MATTHEW LEE MILLER

After a long process of seeking official approval, the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) began its service among Russian workers and students in 1900. Its Mayak [Russian: Lighthouse] program in St. Petersburg offered a wide range of athletic, social, educational, and religious opportunities for young men. These reflected those already on offer in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere from the middle of the 19th century onwards. Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, many YMCA workers expanded their efforts in Russia to provide humanitarian assistance to both soldiers and prisoners of war. During the war, YMCA staff formed the largest group of Americans living in Russia. Their service—setting up libraries, promoting athletic competitions, and organizing concerts and classes for men in uniform—came at the request of both the U.S. and Russian governments. 

John R. Mott was the primary catalyst for the expansion of the YMCA’s work with soldiers across Europe, and specifically in Russia. Raised in a Methodist home in Postville, Iowa, Mott joined the YMCA student ministry during his years at Cornell University, New York. After graduating from Cornell in 1888, he embarked upon a career with the YMCA, and by 1890 was the director of its college and university ministry. He was also among the founders in 1895 of the World Student Christian Federation, an organization that attempted to support and unite student Christian movements throughout the world. 

Mott deeply influenced the Russian ministry of the YMCA. While he participated in this work only intermittently, he contributed to it throughout the first half of the twentieth century. His direct involvement began in 1899, when he encouraged the founding of the Russian Student Christian Movement (Russian: Russkoe studencheskoe khristianskoe dvizhenie), to which he provided guidance and financial support in subsequent years. However, Mott’s most significant influence proved to be indirect, providing guidelines for the direction of the YMCA’s Russian ministry: coordinating evangelization, encouraging ministry cooperation, motivating indigenous leadership, supporting Russian Orthodoxy, and providing leadership training. 

Mott’s conviction that the YMCA should serve soldiers in Russia developed in the early days of the First World War. During the course of the conflict, more than six million soldiers and civilians were held in prison camps across Europe; Russia held 1.5 million of these inside its borders, while 2.5 million Russians went missing in action or were held as prisoners of war in foreign countries. These numbers far exceeded expectations and the resources available for relief services. Such an unexpectedly high number of captives forced combatant nations to find solutions— including the involvement of neutral nations, as was the United States before early 1917. 

In September 1914 Mott traveled with others to Europe to inspect the situation and determine the possibilities for wartime YMCA assistance. His group witnessed overcrowded hospitals and difficulties in communication between wounded soldiers and family members. Mott and other YMCA leaders were motivated to help, and to visit those in prison, as taught in the Gospel of Matthew. He resolved to raise millions of dollars and recruit YMCA staff to address the needs they observed. Three months later, Mott met with the International Committee of the YMCA and described to them the tragic impact of the war upon soldiers and refugees. He recognized that the war was a disaster, but— expressing his characteristic optimism—he suggested that it was also an opportunity to serve an enormous number of people across Europe. The main challenge, however, was how to provide relief while maintaining American neutrality.1 

In January 1915 Mott met with President Woodrow Wilson at the White House to discuss his experiences in Europe. The pair had already met in 1889, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. At that time, Wilson was a professor at the university, while Mott was a visiting representative from the Student Volunteer Movement, a YMCA-supported body facilitating the service of U.S. college graduates in Christian ministries around the world. On meeting again in 1915 they agreed upon a plan that would “extend relief to war prisoners in both Allied and Central Power countries” and “meet a desperate need… The American YMCA now had the President’s support for an ambitious relief program in Europe.”2 

By May 1915 the United States government emerged as the only entity capable of providing aid to these prisoners of war. The Wilson administration soon realized that non-governmental organizations must participate in the relief program if the U.S. was to respond to the scale of need effectively. The American YMCA answered the government’s request to provide physical, mental, and spiritual assistance by launching the International War Prisoners’ Aid program, which assisted prisoners of war regardless of nationality or religious belief. The U.S. program functioned under the auspices of the World Alliance of YMCAs—based in neutral Geneva, Switzerland—and coordinated with other national associations.3 

In June 1917, three months after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the United States recognized Russia’s Provisional Government. This led to the formation of a U.S. diplomatic mission to Russia led by Elihu Root, a recent U.S. Secretary of State and senator. The mission attempted to evaluate how best to assist the new Provisional Government and to encourage continued Russian participation in the war, the U.S. having entered it on the side of the Allies in April 1917. One of the members of the Root Commission was John R. Mott.

During his years at Cornell, Mott had adopted a negative evaluation of the Russian Orthodox Church, but he rejected this after extensive contact with Eastern Christians. Over the years, he established a network of international Christian friendships and frequently expressed his admiration for the Orthodox, emphasizing the YMCA’s support for them due to their church’s doctrinal foundations, rich liturgy, and perseverance. On his trip to Petrograd in 1917, Mott initiated a variety of discussions with many influential Orthodox leaders.4 He also secured permission to expand welfare work with Russian troops. On returning to the U.S., he personally began to recruit college students and graduates who had YMCA program experience for this work. Over three hundred Americans came together for this service, working across different levels of Russian society and in many geographical regions.5 

