Early last Sunday morning, in the holy Russian city of Zagorsk, a priest was murdered with a precise swing of an ax to the back of his neck as he walked along a wooded path to the train that would take him to his church.
The savage slaying sent shock waves to the very highest level of the Kremlin. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev expressed ”profound regret” and ordered a thorough investigation.
For this was no ordinary crime and Rev. Alexander Menn, born a Jew, was no ordinary priest.
The attention devoted to the murder-it was the subject of numerous press accounts and conversations on Soviet TV last week-went to the heart of the changes taking place in the USSR.
”It goes without saying that this crime is connected with the growing wave of anti-Semitism in Russia,” said Rev. Gleb Yakunin, a fellow priest and a frequently jailed Soviet dissident, as he spoke by telephone from Moscow last week.
”And it is the first murder of a major public figure who believed in perestroika,” added Yakunin, now a member of parliament in the Russian Federation, largest of the Soviet republics.
”We hoped we would be fortunate enough to avoid bloodshed, but now we have begun to pay for perestroika.”
Among the reasons Yakunin and others cited for the murder were Menn`s popularity as a priest and public figure who was also a Jew, although he never practiced Judaism and that heritage was no bar to his ordination in the Russian Orthodox Church.
”There were fears both inside and outside the church that his radical populism might eventually propel him to a place in the church`s hierarchy,”
said Mikhail Morgulis, a Soviet emigre who is editor in chief of the Slavic Gospel Press, a Russian-language religious publishing house in suburban Wheaton.
Menn was a riveting preacher, a spiritual adviser of great personal warmth and an internationally known biblical scholar. Politically, he was a prominent opponent of Communist rule and his church`s traditional
accommodation with it.
In recent years he had become a personal symbol of the new freedoms sweeping the USSR. This month Menn was to begin the first-ever regular Soviet TV program with a priest serving as host and to serve as the rector of
”Sunday University,” a new platform for preaching in major Moscow cathedrals.
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His brutal death aroused a litany of suspicion that extends into many areas of Soviet life and reflects the uncertainty that pervades Soviet society at a time of turbulent change.
”Menn was an ardent opponent of pseudopatriotism, anti-Semitism and infringement upon human rights,” said Tass, the official Soviet news agency, in reporting the murder.
Speculation about the killers centered immediately on ultraconservative forces in the KGB and on Pamyat, the neo-Nazi, fanatically nationalistic Russian movement that openly blames Soviet Jews for all the Soviet Union`s current problems.
A prominent Lutheran pastor in Estonia, Rev. Harald Meri, who had been researching deportations to Siberia by the NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, disappeared in April. His body and that of his housekeeper were found nine days later. They appeared to have been tortured.
More recently, fires destroyed the Moscow apartments of two journalists who had written articles critical of Pamyat.
”Father Alexander,” as Menn was usually known, was 55. He and his wife had two children. He wrote 10 books and numerous articles on comparative religion and church history.
He had a magnetic gift for preaching that brought overflow crowds on the 45-minute train trip from Moscow on Sunday mornings to his little church midway to Zagorsk, the town where he lived and whose seminaries make it the spiritual center of Russian Orthodoxy.
But he was also a man whose accomplishments spawned enemies, including many leaders of his own church. It was not until last year, after a quarter-century at the little Sretenskaya church, that he was promoted to pastor.
And there was a horrifying historical symbolism in the fact that he was slain with an ax. That was the weapon used to signify death as retribution in the primitive Russia of many centuries ago.
Last Sunday morning, Menn was planning a routinely busy day: preaching, hearing confessions, teaching Sunday school, baptizing infants and concluding with an evening service.
Accounts of the slaying differ in some details, but there is general agreement that it had been planned with meticulous care.
The murderer was hiding among the trees along the path through the woods leading to the train station. He struck once, or possibly twice, with a small camper`s ax, grabbed the priest`s briefcase and ran away.
No suspect has been arrested.
”It is hardly likely that this was done by a common criminal or by a demented individual. It was too carefully planned and professionally done,”
said Michael Rowe by phone from Keston College, a research institute outside London that specializes in the study of religion in Communist countries.
Others are not so certain. Boris Rauschenbach, one of the USSR`s best known space scientists and an expert on old Russian religious icons, pointed out that the killing of priests is an unsavory aspect of Russian history.
And Morgulis, the emigre editor, said there were a number of unstable individuals among the people Menn had attracted to his parish.
”Father Alexander was a man of enormously appealing, luminous spirituality,” recalled Mark Elliott, a history professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Marxism at Wheaton College, who visited him in Russia last month.
”What I found most striking about him was his tolerance for other religions, a feature that is rare among the Russian Orthodox clergy.”
Menn was identified early by the Soviet authorities as someone to be watched. In 1953, shortly before Stalin`s death, he was expelled from Moscow State University, where he was a biology major, for expressing strong religious convictions.
Jewish by birth but not by faith, he studied for the Russian Orthodox priesthood in Leningrad and Moscow and was ordained in 1961. He began publishing scholarly articles almost immediately, soon developing a reputation abroad that led to publication of his books by a Catholic printing house in Belgium.
He used assumed names-Andrei Bogolubov (which means ”the love of God”)
and Emanuel Svetlov-for his books abroad, including a multivolume history of religion and a children`s book about the Bible that won wide popularity across Europe. Publication of his books was not allowed in the USSR.
As Menn gained prominence, he also gained enemies. Articles in the state- run Soviet press referred to him as a CIA agent. After Gorbachev`s ascension to power in 1985, Menn increased his public appearances and his fame increased even more.
With fame came threatening, unsigned letters. His response was to read them aloud at public appearances. He never sought-nor was he allowed-to forget his Jewish heritage.
Vadim Molodyi, a Moscow psychologist and Protestant pastor, recalled one meeting in which a man stood in the audience and shouted: ”Get out of here, you kike! You have no right to speak about our religion!”
Molodyi recalled last week that he once asked Menn why he didn`t emigrate to the West.
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” `For what purpose?` ” Molodyi quoted Menn as saying. ” `If God has not turned away from us, then we can live in Russia. If He turned away, where could we go?` ”