politics of the World Council of Churches", The World Today 35(9): 369-376; Lefever, Ernest (1979) Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Lefever, Ernest (1988) Nairobi to Vancouver: The World Council of Churches and the World, 1975-1987. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center.

26. Michael Bourdeau, email to the author, November 16, 2016; KCRPS, Box W-88.1, Folder: "Writings: Radio Liberty 1968".

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There are many religious and secular periodicals; some of them have never been published. From the late sixties to the early seventies, he conducted semi-regular correspondence with newspapers such as The New York Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. Some of these newspapers published his articles or included information received from him in their editorial columns. 27 In 1972, The Sunday Telegraph published an article by Bourdeau and co-authors: "for the first time in history, such a lengthy report on Christianity in the USSR appeared" in a major newspaper. According to Bourdeau, the publication of this article was a sign "that the Western world is finally beginning to understand how important religion continues to play in Russia." 28
In the same year, the Center's Board of Management invited Howard-Johnston to become editor of a new magazine, Religion in Communist Lands, whose first issue appeared in early 1973. [29] In her first editorial column, Howard-Johnston wrote:

The Center hopes that Religion in Communist Lands will play an important educational role and that it will become a platform for presenting and discussing all aspects of the religious situation in communist societies, both positive and negative. The Center is a research organization that does not adhere to a specific point of view; it stands outside politics and is independent of religious affiliation.30
Indeed, everyone who was involved in the work of the Center (and later Keston College) in the early years of its existence, insist that their organization was, first of all, non-educational-

27. KCRPS, Box W-88.1: "Bourdeaux Writings and correspondence, etc."

28. Bourdeaux, M. Aida of Leningrad, p. 109. Bourdeaux wrote this article ("Martyrs of Religious Protest", Sunday Telegraph, 28 May 1972) in collaboration with five other people; it was reprinted in: Howard-Johnston, K. and Bourdeaux, M. (ed.) Aida of Leningrad, pp. 109-120.

29. Dennen, interview (2016). This magazine still exists today. Its current name is Religion, State and Society.

30. Howard-Johnston, Xenia (1973)" Editorial", Religion in Communist Lands 1(1): 6. Dennen (interview, 2016) admits that the work they did " on behalf of the faithful was politicized ... by the communist authorities ... [because] ... every aspect of communist society is politicized, so that any expression of support for a group that the authorities did not approve of was considered a political act. But from our point of view, [our activities] were just supporting a religious group."

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a political association that has committed itself to spreading well-researched, objective scientific information-despite constant accusations of promoting a highly ideologized "point of view" 31. Ksenia (Howard-Johnston) Dennen, who now heads the Keston Institute, says that the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism was actually created as a "hybrid" with two goals. First, the scientific goal was formulated as a study of "religion in communist countries"; it was expressed in the determination of the members of the Center to rely as thoroughly as possible on "documentary evidence" and "create an archive". Second, the goal of the Center's members was "popularization"; this goal was embodied in the dissemination of up-to-date information by the Keston News Service (founded by Bourdeau in 1974), as well as in additional publications, lectures, and radio interviews.32
Religious Ferment in Russia and Patriarch & Prophets: a Historical and Contextual analysis

In the late sixties, shortly before the creation of the Center, Bourdeau published two books: Religious Ferment in Russia (1968, about evangelical Baptist Christians) and Patriarch & Prophets (1969, about the Russian Orthodox Church)33. Since both books discuss internal church conflicts that were primarily caused by Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign, but continued afterward, a brief historical and contextual analysis of these works will allow us to assess how successfully and accurately Bourdeau presented the situation in the Soviet Union at that time. Critical to this analysis are (a) the variety and types of documents published in the books, (b) how Soviet intra-church conflicts were depicted or interpreted, and (c) the historical assessment of each book in terms of accuracy and completeness.

31. Hurst, M. "From Toothache to Keston, via Moscow", pp. 126-128; Bourdeau, interview (2016); Dennen, interview (2016); Philip Walters, interview with Mark Hurst, May 19, 2010, in Hurst, M. "From Toothache to Keston, via Moscow", p. 127.

