This book, drawing on archives in Moscow, Paris, and the United States, surveys the activities of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century.It is hard to imagine American-style individualism and entrepreneurship encountering four more different, or more important, successive decades in Russian history: rapid industrialization and burgeoning university culture, the 1905 revolution and ensuing religious and political reforms, the First World War, the revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, the New Economic Policy, and the worst of Stalinism. Remarkably, the YMCA soldiered on in the face of all these changes.
Matthew Miller situates the YMCA’s Russian involvement in a number of important contexts: the interaction of Russian and American cultures, global philanthropy, and the interaction of Orthodox and Protestant thought. He also considers the internal debates within the YMCA as it encountered new, puzzling contexts. It is fascinating to ponder, for example, how an organization explicitly created to counter the feminization of evangelical Christianity by embracing a “muscular” form of the same religion, encouraging boys and young men “to control their wills in order to lead a life of assertiveness and integrity,” fared in a Russia still focused on the communal values of the extended family and home village.
Not surprisingly, the YMCA was most successful among white-collar and middle-class men in the cities, particularly in St. Petersburg. Mayak, the short name for the YMCA-sponsored Committee for the Promotion of Moral and Physical Development founded in St. Petersburg in 1900, enjoyed the support of figures as illustrious as the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Prince Mikhail Khilkov. During the First World War, the YMCA focused its energies on POW soldiers within the territory of Russia. After the October Revolution, YMCA opinions for further activity split. After supporting joint relief work with the American Red Cross and civilian programs in central Russian cities, the YMCA ultimately worked with the Allied intervention, thereby earning Soviet denunciation for a lack of neutrality.
One of the book’s particular strengths, and one of its central themes, focuses on the role of the YMCA in the Russian diaspora. Miller notes correctly that “through its support of the émigré student movement, publishing house, and theological academy, the YMCA played a major role in preserving an important part of pre revolutionary culture in western Europe during the Soviet period until the repatriation of this culture following the collapse of the Soviet Union” (2).By working together with the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM), including Vasily Zenkovsky, Lev Zander, Nicolas Zernov, Nicholas Berdyaev, and the recently canonized Maria Skobtsova, the YMCA earned a permanent place in Russian intellectual and religious history. It is little exaggeration to say that the YMCA Russian publishing house, which for decades remained the oldest and most important publisher of Russian books outside of Russia, made it possible for post-1917 Russian theological, philosophical, and literary life to extend worldwide. As Miller notes, an originally Protestant leadership made it possible to produce Russian Orthodox religious literature. YMCA financial and administrative support also undergirded the influential St. Sergius Theological Academy.
But the book does not limit itself exclusively to relations between Russians and America.Miller’s comparison of the YMCA’s activities in four other traditionally Orthodox countries—Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia—suggests what was specific about the Russian case. By doing so he contributes to the recent trend in scholarship of not studying the Soviet Union in isolation, but situating it within an international context—which includes the émigré community. In short, everyone interested in ProtestantOrthodox inter-confessional cooperation, in RussianAmerican relations, in Russian religious thought, in émigré history, and in interwar Europe, will benefit from reading this important book.
Nadieszda Kizenko, State University of New York at Albany
Editor’s note: Excerpts from The American YMCA and Russian Culture were published in the East-West Church and Ministry Report 15 (Summer 2007): 1-4; and (Fall 2007): 9-11.