The Keston Archive: From Oxford to Baylor 

Wallace L. Daniel

Periods of war and revolution are notorious for destroying key components of a nation’s memory. Equally destructive are government attacks on ways of thinking and believing that seek to obliterate the past and create new patterns of being. In the Soviet Union, for most of the twentieth century, Russian Orthodoxy and other forms of religious belief suffered one of the greatest assaults on religion in history. As a result, a great deal of Russia’s national story has been lost from view, feared gone forever, or remains still to be reconstructed. Such losses particularly apply to individuals and groups whose views did not conform to the government’s desired paradigm. Their voices are essential parts of the mosaic of life in the former Soviet Union. 

Fortunately, an archive of religion exists that contains documents and other materials concerning significant aspects of Russia’s national story, other regions of the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. The Keston Center, located at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, holds such a collection, the product of more than a half-century of diligent work. “You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful in life than some good memory, especially some memory from childhood, from the parental home,” says Alyosha near the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 1 The memories stored in the Keston Archive are often not the most pleasant aspects of the past, but collectively they comprise a nearly unparalleled record of struggle, courage, and commitment to certain values in extremely difficult circumstances. They fill in important gaps in Russia’s national story that otherwise might well remain unknown. It is the purpose of this article to revisit the Keston Archive, its current status, holdings, and opportunities for research.

 Specifically, how might the archive contribute to scholars interested in religious liberty, politics, and religion, the ongoing debate over the role of religion in public discourse, and the relationship of religion to power? What resources found in the Keston Archive might enrich the discussion of all four of these related subjects, offering a more complete picture of a dynamic that continues to provoke controversy in present times? 

Origins and Content 

The collection had an inauspicious but forwardlooking beginning. Its story is well known, but several aspects deserve brief recapitulation. In 1958-59, Michael Bourdeaux, a young graduate  student at Oxford University, was a participant in the international exchange program between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. In the winter of 1959, he became aware of the atrocities perpetrated by Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign against religious believers. He made the decision to become a “voice of the persecuted” by documenting their stories and collecting materials relating to the assault on them and freedom of conscience. Purchasing on the street the first copy of a new journal, Science and Religion [Nauka i religiia], Bourdeaux could not have foreseen that the journal would spearhead the ideological crusade against religion. The materials he collected that year turned out to be first-hand accounts of an anti-religious campaign only then getting underway. In time the growing collection would evolve into a major repository of primary sources on religion and church-state issues in Communist countries. 

As an institution, Keston’s origins date to 1969 and the creation of the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism. In 1974 the Center moved from Chislehurst, Kent, to a vacant elementary school building in the village of Keston, south of London, and changed its name to “Keston College.” In founding the college, Bourdeaux was joined by three prominent English friends—diplomat and writer Sir John Lawrence, Soviet historian Leonard Schapiro, and political scientist and international affairs specialist Peter Reddaway. Like Michael Bourdeaux, each of them had a passionate interest in Russia and the Soviet Union. Each of them also had a strong commitment to religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience.

 The defense of these fundamental freedoms and the courage to be the “voice of those who do not have a voice” have served as major themes of Keston from its inception. Such a theme runs throughout Keston’s history and activities—the publication of a major international journal, Religion in Communist Lands, edited by Xenia Dennen, the award of the Templeton Prize to Michael Bourdeaux in 1984, and the move to the city of Oxford and the change of name to “Keston Institute” in 1991, which it has retained. In 2007, the archive was transferred to the J. M. Dawson Center at Baylor University in the United States and became a central part of the newly established Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society. 

The administrative and financial reasons underlying the archive’s transfer are recounted in Davorin Peterlin’s recent article on the impressive publishing activity of Keston Institute.2 Suffice it to say here that the J. M. Dawson Center and its Journal of Church and State have a long history of support for religious liberty and the goals articulated by Michael Bourdeaux and his associates. Administered within the framework of the Baylor University Libraries, the archive is in capable hands. Peterlin’s worry, expressed near the end of his article, that the transfer of the archive to the United States would make it less accessible to European scholars is a legitimate concern. The archive’s current leadership is sensitive to that problem and has taken steps to alleviate it, as will be discussed more specifically below. Most importantly, the Keston Archive continues to be a significant resource for filling in gaps in the historical memory and the ongoing struggle for religious liberty. 