32. Dennen, interview (2016).

33. Bourdeaux, M. Religious Ferment; Bourdeaux, Michael (1969) Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church Today. London: Macmillan.

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The book" A Piece of Religious Russia " was an attempt by Bourdeau to understand the situation of Evangelical Baptist Christians who went through a public all-Union church schism in the early to mid-sixties. The book traces the history of this internal disagreement from 1960 to 1966, when a group that later headed the structure of the Council of Evangelical Christian Baptist Churches (ECB, also known as the Initiative Group, or Organizing Committee (Organizing Committee), or the so-called Prokofievites) opposed the official All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists (VSEKHB), and then it completely separated from him 34. In The Patriarch and the Prophets, Bourdeau explored the history of the persecution of Orthodox laity and clergy from the mid-1950s to 1967, while highlighting some particularly major internal divisions that turned some of the Orthodox intelligentsia and clergy against the Moscow Patriarchate. These schisms were revealed in 1965 thanks to the letters of priests Gleb Yakunin (1936-2014) and Nikolai Eshliman (1929-1985) , who together with Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin (1915-1991), Boris Talantov (1903-1971) and Bishop Hermogenes (1896-1978) played the role of prophets in Bourdeau's book - "passionate voices of those who seek new paths"35. Bourdeau writes that the two books "were conceived together, they emerged as a result of the brutal policy that the Soviet government began to pursue against religion in the last years of Mr. Khrushchev's rule." 36
Each book consisted mainly of quotations drawn from three main types of sources: 1) the Soviet and party press and propaganda; 2) documents and statements of the official church; 3) samizdat materials prepared by those who were in opposition to the official church in view of its alleged complicity in the activities of state officials on religious issues who refused to participate in the official church's activities.-

34. For a historical review of these differences, see: Sinichkin A.V. History of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR from December 1959 to 1966 (History and analysis of the crisis in the ECB brotherhood). Graduate work. Moscow: Moscow Theological Seminary of Evangelical Baptist Christians, 2001.

35. Bourdeaux, M. Patriarch and Prophets, p. 11. For an outdated but high-quality historical study of this conflict, see the work of Bourdeaux's colleague, Jane Ellis: Ellis, Jane (1986) Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

36. Bourdeaux, M. Patriarch and Prophets, p. 11.

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to know the suffering of those who were supposedly under their care. The "Particle of Religious Russia" mainly cited quotes from central and provincial newspapers, but samizdat materials (often obtained through the samizdat magazine of the ECB Social Center "Bratsky Listok" and the magazine of Russian emigrants "Posev") 37. Statements were also widely presented. All of them were used, but to a much smaller extent. Bourdeau speaks about this imbalance in the preface, where he expresses "regret" that so far he has not been able to find more statements from the official leadership and that he can only count on the censored publication Bratsk Vestnik, which, for obvious reasons, occupies a "very blurry" position compared to the EXB SC. which he calls "reformers" in the book. Bourdeau hopes "that soon those who sympathize with the official leadership will be able to describe the true state of affairs with all openness." 38 In The Patriarch and the Prophets, Bourdeau relies more on samizdat materials (some of them were purchased from the emigrant magazine Vestnik Russkogo Studentskogo Chistianskogo Dvizheniya) than on the Soviet and party press or on magazines like Nauki I Religii. Again, the statements of the Moscow Patriarchate are presented to a lesser extent, and most of them are taken from the official censored "Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate". Speaking of this imbalance, Bourdeau writes:

The problem of a balanced representation of two positions turned out to be unsolvable. In this book, new voices are given the opportunity to be heard: in other places, they do not have the opportunity to be fully heard, while Patriarchal officials have the opportunity to speak at large conferences of clergy around the world. The Moscow Patriarchate was unable to use its privileged position for any adequate discussion of the internal processes of church life. Attempt

37. Despite hundreds of newspaper citations, Bourdeau actually studied a lot of small excerpts from fifteen to twenty articles from various central and provincial newspapers. См. Bourdeaux, M. Religious Ferment, pp. 125-53, 239-43. Bourdeau's association with Fletcher's organization probably made it easier for him to access the Soviet and party press used in both books.

