Letter from the Chairman

Exploration of the Stasi archives by Canon Michael Bourdeaux, the founder of Keston, 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 handwritten 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. Our Encyclopaedia of Religious Life in Russia Today in eight volumes (in Russian) was completed in the autumn of 2008 (four volumes of an updated version have so far been published and are available on Keston’s website, with another volume due to be published this year). 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 of Management to forge a new vision for Keston and to define our role in the 21st century – it is now over 36 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 researchers 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 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. 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 would have inevitably deteriorated. Keston’s Council of Management is represented on the Advisory Board 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.

In November 2007 the Keston Center for Religion, Politics and Society was officially opened. Michael Bourdeaux and I attended the opening, and in November 2008 and February 2010 we again visited the Centre to see what progress had been achieved in organising the Keston archive and library, and to hear about the number of research students, some funded by Keston UK, who had made use of these resources. New digitising technology, similar to that in the Library of Congress, had been acquired by Baylor’s main library. Priority had been given to digitising material which was fragile and beginning to disintegrate. Items were also digitised in response to the requests of researchers, and already many additional documents were ready to be put on the Center’s website, www.baylor.edu/kestoncenter.

Following the resignation on 1 August 2011 of the Keston Center’s Director, Professor Christopher Marsh, Professor Robyn Driskell was appointed Interim Director and was able to help maintain and develop the Center until a permanent Director, Professor Kathy Hillman, was appointed at the start of the 2012–2013 academic year. Professor Kathy Hillman is an Associate Professor and Director of Baptist Collections and Library Advancement. As Director of the Keston Center she is an ex officio member of the Council of Management.

Over the years, during my visits for meetings of the Keston Center’s Advisory Board, I have been able to see the progress achieved at the Keston Center. The Keston archive and library are now housed in a fine light-filled room, named the Michael Bourdeaux Room, on the third floor of the Carroll Library, where there is space for all Keston’s documents, books and journals. Conservation work has continued and a remarkable amount of material has been digitised and thus made available to a world audience.

Many interesting lectures and events have taken place in the Keston Center. For example, a symposium entitled ‘Religion and Political Culture in Communist Countries: Past, Present and Future’ took place in 2013, at which Dr Wallace Daniel and Canon Michael Bourdeaux gave keynote addresses. Wallace Daniel, University Professor of History at Mercer University (Georgia), helped engineer the transfer of the Keston Archive to Baylor in 2007 when he was a senior Baylor faculty member, and today serves on the Keston Center’s Advisory Board as well as on Keston’s Council in the UK. The complete programme and video recordings of the two keynote addresses can be found at www.baylor.edu/kestoncenter/index.php?id=933307.

2014 was a memorable year when Alexander Ogorodnikov, the Russian Orthodox dissident who was imprisoned for his faith during the communist period, arrived at Baylor for a period of study funded by Keston UK. He gave a most moving talk in a packed Michael Bourdeaux Room which I introduced: I emphasised how important the Keston archive was, since it had preserved material which Alexander Ogorodnikov could no longer find in Russia. He spoke about his prison experiences and the way he had been called to bring light into the darkest places in prison.

During my visit to Baylor in 2023 for the Advisory Board, I gave a lecture on the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine about the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, which can be accessed via the following link: https://library.web.baylor.edu/visit/keston-center-religion-politics-society/lectures-symposia/2023-irina-ratushinskaya-triumph. Last year, when I was again at Baylor for the Advisory Board meeting, Dr Wallace Daniel gave a lecture about the remarkable Russian Orthodox priest, Fr Gleb Yakunin, who defended freedom of conscience in the USSR and as a result spent many years in the Gulag. This year it was the turn of Dr Scott Kenworthy to give a lecture – on Patriarch Tikhon (1865-1925), about whom he had recently published a biography.

The creation of the 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. Each year Keston awards scholarships to enable young scholars to spend some weeks working in the Keston archive, and, at the start of the current academic year, established a new three-year Research Associate post at Cardiff University for a post-doctoral young scholar. Keston UK completed in 2008 the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Religious Life in Russia Today, covering all aspects of religion in contemporary Russia, and this is now being updated. Four volumes of the second edition so far have been published and are available on Keston’s website, and a further volume is due to be published this year. Last year three field trips were completed, to Orenburg, Yakutsk and Rostov-on-Don, and this year, so far, there have been two - to Kazan and Saratov. I was privileged to participate in this project (before the outbreak of the war against Ukraine) for 20 years, travelling with the team to many parts of Russia, including to some very remote places. Particular highlights for me were the field trips to Magadan, Kamchatka, the Mari El Republic, and the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. Magadan, on the Far East coast facing Kamchatka, was the location in the 1930s for many labour camps where thousands perished in the uranium and gold mines of Kolyma; there I met a remarkable Roman Catholic priest from Alaska, who had devoted his life to praying for those who suffered and died in the Gulag. Kamchatka, 6½ thousand kilometres from Moscow, was where we encountered some of the most impressive Protestant missionaries, members of the Full Gospel “Good News” church, one of whom – a champion sled team driver – had reached isolated villages and brought many to the Christian faith. In the Mari El Republic, I was fascinated to discover that its ancient form of paganism was regarded as an official religion on a level with Russian Orthodoxy. Most memorable of all was our field trip to the far north, to the Solovki Islands – a place of extraordinary natural beauty – where a Russian Orthodox monastery, founded in the 15th century, was turned into the first labour camp after the Russian Revolution. Since the fall of communism, the monastery has been revived; the terrible suffering of the communist period is a focus today for its redemptive work.

As well as the Encyclopaedia project, Keston UK monitors the use of the Keston library and archive, continues to produce a newsletter for Keston members (all issues are available on this website), 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.

With best wishes,
Xenia Dennen
Chairman
May 2026