A general description of materials housed in the archive is available on the Keston Center’s website at http://baylor.edu/kestoncenter. These materials fall into three main categories: a) samizdat, or self-publishing, which includes more than 4,000 memoirs, pamphlets, letters, symposia, and petitions to the government, which collectively reveal a multifaceted conversation among different denominations about religion and society during the Soviet era; b) the press file, arranged by subject and country, containing more than 100 newspapers and journals, published in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and c) the photo file, comprising several thousand photographs of churches and their activities, and, in addition, fifty original Soviet posters, widely used in anti-religion campaigns from the 1920s through the early 1980s. Keston also acquired nearly 500 documents on church and state from KGB, state, and regional archives. Within the three large categories are materials on diverse topics relating to religion and politics. The full scope of these topics goes beyond the limits of this article, but several examples will suggest the possibilities. The collection includes many journals published in the last three years of the Soviet Union, revealing religious and social aspirations and projections for the future of Russian society at the end of the Soviet state. 

The archive has multiple files of primary materials on individuals—Gleb Yakunin, Aleksandr Men’, and Nikolai Eshliman—and their struggles for religious and human rights. Among the archival holdings are numerous petitions from Baptist, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, and other faiths, requesting and giving their justification for religious freedom.3 

Roughly 40 percent of the archive’s holdings relate to Russia and the former Soviet Union, 15 percent to Romania, 15 percent to Poland, and 15 percent to the Czech Republic, with 15 percent distributed among other countries. These holdings include a broad spectrum of different religious groups and individuals: Russian Orthodox (35 percent), Roman Catholic (15 percent), Baptists (20 percent), Jews (10 percent), Pentecostals (17 percent), and Seventh-day Adventists (3 percent).4 The materials in the archive are supported by a library of over 10,000 volumes, including a large collection of publications relating to the Soviet government’s campaign against religious beliefs.

Accessibility 

Given the transfer of the archive to the United States, the organizational status of these primary materials might be a concern. Since January 2013, the Keston Archive has been consolidated and housed in Baylor University’s Carroll Library.5 Scholars coming to work in the archive should know that they will have full access to the materials. The categorized press archive, samizdat documents, and KGB files are readily available. The photo collection is fully processed and catalogued, as are more than 200 of the more than 300 periodical titles. The archival staff has worked diligently to organize the richly diverse and complex materials in the archive. Presently, nearly 70 percent of the archival holdings and 80 percent of the book collection have been catalogued. (By August 2015, the entire book collection will be catalogued.) 

Accessibility of the archive to European and other scholars continues to be a main objective of Keston Institute in England, as well as to the leadership of the Keston Center. The institute maintains a close relationship to the center at Baylor; both institutions share in policy decisions; both are represented at meetings; and both support the archive’s mission. Keston Institute also sponsors a scholarship program for scholars, which has been very active in enabling scholars internationally to spend an extensive period working in the archive. Alexander Ogorodnikov from Moscow and Alina Urs from Romania are the most recent recipients of this support. 

Competitive scholarships cover all costs, including travel, and support up to four weeks of research at Baylor University. Coverage, qualifications, and the process of application are described in detail on Keston Institute’s website at http://www.keston.org. uk/scholarships.php. (See the appendix for a list of scholarship recipients and their research topics.) 

Among the pleasures of doing research at Keston is the opportunity to work with its chief archivist, Larisa Seago. Born and raised in Samara, Russia, Ms. Seago (née Smirnova) has a technical education, which she received at Samara State Aerospace University during President Gorbachev’s period of perestroika. She came to the United States in 1999, held a position in the international studies division of Baylor University, enrolled in the graduate program in museum studies, and began to work in the Keston Archive soon after its arrival. Under the expert tutelage of Kathy Hillman, Keston’s present director, and Dr. Patty Orr, Dean of University Libraries, Larisa Seago has become a skilled archivist. She has the heart of a servitor, who extends great effort to make the archive accessible to visiting scholars. 

The process of digitizing the archive is essential to extending its reach beyond the physical boundaries of the university. Digitization has become a principal goal of Ms. Seago and the center’s director. Accessibility of the archive requires that its materials are preserved, and fragile, crumbling documents must be photographed and transferred to acid-free paper. The staff has made it a priority to digitize items in  fragile condition, such as Aida Skripnikova’s trial transcript, Russian Orthodox, Pentecostal, and Baptist samizdat periodicals, and Soviet posters. Digitized materials become accessible immediately after the completion of the metadata.6 

The Keston Digital Archive contains 2,268 items, including 240 samizdat publications, 1,579 images, and 71 Soviet posters. The rich collection of Soviet Baptist samizdat periodicals has been fully digitized. Archive users may also request the staff to digitize specific documents. (In the next five years, the goal is to complete the entire process.) 