38. Ibid., p. x.

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to do so would jeopardize the very foundation of its relations with the State.39
Since each of these books largely consists of excerpts or full-text quotations from documents, it can be assumed that Bourdeau's own opinion is rather muted, but his interpretation of the stories of internal conflicts captured in documents is visible in every work.40 Calling representatives of the ECB " reformers "and hinting that Orthodox dissidents are" prophets", he thus highly appreciates those who simultaneously criticize both the state that represses believers for violating its own laws, and the official position of the church, which appears to be colluding with the state. While Bourdeau respected dissidents for their courage, he also understood that the situation on the ground was probably more complex and less clear-cut than could be reflected in the documents in his possession or in the hostile anti-religious propaganda. For example, in" Particle of Religious Russia " he writes:

Any church that exists in a communist country (or, for that matter, in an industrialized Western society...) exists in a situation of more or less compromise. Therefore, we do not want to make any moral judgments about the compromises that Russian church leaders have made to ensure that organized Christian life can continue in their country. We only want to provide evidence that the statements in Bratsk Vestnik may conceal undercurrents of thought about which we have no information. Any statement in this publication will be read not only by believers, but also by the communist authorities. For this reason, these statements may not make the same impression on both parties.41
Similarly, Bourdeau begins his book on the Orthodox Church:

39. Bourdeaux, M. Patriach and Prophets, p. 12.

40. In Religious Ferment, Bourdeau's position is more clearly expressed, as it was his dissertation (Oxford University BD, 1969).

41. Bourdeaux, M. Religious Ferment, p. 41.

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In the Old Testament, there was a long conflict between the official cult religion, personified in the figure of a priest, and the fervent call to repentance coming from the prophet. It was not a dramatically unambiguous choice between good and evil, but a creative tension in which both elements were necessary for the formation of Jewish religious consciousness... We believe that this conflict [in the Russian Orthodox Church] is also creative, and that, ultimately, both Baptists and Orthodox will come to the conclusion that no one's position should completely exclude the other, if the church is to play a full role in the development of society.42
Given the limited sources that Bourdeau was able to study and publish in the late sixties, as well as his lack of access to State and party archives, he did a remarkable job of reconstructing the history of internal conflicts that tore apart the Baptist and Orthodox Churches. His understanding of the evolution of Soviet legislation on religion, the problems that many communities faced in obtaining official registration, and even some internal documents that were not fully available until decades later, is truly impressive.43 In the years to come, Bourdeau and his colleagues will have even more information about religion in the Soviet Union. But already in the late sixties, relying on samizdat materials from the USSR, he realized that the "Instructions" to the senior presbyters of the All-Russian Orthodox Church (ratified in December 1959 and sent to the congregations of the congregation in 1960) and the Bishops ' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1961 were the result of manipulation and external pressure on official leaders from outside, most likely in total, state officials from the Councils for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and Religious cults. In addition, the documents received from Soviet believers in the sixties are even larger

42. Bourdeaux, M. Patriarch and Prophets, p. 11.

43. One of these internal documents is the "Instructive Letter to Senior Elders of the All-Russian Orthodox Church". Most Western researchers, including Burdo, were forced to rely on extracts from this document published in the samizdat magazine of the EXB Scientific Center "Bratsky Listok". The full text of this controversial document was not known in the West until the early 1970s: All-Union Council of the ECB, "Instructive Letter to Senior Presbyters", Samizdat Archive vol.14, N 773 (1973).

