Lexington Books The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940

In The American YMCA and Russian Culture, Matthew Lee Miller explores the impact of the philanthropic activities of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) on Russians during the late imperial and early Soviet periods. The YMCA, the largest American service organization, initiated its intense engagement with Russians in 1900. During the First World War, the Association organized assistance for prisoners of war, and after the emigration of many Russians to central and western Europe, founded the YMCA Press and supported the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris. Miller demonstrates that the YMCA contributed to the preservation, expansion, and enrichment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It therefore played a major role in preserving an important part of pre-revolutionary Russian culture in Western Europe during the Soviet period until the repatriation of this culture following the collapse of the USSR. The research is based on the YMCA's archival records, Moscow and Paris archives, and memoirs of both Russian and American participants. This is the first comprehensive discussion of an extraordinary period of interaction between American and Russian cultures. It also presents a rare example of fruitful interconfessional cooperation by Protestant and Orthodox Christians. Review Dmitrii Likhachev affirmed in 1991 that one should judge countries and cultures by their best, not their worst. This represents the sensibility of Matthew Lee Miller's meticulously researched and engrossing study of the relationship between the American YMCA and Russians both inside Russia and in European emigration. . .Miller assembles an enormous amount of material into a coherent narrative, as each chapter traces the interactions of the Y men with a specific nationality or group during a designated period of activity. . .Miller's book is recommended.--The Russian Review In his extensive, well-documented study, Matthew L. Miller scrupulously explores the YMCA's contribution to Russian culture as a significant aspect of the interaction between the American and Russian cultures in the twentieth century. Most scholars of Russian culture know of the publishing house YMCA Press and the YMCA's role in the creation of the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris. Miller's book significantly expands this general knowledge, providing the readers with detailed information on the YMCA's presence and activity in Russia in the changing historical time and political climate, as well as shifting American-Russian diplomatic relations between 1900 and 1940.--Canadian Slavonic Papers Matthew Lee Miller is to be thanked for this very useful and important study of the really amazing dedication of the YMCA to émigré Russian fellow Christians. Their work was not only humanitarian, in the aftermath of the war and the revolution but it was also an almost clairvoyant vision of rapprochement between the long divided Eastern and Western churches. Miller documents this now forgotten work of lovingkindness, one that created much communication and exchange and solidarity among Christians for decades thereafter.--Logos: Journal Of Eastern Christian Studies Miller (history, Northwestern College) has written a valuable study of the YMCA's role in helping to keep Russian Orthodoxy alive and vital during the 20th century. Before WW I, the YMCA, the leading US Protestant movement that sought to teach the Christian faith through youth activities, cooperated with Orthodox clergy and believers to help Orthodoxy adjust to the modernizing winds pushing Russia toward industrialization and land reform. When the communists took power in 1917 and Russian believers fled to western Europe, it was the YMCA that provided financial support to maintain the Orthodox community and to build St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris, which became the home for Orthodox intellectuals like Sergei Bulgakov, and St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary in New York. Throughout the dec