American YMCA and Russian Culture

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.

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 decades of communist rule, the YMCA backed the isolated Russian Orthodox community and helped it to grow. Mining both Russian and YMCA archives, Miller shows the interdependence and cooperation between the two Christian communities and fittingly hails the YMCA's philanthropy and ecumenism in a time of need. Excellent index and bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended., 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., 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. . .One of the book’s particular strengths, and one of its central themes, focuses on the role of the YMCA in the Russian diaspora. . . .In short, everyone interested in Protestant-Orthodox inter-confessional cooperation, in Russian-American relations, in Russian religious thought, in émigré history, and in interwar Europe, will benefit from reading this important book., The YMCA’s involvement with Russia as explored by Matthew Miller in The American YMCA and Russian Culture is a fascinating chapter of Russian-American relations. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Russian émigré culture without the YMCA’s support., Miller significantly expands our knowledge of the scope and impact of the YMCA in Russia and among Russians. He also expands, in interesting and provocative ways, our knowledge of an early effort at ecumenical understanding between Russian Orthodoxy and Protestantism. ... This is a fascinating and informative work that extends our understanding of an understudied arm of American philanthropy abroad, in a crucial revolutionary context. It also deepens our knowledge of the impact of Russian philosophy and Orthodox theology and culture both in Russia and in emigration. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in either field.

Matthew Lee Miller is assistant professor of history at Northwestern College.