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They convinced Burdo that the Soviet legislation on religious organizations was extremely controversial. The law provided guarantees of freedom of conscience, but at the same time its codification and application was intended to discriminate against believers, which was largely an unsuccessful attempt to force them to live in accordance with ideology.44
The books " A Particle of Religious Russia "and" The Patriarch and the Prophets " aimed to highlight the situation in which many Soviet believers found themselves in the sixties. Given the tone and content of protest letters written by religious dissidents, the books, despite Bourdeau's attempts to add nuances to this picture, paint the image of the "other", that is, the Soviet Christian, as either a sufferer or an opportunist. And, as Bourdeau had anticipated, the reality was much more complex than this incomplete dichotomous concept of the Soviet believer. It is fair to say that since, for example, Baptists from officially registered churches rarely sent samizdat literature to the West, and representatives of official churches (both Orthodox and Baptist) publicly refuted (or pointedly ignored) state repression against their co-religions45, it was extremely difficult for people in the West to get a complete picture of what was happening in the cold war era.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became possible to get a more complete picture. Although the ECB dissidents who were expelled or left the ECB on their own claimed that they were the only ones who suffered at the hands of the authorities, many believers who remained in the registered churches were discriminated against in higher education institutions and at work. For example, some women who were-

44. Bourdeaux's opinion on this issue was partly shaped by various reports that he received (and will continue to receive) from believers in the USSR. See, for example, Bourdeaux, M. Religious Ferment, pp. 105-113 (1965), 119-124 (1966); Bourdeaux, M. Patriarch and Prophets, pp. 189-194 (Excerpts from Yakunin and Eshliman's letter to Podgorny dated December 15, 1965). See also Xenia Dennen (23 May 2013), "Keston Institute: KGB's Bête Noire," Gresham Lecture (London: Gresham College), 2-3.

45. For example, numerous reports in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate from 1965 to 1967, published immediately after the repression of the Pochaev monks from 1960 to 1965, described the situation in the Lavra as normal and even praiseworthy: Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, October 1965; November 1965; December 1966; November 1967. Bourdeau (Patriarch and Prophets, p. 116) cites two similar issues.

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Those who are members of registered EXB communities in Siberia have faced various forms of pressure and repression in higher education institutions or at work, including taunts, interrogations, fines, open threats from party officials, attempts to recruit KGB informants or friendly courts.46 Similar preventive measures were used against these women (and their co-religionists) on a case-by-case basis from the sixties until the late eighties. Thus, those who allegedly compromised their faith by remaining in a church led by what Baptist dissidents called "opportunists" also faced reprisals for their faith.

Meanwhile, religious dissidents who were strongly opposed to the State and the established church - and who had indeed suffered the lion's share of interrogations, arrests, show trials, and prison sentences - tended to be so stubborn in their resistance that it led to a narrowing of their theological views. This is evident from the memoirs of Father Alexander Me (1935-1990). He formed a circle of priests and laity, including Yakunin and Eshliman in the early sixties, and even offered to write a letter expressing concern about the consequences of the Bishops ' Council of 1961 and the excesses in the anti-religious campaign. Men suspected that Felix Karelin (1925-1992), who moved in their circle, helped Yakunin and Eshliman write their lengthy dogmatic letters in 1965. Men, who considered the letters of his friends ineffective and untimely - after all, Khrushchev was no longer in power - later complained that after writing these letters and subsequently being banned from the Soviet Union, he was forced to write a letter to Yakunin. Yakunin and Eshliman, together with the layman Lev Regelson (born in 1939) and others, were involved for several years in Karelin's fanatical apocalypticism47. Again, My recollections of the six-

46. Interviews conducted by the author (Brandeis University Institutional Review Board #14165): Anna Stepanovna, Omsk, December 11, 2014; Nadezhda Alexandrovna, Omsk, December 13, 2014; Lyudmila Vladimirovna, Omsk, December 16, 2014; Valentina Alexandrovna, Minusinsk, March 10, 2015; Oktyabrina Petrovna, Krasnoyarsk, March 19, 2015; Maria Matveevna, Novosibirsk, April 29, 2015; Elena Vladimirovna, Omsk (about life in Blagoveshchensk), June 4, 2015

47. Men believed that Karelin, who was "sent by either the GB or Satan", led his friends "in the direction of some kind of pathological fanaticism." Men, A. (2007) "I remember the 60s" // About me: Memoirs, interviews, conversations, letters. Moscow: Alexander Me Foundation, p. 169, 157.

