by Alexander Nezhny
Moscow News
10-17 January 1999

From age to age the hunt for heretics goes on in our society

The leader of our liberal democrats and his party girlfriend Nina Viktorovna Krilevskaia report, for example, that on Kamchatka the Jehovah's Witnesses are making money by the primordial oldest profession and turning the money over to the Jehovist association. In the process and, one should suggest, intentionally they reward the sailors they seduce with foul diseases.

Crusade

Candidate of philosophy Irina Alexandrovna Galitskaia, who is the director of the religious studies group of the Institute for the Development of Personality of the Russian Academy of Education identifies in the religious teaching of these Witnesses a kind of Shigalevshchina, at first plunging society into a frenzy and then two or three significant acts of terrorism. Besides this, as a good woman, she is concerned that this filthy faith has its roots not in some tender heart of Riazan territory but in the completely alien ground of the state of Pennsylvania and that the sectarian leaders located in USA can easily exploit the deceived Russian citizens for undermining our national security. "They must be prohibited," she said with all her heart. And that is not all.

Should we report to you the opinion of an important person, the director of the administration of the domestic policies of the administration of the president of Russia, Andrei Viktorovich Loginov? I won't hide it: he has a frightful attitude about sectarians. In a word, they are monsters, beasts, and perverts. I understood Loginov to be saying that these enemies of the human race do nothing to protect a decent girl or woman, a mother, and, as horrible as it is to say, they force innocent children to serve their base passions. And if any one of their followers tries to break out of the murky religious underground into the fresh air of Orthodoxy or, even worse, Judaism, then it's all over. A bullet in the head or a noose around the neck--Mr. Loginov spares us the details, but he is 100 percent sure; they murder.

Does one report the main line of the Leninist communist party of the Russian federation, which always is combating the opium of the people? Its research center has pummeled the sects, but not at all because they, so to speak, are sitting on a pin and are trying to give quite rational citizens access to it. No. The research center has a broadly bolshevik point of view and argues that the issue is not opium as such but that the sectarians have a different kind of opium, unlike that which for a thousand years has met the needs of real Russian people. Hence, it is (I quote) "undermining the spiritual foundation of the Russian people."

Really, there is reason to be filled with great anxiety. My poor fatherland, why are you surrendering to evil forces? Motherland, why are you not upset about the intrusion of adherents of an American faith? It seems to me that one name is whispered in response, repeated like a mantra: "Bring Dvorkin; call for Dvorkin."

The biography of Alexander Leonidovich Dvorkin, the defender of piety, the hammer against the Jehovists and similar garbage, which has been distributed by the Irenaeus of Lyons Center, of which he is the head, describes a complex and glorious fate. As a youth he shook the dust of the totalitarianism of his homeland from his feet and crossed the ocean as a political (!) emigrant. He married an American citizen and became himself a full-blooded American. Regarding his marriage his biography is silent, out of some apparently false modesty, although there is nothing shamful in it; even saints had wives. Returning seven years ago to his paternal home, Dvorkin wisely maintained his adherence to the stars-and-stripes and his American passport. He is quite right: can one really take citizenship in a country in which power could fall into the hands of Jehovists, or Krishnaists, or even Antichrist himself who is personified as a student studying the principles of Doctor Moon.

Dvorkin was not the first in our homeland to accuse the sectarians of violent actions. He was the first to blame them with inciting murder. And finally he was the first to manage to penetrate the inner sancta of these Witnesses, Krishnaists, Moonists, and Mormons, and their cold-blooded attempt to seize governmental power in Russia.

However in everything that Dvorkin and those who think like he does swear to, there is not a single word of truth.

He is lyingwhen he assumes the crown of thorns of a political emigrant. He left the Soviet Union for Israel. I don't care what kind of blood he has--Tatar, Persian, or Eskomo. A Jew is a Jew; Israel is Israel. There's no need to lie.

He is lying when he declares that our law "On Freedom of Conscience" of 1990 was an American version, even though there simply is not any similar law in USA.

He is lying when he reports to an anxious society about the 250,000 families destroyed by sectarians. I called an agent of the Russian procuracy who should have access to such data. He referred me to Professor Nikolai Antonovich Trofimchuk, the head of the department of religious studies of the Academy of State Services. The professor answered that no such statistics exist and Dvorkin is "making them up."

He is lying when he accuses the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Society of Krishna Consciousness, the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and other religious associations of crimes against the individual and state security. There is not a single instance of criminal behavior; there only is wretched and evil fabrication

Believe me: acquaintance with the life and works of Mr. Dvorkin did not give me the least comfort. This study in the end gave an impression that you have literally swallowed some kind of evil and turned yourself inside out. But at the same time you begin slowly to realize that he has not operated in a vacuum and that you must realize that within the enigmatic Russian soul there are some strings on which this man is able to play with his skillful hands.