Rediscovering Stories, Imagining the Future

 Among the treasures of the Keston Archive are its unique samizdat holdings. They are prime sources for researching what some have called the “religious renaissance” during the last 30 years of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Samizdat provided a “communications network,” an alternative universe to the channels operated by the state, and a forerunner of the internet culture of today.7 Full texts, notes written on thin paper, reports of discussions about social and religious issues, and petitions to the government, these materials cover a wide variety of issues. They were copied by hand or by typewriter and distributed among friends and colleagues. The Keston Archive contains 4,000 of these documents. They are invaluable for reconstructing the social, political, and religious life that existed outside official government channels since the early 1960s. 

The samizdat collection is too large and diverse to offer more than a sampling of its coverage. Examples include a 1973 letter to Andrei Sakharov from 35 Soviet Jews, expressing their unity with him in the struggle for human rights; a 1972 letter from a member of the Moscow intelligentsia on current philosophical and religious trends; a 1972 handwritten letter to the United Nations on religious persecution from an anonymous individual; a first-hand account of the KGB’s interrogation, in 1980, of a Pentecostal minister; Russian translations of C. S. Lewis’s books, all indispensable sources for viewing how Russian readers interpreted his works. 8 

Bibliographies of religious samizdat received by Keston College were published in the first issue of the new journal Religion in Communist Lands (RCL) in 1973 (pp. 34-40), and continued in each subsequent issue through the summer of 1978. Beginning with the fall issue of 1978 (vol. 6, no. 3: 203-16), the bibliographical section published only selections from samizdat materials. In the spring issue of 1982 (vol. 10, no. 1: 69-80), RCL changed the heading of this section to “Sources,” a practice the journal continued through the fall issue of 1986 (vol. 14, no. 3: 296- 308). Collectively, these publications offer a valuable overview of samizdat resources held in the archive. 

This review of the Keston collection offers only an introduction to the sources it holds and to the intellectual treasures that await scholars who explore its holdings. Those who have ventured there have discovered in Keston’s holdings parts of the past they did not know existed, stories of religious persecution and individual survival, often at great personal cost, evidence of an ongoing struggle for religious liberty that survives into the present. One finds here not only accounts of state policies, but also accounts of nonconformity with those policies, of human aspirations, and of alternative ways of thinking about the state and the church. Recent visitors to the Keston Archive testify to the collection’s importance to their research. 

Alexander Ogorodnikov is one of those individuals, whose work in the Keston Archive yielded unexpected results. A longtime Russian religious dissident, founder of the Christian Seminar in Leningrad in the 1970s, and Gulag survivor, Ogoroniknov spent a month at the Keston Center in the fall of 2014. He discovered materials that he had long feared had been forever lost: 

The archive for me is fundamentally important—it is linked with my life. I had a somewhat distant conception of the archive. But when I worked in it, I was simply bowled over by the unexpected abundance of documents, first-hand accounts, and the immense amount of samizdat, letters, Soviet press clippings, articles from the Western press which reflected the development of religious revival and spiritual resistance, of undercover human rights and religious activity.9 

In filling in the blanks in his own story, Ogorodnikov underscores “the unique importance of the archive for me, and, I would suggest, for other participants in the religious and human rights movement, and for today’s researchers into the subject.”10 Such materials— documents and articles—he maintains, exist “only in the Keston Archive” (Ogorodnikov’s emphasis).11 

Other recent scholars attest to the archive’s significance to their work. Julie deGraffenried, author of Sacrificing Children: Childhood for the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014), writes: 

The Keston Archive is a gem amongst archival resources on the former Soviet Union located in the United States. I truly believe its contents will help historians write the story of late Soviet religious life, religious dissidence, and religious persecution, an era that is just now coming into its own in the field of Soviet/ Russian history. This story is an essential component for understanding past and present Soviet/Russian society, culture, politics, and identity. My own work has been enriched by the visual culture holdings of the Keston Archive; its collection of late Soviet antireligious posters, I believe, is rivaled only by that of the State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg.”

Research in such primary source materials offers not only important details in the investigation of particular events, but also re-shapes the parameters of what is thought to be true. Alina Urs described her experience in late 2014 as follows: 

The Romanian section of the Keston Archive is a phenomenal collection of mysteries and clues. It provides the researcher with a unique  combination of historical sources that cannot be accessed anywhere else. There are letters, appeals, press articles, all offering insight into the fight for religious freedom under a totalitarian regime. 