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his recollections, which he shared with a friend five or ten years after these events, were not known in the West until the nineties, so that neither Bourdeau nor anyone else in the West could have known anything about the inner workings of the circle of priests and laity to which they belonged in the early sixties Yakunin, Eshliman and a number of other people, including Priest Dmitry Dudko (1922-2004) and Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin, with the support of Bishop Hermogenes 48. But the commissioner of the Moscow Region Council for Religious Affairs, A. Trushin, was aware of this. His report on those priests and believers who opposed the 1965 letter of Yakunin and Eshliman (including the Patriarch, who reportedly stated on May 13, 1966, that their activities were "harmful to the church") contains information about the existence of a circle of priests and laity and, not surprisingly, interpreted their activities as subversive and illegal activities 49.

Center for the Study of Religion and Communism in the Context of the Cold War

Trushin's assessment is quite predictable: after all, he was an official in the USSR whose church policy was based on "the conceptual idea of Marxism-Leninism about the incompatibility of religion and socialism." 50 Indeed, Marxism-Leninism was defined "as the direct opposite of religion"51. Given this internal Soviet ideological reality, as well as the distrust that most Western religious institutions felt for communism, the conflict of values between the Soviet State and Western religious institutions that emerged during the Cold War was inevitable. Bourdeaux and his organization, from the first years of its existence, first as a Center, and then in the format of Keston College, regularly reminded

48. Ibid., pp. 97-178.

49. TSGAMO F. R-7383, Op. 3, D. 55, Ll. 26-30 (1966). Bourdeau's book (Patriarch and Prophets, pp. 226-7) contains excerpts from the same patriarchal statement quoted by Trushin.

50. Chumachenko, Tatiana (2002) Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, edited and translated by Ed Roslof, p. 193. New York: Taylor and Francis.

51. Thrower, James (1983) Marxist-Leninist "Scientific Atheism" and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Religion and Reason 25, p. 131. Berlin: Mouton.

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about this conflict of values and fueled it. Thus, the subsequent consideration of the significance of this organization during the Cold War period should address the distrust of its researchers for communism, especially in its Marxist-Leninist form, as well as their religious faith, especially in view of the influence it had on their activities to defend religious freedom.

As shown above, CPSU propagandists viewed the Center as "a gathering place for militant churchmen in the name of fighting communism."52 Indeed, the founders of the center, of whom only one was a clergyman, did not have much respect for the type of communism that the CPSU members advocated. According to Bourdeaux, Sir John Lawrence used to say: "Communism is a facade. It's like a deck of cards. If you build a house out of [cards] and draw one card from it, the entire deck will collapse. Communism is in danger of collapsing in my lifetime. And I will live to see it. " 53 He died in 1999, and his prophecy came true (at least for the Soviet Union). Professor Leonard Shapiro was an expert on Soviet communism, considered it "totalitarianism" and argued that Stalin's rule was a logical extension of Lenin's. Before entering science, he worked as a lawyer for sixteen years and was a proponent of" classical liberalism", that is, the doctrine that"legal guarantees of protection against state encroachments on the rights of citizens are more important than the needs of society for protection from the subversive activities of individuals" 54. Ksenia (Howard-Johnston) Dennen, who worked with Shapiro for many years and was a former student of his, says that she "could not stand Marxism-Leninism, ... that this is not Marxism, ... [but] a dangerous doctrine proclaiming that the end justifies the means, [leading] to the destruction of human lives, the destruction of society, and the destruction of political institutions. " 55
52. See note 1.

53. Bourdeau, interview (2016).

54. Kelly, Aileen M. (1998) "Leonard Schapiro's Russia", in Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance, pp. 29-30. New Haven: Yale University Press.

