Church Hitchhiking

Archpriest Alexei Umensky was one of the most well-known Moscow priests - he hosted a program about Orthodoxy on the city television channel, published books of sermons, and on holidays and charitable fairs at the Trinity Church in Khokhlov, where he served as rector for 30 years, gathered poets, musicians, writers, and artists. It was an important place on the map of Moscow for many, where people came in both sorrow and joy. Father Alexei organized special liturgies for patients at a children's hospice, visited prisons to see inmates, and befriended both well-known and unknown people.
All this came to an end during the war. Now he lives and serves in Paris, and the Russian Orthodox Church has deprived him of his clerical status.

This book is a story about his life. About his childhood in Perovo in the 1960s, when Gagarin went into space, and instead of crooked rural houses, five-story buildings grew up. About his youth among Soviet hippies and Orthodox monarchists. About the priest's journey from the enthusiasm of the 1990s to the catastrophe of the 2020s. But above all - about the present. This is a Christian reflection on life in a collapsed world.
Co-author of Umensky is journalist Ksenia Luchenko, author of the book "With Good Intentions".