Letter from the Chairman
Keston never fought in the Cold War, yet we were in the frontline reporting on the battle, telling countless stories of the heroic resistance of believers to persecution and betrayal (sometimes by Christian leaders both in their own churches and in the West).
Exploration of the Stasi archives by Canon Michael Bourdeaux, founder and now President of Keston, has revealed that the East German government considered us to be one of their most important ideological opponents: they mistakenly thought Keston was founded in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and that we were a large international organisation with a network of branches. Canon Bourdeaux found evidence that the East Germans were watching us closely: the Stasi archives contained some hand-written notes by a visitor to Keston in 1977 and by someone who had attended a 1985 Keston conference.
It is not surprising that our role has changed significantly since the collapse of communism. The miracle is that we have kept going for so long. However, circumstances, not least financial, have forced us to reconsider our role.
Keston has a good track-record of publishing: we produced a series of Keston Books, the Keston News Service (1974-1991 and revived 1995-2002) as well as our magazine Frontier and our journal Religion in Communist Lands (founded 1973 and renamed Religion State and Society after the fall of communism). We have produced a solid body of research and most recently our Encyclopaedia of Religious Life in Russia Today in eight volumes (in Russian) completed in the autumn of 2008. Publishing on such a scale, however, is no longer sustainable. The future of Religion State and Society was secured in June 2006 when Keston transferred the rights of this journal to Taylor and Francis, the journal’s publisher.
I have been working with the Council to forge a new vision for Keston and to define our role in the 21st century - it is now 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. We know that Keston has an important legacy from the period when it had reports almost weekly in the church or national press. This legacy is embodied in Keston’s archive, which is unique in the world. It is extensive and comprehensive, covering all former communist countries in one way or another - after all, in the early 1980s we had over 20 staff and our researches led the world. The large staff of those early days shrank gradually during the 1990s until during 2006-2007, owing to financial constraints, the few remaining staff either left or sadly had to be made redundant. The Council of Management decided that, in its straitened circumstances, Keston must concentrate its resources on preserving the archive.
The archive contains many examples of heroism, texts which will one day become spiritual classics. By collecting material on all religions and Christian denominations during the communist period, Keston created a source of exceptional value for future church historians and for all those who recognise the importance of the 20th century religious witnesses in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: they defended freedom of mind and spirit in the face of a political system which claimed total control over all aspects of human life. They and their message must not be forgotten.
As Keston had to leave its Oxford premises in November 2007, the trustees explored a number of locations in the UK and Europe as a new home for Keston's archive and library. The search was long and laborious. Most of the institutions approached were unfortunately not willing to house both the library and archive because they either did not have the space or the money, or both. In other cases either the proposed premises or the financial terms were not acceptable to Keston's trustees.
Baylor University in Texas, USA, approached Keston in the autumn of 2006 and three of their academic staff then made a presentation to the Council of Management in December of that year. Baylor wished to establish a new Keston Center for Religion Politics and Society which would carry on the mission of Keston into the 21st century, and would offer a new home to the archive. This new centre would be part of an existing institution – the Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies - which is devoted to the study of church-state relations in the areas which concern Keston, and which has a body of research students already engaged in study within Keston's field. In February 2007 Michael Bourdeaux and I went out to Baylor to explore their proposals further, and after careful thought and consultation with the other trustees came to the conclusion that the best solution - and one which had been approved by the Charity Commission - would be for Keston to accept Baylor's offer.
On 24 March 2007 an Extraordinary General Meeting was held in London at which I spoke at length about the many approaches made to institutions in the UK and Europe and about the problems the trustees had faced. After lengthy discussion with Keston members, a proposal was put to the meeting that the library and archive be placed at Baylor, on terms to be negotiated by the Council. The vote to accept the proposal was unanimous. By June 2007 a contract had been signed with Baylor and in August the collection was moved to Texas where it is now being managed by Baylor library staff who have all the expertise to hand for its conservation and maintenance.
Conservation is particularly important because some of the most important items in the archive are samizdat documents which were produced on poor quality paper, and are inevitably deteriorating. The library has a department devoted to digitising and plans to get much of Keston's material onto the Internet.
Keston’s Council of Management is represented on the governing body of the Keston Center at Baylor, and at Keston’s Annual General Meeting on 3 November 2007 Keston’s Articles of Association were amended to allow the Director of the new Keston Center to join the Council of Management. Collaboration between Baylor and Keston will be close and based on regular communication.
On 27 and 28 November 2007 Baylor celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and the opening of the Keston Center for Religion Politics and Society. Michael Bourdeaux, his wife Lorna, and I were invited to attend the celebrations. In November 2008 Michael and I visited Baylor again to attend the Keston Center’s Board meeting and to see what progress had been achieved in organising the Keston archive and library.
We were shown round the Center. The room next to what had been called the Michael Bourdeaux Room was now beautifully organised. It had been named the Youens Library with a plaque on the wall which was given to Keston’s library by Canon John Youens as a memorial to his daughter Georgina, who was killed in a 1977 plane crash (John Youens was a Keston Council member and gave a great deal of money to the library). At considerable expense a central structure had been made containing drawers for files and shelves for books. To the right were moveable metal shelves for the acid-free folders, which made maximum use of the space available. On all the other walls were shelves for the books. Bound volumes of journals were located in the Michael Bourdeaux Room.
In June 2009 the Council welcomed Professor Christopher Marsh, Director of the Keston Center at Baylor, who reported that the digital archive had been updated and increased, that 93% of all material was now out of boxes and on the shelves, including all of the samizdat material, which had been placed in acid-free files, and that by 2010 all the journals would have been bound. The renovation of the existing physical space was complete, and additional accommodation had been acquired. The university library now had a cataloguer who was a graduate in Russian, which had greatly facilitated the process of cataloguing Russian-language material. The objectives for 2009-2010 were to complete the cataloguing of the books and the binding of all journals, to empty the warehouse and to begin processing all the remaining material, and to increase the use of the collection.
The creation of a Keston Center in the USA does not mean that Keston in the UK has ceased its activity. Keston continues to promote the goals for which it was founded in 1969. It completed in 2008 the twelve-year project to produce an Encyclopaedia of Religious Life in Russia Today covering all aspects of religion in contemporary Russia, it monitors the use of the library and archive, continues to produce a newsletter for Keston members, manages its current finances and provides scholarships for researchers in Keston’s field of study. It will sponsor conferences and publications which promote the purposes for which Keston was founded, and will undertake such other activities as are possible within the resources available in keeping with Keston's objectives.
I would like to thank most warmly all those who continue to support Keston Institute and its work.
With best wishes,
Xenia Dennen
Chairman
November 2009
|