55. Dennen, interview (2016).

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The authors of a review of Bourdeau's 1971 book Faith under Investigation in Russia accused him of "undermining his own authority" because of his bias, which led to "an overly simplistic exaltation of the highest moral virtue of Christians and condemnation of the bloodthirsty villainy of Communists" and "ignoring the Communist point of view" and any excuses that communists could provide in the future. response to "accusations of persecution" 56.In fact, although Bourdeau's earlier books ("A Piece of Religious Russia" and "The Patriarch and the Prophets") partially presented the Communist point of view, the author's goal was primarily to give a word to believers who were facing repression. Bourdeau was convinced that the West already hears enough of the voices of the official church and communist propagandists and often believes them.57 Therefore, despite its strong position on communism, the Center did not set as its main goal the real study of communism. For this reason, in the second half of the seventies, the organization's Management Board decided to change its name to Keston College. The original title was "really misleading: the members of the Center did not study Marxism-Leninism or communism as such", but religion under communism58.

For Bourdeau, Howard-Johnston, and the other founders and employees of Keston College, their own religious faith was a motivating factor in the study of religion in communist countries.59 As can be seen from the above, Bourdeau was convinced that God himself had called and directed him to "serve as the voice" of the faithful behind the "iron Curtain", and the story of his meeting with Barabbas and Pronina in Moscow in 1964 was established as a fundamental moment in the creation of Keston 60. By approving,

56. Scanlan, James P. (1972) "Review of Bourdeaux's Faith on Trial in Russia", Slavic Review 31(2): 442-3; I.M.S. (19 November 1971) "Writer ignores communist view on freedom", Weekly Herald, находится в: KCRPS, Box W-89.1, Folder "Writing - Faith on Trial, Revisions & Publicity."

57. Bourdeau, interview (2016).

58. Ibid.; Bourdeau, unpublished memoirs.

59. See also Hurst, M. "From Toothache to Keston, via Moscow", pp. 142-3.

60. Bourdeaux, Michael (1983) Risen Indeed: Lessons in Faith from the USSR. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd; Robertson, Jenny (1984) Be Our Voice: The Story of Michael Bourdeaux and Keston College, pp. 24-28. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd; Hurst, 118-19; "Keston's first quarter-century" (1994), brochure, pp. 6-7. Oxford:

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that faith was "absolutely central" to Keston's work, Ksenia (Howard-Johnston) Dennen recalls how Sir John Lawrence, a "deeply religious Christian" and a leader of the Anglican laity, "drew inspiration from the Christians of the Soviet Union." She'd seen it firsthand when she'd visited the Soviet Union several times with Lawrence in the early seventies. According to her, the "soul" of their organization was "loyalty to the witness of the Church, the recognition and understanding of which is important for the whole world." 61
According to Bourdeaux, Keston's staff considered themselves dedicated defenders of religious freedom and supporters of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) .62 Reflecting on the dissident Baptists of the sixties and seventies, Dennen said that Keston's researchers tried not so much to take sides as "to convey very significant criticisms [of the ECB] ... concerning [Soviet] legislation and the fact that the separation of church and state was not completed: control over the church [and] interference in the affairs of the church took place everywhere and constantly, [despite] assurances [by the Soviet state] of support for freedom of conscience. " 63 According to Sonia Luhrmann, Keston's extensive work of "collecting, translating and quoting" religious dissident samizdat was intended to "encourage Western governments and international organizations, such as the World Council of Churches, to become aware of the problems faced by believers in socialist states and to start defending their rights in meetings with Soviet politicians." 64. For this reason, Bourdeau was extremely pleased when, on the eve of the Helsinki Accords, British politicians began to pay attention to his work on human rights.-

Keston Institute. Bourdeau also mentions this story in his unpublished memoirs.