The American YMCA’s service among soldiers shifted significantly as it adjusted to Russia’s dramatic political trajectory, particularly the nation’s withdrawal from the First World War with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. The revolutionary changes of late 1917 also sharply increased the political tensions experienced by the YMCA. Despite being a non-governmental organization, its relations with the U.S. government contributed to its closure on Bolshevik-controlled territory in 1919. Yet YMCA workers continued to serve among Russian émigrés in creative ways. They supported the further development of the Russian Student Christian Movement, which brought together many young Russian émigrés across Europe. In Paris, the YMCA also supported the Orthodox Theological Institute—initially the only Russian Orthodox educational program of its kind—which ultimately became the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. A further key YMCA contribution was the YMCA Press, which in time would publish a remarkable variety of Russian-language literary, philosophical, and spiritual books that would never have been permitted inside the Soviet Union, including works by Nikolai Berdyaev, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

John R. Mott received the Nobel Peace Prize for his cooperative Christian ventures in 1946. Yet evaluating the YMCA’s Russian service is not a simple task. The present author hopes that a new volume of primary source documents accompanied by his introduction and explanatory footnotes: John R. Mott, the American YMCA, and Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers/Indiana University, 2020) will be a helpful contribution. This is one of a series of 14 volumes with a similar format highlighting the observations and experiences of a diverse group of American-born women and men who witnessed the outbreak of war and revolution in Russia between 1914 and 1921. Subjects include John Reed, Princess Julia Cantacuzène, Countess Spéransky (née Grant), and Albert Rhys Williams. 

The volume on Mott is the first in the series to address the topic of religion directly, with two sets of documents. The first, Mott’s Recent Experiences and Impressions in Russia, presents several public addresses and letters created during his participation in Elihu Root’s mission to Russia from May to August 1917. These historical documents—printed in 1917 but never distributed—describe the Root Commission and offer perspectives on several momentous  events and leaders of the era: the First World War, the February Revolution, members of the Provisional Government, and leading figures in the Russian Orthodox Church. The documents include the proposal for the YMCA to conduct a program of service among Russia’s military, Mott’s detailed letter reflecting on the country’s recent religious developments, and his speech to the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

Mott shared these words in his 19 June 1917 address to the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity:

The opportunity of mingling with Russian Christians which I have appreciated most deeply was that which came to me during my two visits to the prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Possibly many of you do not know that the Christians of America early in the war were given permission to extend the helpful ministry of the Young Men’s Christian Association to the prison camps of these countries, and that we have had over thirty wise and unselfish American workers busily engaged throughout the larger part of the war in helping to meet the needs of the Russian prisoners as well as those of the other Allied countries. It would be difficult, yes impossible, to express to you adequately the sense of joy and deep satisfaction it has afforded us to be permitted in this way to become better acquainted with the Russian people and with the Russian soul. Anything which God will permit us to do directly or indirectly to serve the Russian prisoners we will gladly do.6 

The volume’s second set of documents, Service with Fighting Men: An Account of the Work of the American Young Men’s Christian Associations in the World War (published in 1924), presents the YMCA’s official description and evaluation of its work carried out in Russia in response to Mott’s plans.7 

In order to provide context to the reader, the introduction to the volume includes key information on the work of the YMCA in Russia, the role of Mott as an organizational leader, and a survey of the YMCA’s work with soldiers during the First World War.8 The goal of the introduction is to encourage analysis of the texts, bearing in mind that the Bolshevik Revolution had not yet taken place by the time the first set of documents was written. Mott wrote with idealism and self-confidence—but of course he did not know the future. The second set of documents demonstrates how quickly realities in Russia shifted during his era. 

In spite of the many limitations and swirling suspicions, the YMCA was able to improve prisoner-of-war conditions significantly in the locations where it was able to operate. However, YMCA workers could not serve the vast number in need, and made contact with only a small percentage.9 The YMCA’s own evaluations of this work in Russia therefore express ambivalence, in part as its attempts to serve soldiers raised more controversy from more critics than any other aspect of its Russian service. A century on, connections between America and Russia in the fields of faith, culture, and politics continue to raise engaging questions, for which the close experience of John R. Mott should provide helpful historical context. 

Notes:

1. Kenneth Andrew Steuer, Pursuit of an “Unparalleled Opportunity”: The American Young Men’s Christian Association and Prisoner-of-War Diplomacy Among the Central Power Nations during World War I, 1914- 1923, doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1997, 45- 47.
2.  Ibid., 48-50.
3.  Ibid., 1-4.
4. See John W. Long and C. Howard Hopkins, “The Church and the Russian Revolution: Conversations of John R. Mott with Orthodox Church Leaders, June-July 1917,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol. 20 (1976), no. 3, 161-180.
5. Memorandum from Crawford Wheeler to John R. Mott and E. T. Colton, “Report on war-time activities in Russia,” 22 November 1919, 3-5. World War I Field Reports, binder 2. Russia, Colton E. T., Reports, Addresses, and Papers, two volumes. Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
6.  Matthew Lee Miller, ed., John R. Mott, the American YMCA, and Revolutionary Russia, Bloomington: Slavica Publishers/Indiana University, 2020, 26.
7.  William Howard Taft, et al., eds., Service with Fighting Men: An Account of the Work of the American Young Men’s Christian Associations in the World War, vol. 2, New York: Association Press, 1924, 270-282, 419-457.
8.  See also Matthew Lee Miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900- 1940, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013; Matthew Lee Miller, “The American YMCA and Russian Politics: Critics and Supporters of Socialism, 1900-1940,” in William Benton Whisenhunt and Norman E. Saul, eds., New Perspectives on RussianAmerican Relations, New York: Routledge, 2015, 161-177. 
9.  Steuer, 458, 454-455, 473.

Matthew Lee Miller is book review editor for the East-West Church Report and Professor of History at the University of Northwestern (St. Paul, Minnesota).