Urs reported that her work in Keston led her to the police archive in Bucharest to discover personal and political relationships among political informers who turned into religious dissidents. 

The archive owes a large debt of gratitude to earlier Keston staff members who worked diligently to preserve and enhance the collection, and to individuals in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe whose courageous efforts to keep their stories alive mark every facet of this rich collection of primary source materials. 

The Keston Archive deserves wider recognition as a unique resource for scholars interested in the relationship between religion, politics, and society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Equally important, the archive contains the stories of large numbers of individuals and groups engaged in an ongoing struggle for religious liberty and human rights. They are contributors to a continuing debate, connecting the past to the future and human aspirations to political and social possibilities. Michael Bourdeaux has spoken eloquently about the heroism and self-sacrifice of these courageous individuals and groups whose voices comprise central parts of a fascinating, multi-dimensional history, which, in this post-Cold War period, is in need of reexamination. The Keston Archive offers a rich source for that project to begin. 

Notes:

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, Vintage Classics, 1991), 774.
2. Davorin Peterlin, “An Analysis of the Publishing Activity of Keston Institute in the Context of Its Last Three Years of Operation in Oxford (2003-2006),” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 30 (February 2010); http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol30/iss1/1.
3. These petitions support Geraldine Fagan’s thesis that religious freedom has a long tradition in Russia, in her informative, wellresearched book, Believing in Russia—Religious Policy after Communism (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
4. The percentages in parentheses are rough estimates, since the holdings continue to be catalogued and classified.
5.  The Keston Archive is located on the third floor of Carroll Library; the Michael Bourdeaux Research Center (CL316) contains the periodicals, books, research files, KGB documents, the photo archive, Soviet, Romanian, and Polish samizdat; artifacts, and posters.
6.  Larisa Seago, “Making Voices Heard: Digitizing Soviet Religious Samizdat and Making It Available Online,” paper presented at 46th annual convention of the Association of Slavic,East European, and Eurasian Studies, San Antonio, TX, 23, November, 2014. Because of copyright regulations, access to the digital archive is restricted. But researchers worldwide may apply for temporary guest access, which can be granted easily. Information on obtaining guest access is found at http://www. baylor.edu/kestoncenter/index.php?id=859649.
7. Michael Meerson-Aksenov, “The Problem of the Church in Samizdat” in The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’: An Anthology, ed. by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1977), 505-10; Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat as ExtraGutenberg Phenomenon,” Poetics Today 29 (Winter 2008): 629-67. 
8. The last example is drawn from Seago, “Making Voices Heard.” The samizdat collection contains invaluable political documents relating to the emergence of the human rights movement in the 1960s, nationalistic publications, which also began in the 1960s, and religious samizdat periodicals, which are especially prominent in the collection. The latter include Russian Orthodox, Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal publications, many of which are unique and cannot be found elsewhere. Russian Orthodox periodicals include issues of Mnogaia Leta (Many Years), Moskovskii Sbornik (Moscow Collection), Nadezhda (Hope), Obshchina (Community), Veche (Public Assembly), and Vybor. Among the holdings are the journal Przyv (Call), issued by Sandr Riga, a leader of the ecumenical movement, and Aleksandr Ogorodnikov’s Biulletin’ Khristianskoi Obshchestvennosti (Bulletin of the Christian Community) and Express-khronika (Express Chronicle). Seago, “Making Voices Heard.”
9.  “Letter to the Chairman from Alexander Ogorodnikov,” Keston Newsletter, 2014, no. 20 (2014): 36. 
10.  “Letter to the Chariman.” 
11.  “Letter to the Chairman.” In the late 1970 and early 1980s, police confiscated and destroyed Ogorodnikov’s Christian Seminar documents and the underground philosophical journals he issued. He had long despaired of ever seeing them again. Other documents and photographs from this period in the possession of many individuals had also been destroyed. Fearing searches and arrest by the KGB, they had been burned. Ogorodnikov recounted his surprise—and joy—at finding copies in the Keston Archive. 

Regrettably, Koenraad De Wolf did not consult holdings in the Keston Archive in researching his otherwise excellent book, Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). If he had done so, he would have found a nearly complete set of the Bulletin of the Christian Community and other primary materials, which Ogorodnikov published after his release from prison and feared lost.

Wallace L. Daniel is University Distinguished Professor of History, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, and author of The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia (2006).