61. Dennen, interview (2016).

62. Bourdeau, interview (2016).

63. Dennen, interview (2016).

64. Leuhrmann, Sonja (2015) "Counter-Archives: Sympathy on Record", in Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge, p. 137. New York: Oxford University Press. See the information booklet with many examples of implicit criticism of the WCC's silence on human rights violations in the USSR: Michael Bourdeax, Hans Hebly and Eugen Voss (10 August 1976) "Religious Liberty in the Soviet Union: WCC and USSR: a post-Nairobi documentation", in KCRPS, Box W-86.1, GEN 15/11 Centre for the Study of Religion & Communism, Folder 5 of 7.

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9. In 1974/1975, Bourdeaux had a long conversation with Prime Minister Harold Wilson about human rights violations in the Soviet Union. The Prime Minister instructed Bourdeau to prepare a report on this topic and said that he would try to mention the names from this report (George Vince, Ernst Neizvestny, Petras Plumpa and Andrey Tverdokhlebov)in his subsequent conversations with representatives of the Soviet government. 65
Luhrmann writes that Keston's firm goal of being a mouthpiece for those whose voices were drowned out served "the tasks of cold-war intercession" and that compiling a "counterarchive" of religious samizdat was "a kind of documentary arms race."66 However,in this particular arms race, Keston emphasized not so much the task of knowing the enemy as the task of creating a "counterarchive" of religious samizdat. how much-on the knowledge of friends, that is, brothers-believers who were behind the "iron curtain". Keston was trying to convey to the world how the enemy treated his friends. At the same time, Keston's staff deliberately distanced themselves from Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001), a Romanian pastor and founder of the Voice of the Martyrs, who constantly discussed the persecution of so-called "catacomb churches". Keston claimed that the majority of believers in the Soviet Union worshipped God boldly and openly, despite the severe restrictions that many of them faced.67
For Bourdeau, a crucial element of the Cold War's religious front was the need to mobilize the West, and especially the churches in the West, against what Keston saw as massive strategic international Soviet propaganda. Admitting that "Keston was born in an atmosphere of intense disagreement," Bourdeau recalls:

[In the UK] there were a huge number of people ... in very prominent positions, who believed that communism is a given, with which you can only negotiate. Yes, there were some violations of human rights, but the Soviet Union was supposed to be a better place as a result of real negotiations... These people didn't know

65. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Owen, also consulted Bourdeaux on human rights issues in the late 1970s. This is what British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did in the early to mid-1980s. Bourdeau, unpublished memoirs; Bourdeau, interview (2016).

66. Leuhrmann, S. "Counter-Archives: Sympathy on Record", p. 137.

67. Dennen, interview (2016).

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On the persecution of religion under Khrushchev, I became unpopular precisely because I had documentary evidence of it. Many people didn't believe what I wrote at all... Communists - including British Communists-claimed that there was no religious persecution. Also considered prominent Anglican priests, whose voice had weight. Paul Oostreicher was appointed by the British Council of Churches, our local branch of the World Council of Churches, responsible for dealing with Eastern European churches; in those days, he didn't deny that there was persecution; he thought it didn't matter. It is important that the Soviet Union is improving. .."Socialism with a human face" - this was the position of Paul Ostreicher " 68.

In 1968, during a BBC radio debate between Paul Ostreicher (born 1931), an Anglican priest, and Richard Wurmbrand, the former argued that the reason the WCC chose not to condemn religious persecution in communist countries was because it "would reinforce the Communists' belief that Christians were taking up arms against them." Instead of focusing on the "terrible things" that people have experienced, Ostreicher continued, we should ask ourselves: "Can Christians and Communists live peacefully by starting to trust each other?.. [and] recognizing that both are working for the good of humanity?"69 Oostreicher certainly trusted communism much more than Bourdeau or his colleagues. In fact, Ostreicher and Bourdeau advocated two different models regarding the religious situation in the East: the former advocated a diplomatic approach, the latter an activist approach.

In the mid-1960s, when Ostreicher established the Advisory Committee on East-West Relations at the British Council of Churches, he invited Sir John Lawrence and Michael Bourdeau to join the committee.70 According to Bourdeau, for 20 years he and Sir John Lawrence were "a minority of two" in a sea of Ostreicher's "left-wing" proteges, who believed that the dialogue between Christians and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was not a problem.-

68. Bourdeau, interview (2016).

69. KCRPS, Box W-85.2 "Communism & Christianity Research (1961-1977)" / GEN 15/3.1 "Communism & Christianity up to 1970," folder 2 of 3.

