Early in the morning of September 9, 1990, Father Aleksandr Men set out, as usual, to walk through the birch woods to the station to catch a train to Novaya Derevnya, a distant suburb of Moscow where he served as a priest. A few steps down the path someone approached him and asked him to read something. A blow from behind with an axe struck him down, most probably from a second person. His reading glasses were out of their case beside the path. Father Aleksandr staggered back a few yards to his house, where he died at the garden gate.

As with so many other murders in Russia, no proper investigation ever took place. Why was this warm, charismatic — indeed brilliant — man struck down at 56, at the height of his powers? The police hinted at Jewish revenge against a convert from his family’s faith to Christianity. (Actually, his parents were the converts, he being brought up as a Christian.) Equally perniciously, another theory placed the murder with some fanatical Christian who wanted to rid the faith of its Jewish elements. No shred of evidence supports either theory. Almost certainly, this was the last act of revenge by a fanatic from a dying, atheist-dominated Communist Party. After all, the victim was undoing more than 70 years of anti-religious activity by the State.

The party maintained strict control over entry to the Moscow Theological Seminary, so the priesthood was barred to a young man urgently seeking to serve the Church. Father Aleksandr was too zealous, so instead he chose his second love, joining a forestry institute in Moscow, which soon transferred to Irkutsk in Siberia. There he met Gleb Yakunin, who would later become a thorn in the side of both the Soviet State and the Moscow Patriarchate. Both burnt to see justice for the faith and a breaking of the steel bonds that circumscribed it, but they chose different paths. A door opened to ordination for both, but Father Gleb became an active protester against the ongoing persecution of the Church, while Father Aleksandr chose the equally difficult task of trying to reform the Church from within. This, he envisaged, would be through education: by keeping within the law (just) and concentrating on reaching out to the younger generation deprived of even the most elementary Christian teaching.

Aleksandr Men was a man of remarkable intellectual capacity, whose sum of acquired knowledge was, in the circumstances, verging on the miraculous. Last April I sat at the desk of his study at Semkhoz, now preserved as a museum in his memory. Surrounded by his library, I felt the power of his presence as I worked on the script of a radio broadcast I was preparing about him. His widow, Natalya, said that he used to scour the second-hand bookshops in the 1950s, a time of semirelaxation in the atheist campaign. Many did not wish to retain books that could have landed them in trouble, so occasionally valuable titles appeared on the shelves of these shops, books banned from Soviet libraries. He not only bought them but also assimilated their contents.

Father Aleksandr’s knowledge was soon encyclopaedic. He wrote a six-volume history of world religions, in which he paid tribute to the beautiful and positive elements he found in Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim scriptures. This was one of the reasons why his works have never been approved by the official church in Russia.

Collections of his lectures, articles and sermons still appear under the auspices of the Men Foundation run by his younger brother. In Soviet times his disciples sent his manuscripts to Brussels, where the organisation La Vie avec Dieu printed them anonymously, gradually infiltrating them back into Russia, where they had an immense influence. Today the tally of his works comes to some 20 volumes.

Before Mikhail Gorbachev permitted de facto religious liberty in the late 1980s, Men, although hounded by the authorities and forced several times to change his parish, taught a growing group of young disciples. They constantly demanded his time, his energy, his books, but he never refused their requests or turned them away either from his church or his home.

In the period of perestroika all this changed. Almost overnight he became the public authority on the faith, the apostle of Christian glasnost. The demands on him were on the edge of what a human being could bear. He was constantly on the radio and TV. Most significantly, perhaps, he breached a physical barrier, becoming a frequent lecturer on official Soviet premises. As well as keeping going the regular services in his church, during the last year of his life he gave more than 200 lectures.

He delivered the last one the night before he died. Some of those present felt this was his valediction, as he spoke of Christ’s own sacrifice: “Through his love for humanity he stayed with us on this dirty, bloodstained and sinful earth, just to be beside us.”

It was almost as though he knew he was going out to face his executioners the next day. Now, though, as one stands by his grave or by the memorial at the place where he was struck down, there comes an overwhelming feeling, in the new churches built in his memory and through talking to the priests of great spirituality who officiate in them, that Father Aleksandr’s legacy may be more powerful than the message he proclaimed during his lifetime.

Canon Michael Bourdeaux is founder of Keston Institute. Father Aleksandr Men: A Man of Fearless Faith is on Radio 4 at 8.10am on Sunday