Religion

Michael Bourdeaux obituary


Michael Bourdeaux, who has died aged 87, founded Keston College in Kent in 1969 as a centre for the study and dissemination of reliable information about religion in communist countries. He described the college in his memoirs as “my concept”, and poured into it his “energy and commitment over a period of 30 years”. It was an organisation that rattled the Soviet authorities; indeed Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet double agent who once worked for the KGB and escaped to the west in the boot of a car, claimed at a Keston AGM that it was No 2 in the hierarchy of KGB hates, the first being Amnesty International.

Why was Keston so disliked? It uncovered unpalatable facts about the true situation of religious believers behind the iron curtain, and it demolished the communist propaganda that there was freedom of conscience in its “brave new world”. The fact that religion persisted undermined party teaching as propounded by leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev, whose 1961 party programme promised that communism would be achieved in 20 years and religion would fade away.

In Britain, too, not everyone welcomed Keston: Lambeth Palace, Baptist leaders and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office all shunned it up to the mid-1980s and the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, because it “rocked the boat” and undermined quiet diplomacy. Yet, while rejecting Soviet misinformation and doublespeak, Bourdeaux also refused to take up an anti-communist crusade: his approach was balanced, even-handed and based on facts.

Michael was born in Praze, Cornwall, the son of Lilian (nee Blair), a primary school teacher, and Richard Bourdeaux, a baker who, Michael claimed, produced the best Cornish pasties in the county. He studied French and German at Truro school and found he had a facility for languages. His lifelong interest in Russia and its history and culture began thanks to a sensible RAF group captain, who at the start of national service sent him to a Russian interpreters’ course in Coulsdon, Surrey. Then it was off to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a degree in Russian, followed in 1959 by a year at Moscow University as part of the first student exchange programme organised by the British Council.

Michael Bourdeaux visiting Stalin’s birthplace museum in Gori, Georgia, in 2017
Michael Bourdeaux visiting Stalin’s birthplace museum in Gori, Georgia, in 2017

That year was an important milestone in Soviet history, when Khrushchev launched an intense anti-religious campaign, and Bourdeaux witnessed the closure of churches and discrimination against religious believers. The experience led him to make religion in the USSR the focus of his life. After studying theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1961. In 1964, on a brief visit to Moscow, he met two babushki at a site where overnight a church had been blown up. He was taken to meet a group of Russian Orthodox believers who described what was happening to them, and asked him to “be our voice and speak for us”. Five years later Keston was founded, with the help of Peter Reddaway and Leonard Schapiro, two LSE academics.

Bourdeaux was one of the few who foresaw the collapse of the communist system. In 1984 he was awarded the Templeton prize (at that time given by the Templeton Foundation for “progress in religion”), and in his speech at the Guildhall in London he formulated his conviction that a combination of religion and nationalism would bring down the Soviet system: “I see an empire in the process of decay because there’s no binding loyalty which will keep it together.” A year later Gorbachev was elected general secretary by the politburo and a period of reform began, which led in 1988 to a volte-face by the Communist party on its religious policy. This, to Bourdeaux, marked the end of communism.

That year he attended the celebrations of the millennium of the Russian Orthodox church, and recorded in his memoirs the evening he spent at the Bolshoi theatre, where a real set of bells had been mounted as though in a church tower: “A curtain rolled back to reveal the bells, which rang out in a peal of thunder. No one in the theatre, Christian or atheist, could have missed the symbolism: for years the authorities had banned the ringing of church bells, usually even removing them from their stays and throwing them to the ground. Surely this was a pledge of a new beginning for the church in society.”

From Keston’s inception, it studied the present and the past: high-quality, well-researched journalism as well as academic study of the past were the focus of its work. Its reporting earned the respect of the media – if information came from Keston it was trusted. At the same time, Bourdeaux understood the importance of an archive, of gathering primary sources, samizdat documents, articles from the official and unofficial press in communist countries, as well as photographs and even anti-religious posters. This collection, the Keston archive, is a treasure trove for scholars studying the religious history of the former communist bloc.

Keston Institute, as it is now called, eventually moved to Oxford, and gained a sister organisation in the US when in 2007 Baylor University in Texas offered to establish a new Keston Center for Religion, Politics and Society, and to house the Keston library and archive. This center and Keston UK today work in tandem, promoting the study of religion in former communist countries.

Bourdeaux’s first wife, Gillian (nee Davies), whom he married in 1960, died in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Lorna (nee Waterton), whom he married in 1979, and their children, Adrian and Lara; by Karen and Mark, the children of his first marriage; and by four grandsons.

In the briefing pack produced when he was awarded the Templeton prize, Bourdeaux was described as “a mild, soft-spoken, ruddy-cheeked baker’s son from a remote mining region in south-west England”. He commented in his memoirs: “Well, at least the ‘baker’s son’ was accurate.”

Michael Alan Bourdeaux, theologian and writer, born 19 March 1934; died 29 March 2021



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.