70. For records of the February 1966 meeting that Ostreicher chaired and which was probably the starting point for this committee, see: Ibid.

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nistami is the backbone of the country's development. Reflecting on the context of the Cold War, Bourdeau describes the personal losses that came with defending his point of view:

I think [Keston College] is literally a child of the Cold War. But we were not tainted by the ideology of the Cold War, although Paul Ostreicher and the World Council of Churches saw us differently. There was a constant struggle to keep our words consistent with our deeds. I was very worried about the Christian brothers ' criticism of our work.72
Thus, the front line was not only between East and West, but also between various religious groups in the West. For its part, Keston College has never wavered in its determination to "be the voice" of those believers whose daily lives have been poisoned by the discriminatory policies and practices of an atheist state.

Mark Hirst has shown conclusively that the Bourdeaux organization was part of a broader field of British human rights organizations active during the Cold War. He analyzed three stages of development that such organizations have gone through. First, like other human rights groups, the Center was established in the sixties. Although this organization did not officially exist until 1969, Bourdeau was actively engaged in journalism throughout the decade. Secondly, the Center, which in 1974 was called Keston College, like other similar organizations, experienced an "expert boom" associated with the growing demand for information in the field of religion in the USSR. Finally, like other human rights organizations, Keston College took a risk and from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties quickly expanded its front line of work despite constant financial problems.73
This article describes the first of these three stages described: the work of Bourdeau in the sixties, as well as the creation and first years of the Center's existence before 1975. Our analysis suggests that Bourdeau and his newly emerged organization

71. Bourdeau, interview (2016).

72. Ibid.

73. Hurst, M. British Human Rights Organizations, pp. 1-9, 115-46.

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They played a huge role on the religious front of the Cold War in the years leading up to the Helsinki Accords. From 1975 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Keston College gained even greater recognition as a source of information about the religious situation in Eastern Europe. Critics continued to argue that Keston was not "objective" enough, while Keston himself continued to insist that his researchers were doing their best to keep the bar of scientific rigor and objectivity high. In 1984, Bourdeau won the Templeton Prize (Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were among the previous winners), which raised Keston's status even higher. Even now, although Keston College no longer exists as a research center (this is a topic for a separate article), its archival materials are housed at the Keston Center for the Study of Religion, Politics, and Society at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), where researchers from all over the world can access them. Thus, the legacy of this organization, which flourished during the Cold War, continues to provide scholars with information about religious communities in post-Soviet Russia.

Translated from English by Daria Blinova

Bibliography / References

Archive materials

Archive of the Keston Center for the Study of Religion, Politics and Society (KCRPS), Box W-88.1 " Bourdeaux Writings and correspondence, etc."

Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI) F. 5. Apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1949-1991).

RGANI F. 89. Collection of copies of documents declassified when performing thematic requests in the course of research work

Central State Archive of the Moscow region (TSGAMO) F. R-7383

Literature

Men A. "I remember the 60s" // About me: Memoirs, interviews, conversations, letters. Moscow: Alexander Me Foundation, 2007.

"Letter of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy to Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan" / / Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1966, No. 6.

Sinichkin A.V. History of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR from December 1959 to 1966 (History and analysis of the crisis in the ECB brotherhood). Graduate work.

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Moscow: Moscow Theological Seminary of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, 2001.

Chumachenko, T. A. State, Orthodox Church, believers, 1941-1961 Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999.

Archival sources

Archive of KCRPS, Box W-88.1 "Bourdeaux Writings and correspondence, etc."

Russian State Archive of Newest History

Fund. 5. Apparatus of Central Committee of Communist Party (1949-1991)

Fund. 89. Collection of copies of documents declassified during the execution of thematic queries during research work

Central State Archive of Moscow Region. Fund R-7383.

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