In the fate of our wayward fatherland and, it turns out, in our common fate there is a certain tragic nexus. Having received the heritage of Vladimir Monomakh's "Testament," which urged his children and the whole nation to conquer their enemies "by good deeds, repentance, tears, and kindness," it brushed it aside, like a children's fairy tale, but although it treated Ivan the Terrible with awe, honoring him at times for the excesses of the oprichniki and at other times for those who were tried and martyred by him, whom he piously enrolled in the synodik, and then at other times for Metropolitan Filipp (Kolychev) who was killed upon his wish and who fearlessly denounced the bloody occupations of the tsar. While it has in its roll of saints the great elder Nil of Sora, who was a convinced opponent of the use of force in matters of faith, it honors more Joseph of Volotsk, who approved prescribing the trusty drugs for every "heretic" for his final spiritual healing--the bonfire or the executioner's block. Although it possessed a marvelous treasury of Christian love, it locked it away tightly and undertook to persecute Old Believers with unheardof brutality.

Church and state, hand in hand, tried so persistently and ardently to exterminate from the national soul any tendency toward diversity of religious thought that one can imagine that Russia never knew any more important task. Meanwhile all of the enormous and bloody work during the course of centuries drained Russia morally but turned out, in substance, to be completely fruitless. At the beginning of the present century the country had from 20 to 35 million schismatics, people who had separated themselves from state

Orthodoxy and belonged either to the Old Believers or some other of the "sects."

No single state (even USSR--but about this later) had anywhere or ever sought to destroy in people the quest for a new heaven on a par with the official church (or the church in union with the state).

The chief purpose of a person is to find God. True, this search in some situations may take on strange, sometimes even frightening, forms. The way of thought that is circumscribed by standard patterns and is not trained by history and culture and is weighed down by the pressure of generally accepted opinions is not able to reach to that highest spiritual tension with which the meaning of life and personal salvation have always been pursued in Russia.

One can take the example of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, whose departure from Yasnaia Poliana was, in essence, a flight from the falsity of ordinary existence to the final truth of service of God, from the world of vanity to the world of providence, and from the speculative idea to its concrete realization. One can recall his younger contemporary who left Petersburg for the steppe beyond the Volga, leaving the decadence in a quest for religious truth, leaving the war against God to enter faith. He became a preacher of Christianity, but not the kind received from the hands of the church but straight from the Gospel and applied directly to life. I am speaking of the poet Alexander Dobroliubov. Of him, as about Brother Alexander, the spiritual leader of the "Dobroliubov brotherhood," Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote after a brief acquaintance with him: "I had no doubt that I had seen a saint before me."

There is substantial interest in the history of the relations of the soviet regime with non-Orthodox people for study of sectarians, not of the Dvorkin type but of the, if you will, moral type. Smashing the "Tikhonite" church, destroying the priests (as Vladimir Ilich instructed, as many as possible), breaking up churches and monasteries, the triumphant bolsheviks were unable to disabuse any Tolstoyans of their conscientious nonviolence and refusal to fight in the ranks of the Red Army for the good of oppressed humanity. The conscientious objectors were sent to the wall. I had the bitter experience of reading in one archive a letter by one of these martyrs written just before death: "When Christ was condemned to death, he said: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' The same with me. Let them do with me what they will; I will forgive them and will suffer for the name of Christ." That was what was written just a few hours before his execution by the nineteen-year-old peasant boy S.A. Dragunovsky, who was shot on 24 December 1919 for refusing military service on religious convictions.

Among the high bolsheviks there were at the same time people (V.D. Bonch-Bruevich in first place) who were trying to seduce party leaders with tempting pictures of the participation of millions of sectarians of various denominations in the construction of the communist society. There was some basis for it. Having been persecuted in the past by state and church, the sectarians who were enjoying the freedom of conscience that had been granted were ready to roll up their sleves and build within several years in Russia tens and hundreds of model agricultural communes. Sober, honest, hard-working people--they would move mountains. In the name of the government they even sent out a call to all those sectarians who had fled from tsarist Russian: come back. This call was supported even by the secretary and first biographer of Lev Tolstoy, Pavel Ivanovich Biriukov, in 1921, who wrote to the Dukhobors of America and Canada whom he long had known: "Don't some of you want to resettle in Russia in order to establish here your way of thinking and form of life for enlightening the Russian people, which still is in darkness?"

And they believed it. They returned. They worked indefatigably even on worthless, inhospitable lands, transforming them into prosperous farms. Molokans and New Israelites in the northern Caucasus and the steppes, Mennonites (there even was an All-Russian Mennonite Society) in the Crimea, Omsk province, Minusinsk, and Armavir; and Dukhobors on the Don, Temperence Christians outside Moscow and in Kolomna district, while the former student of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy who had become a convinced Tolstoyan, in the soviet era an instructor for agricultural communes of the commissariat of land, Ivan Tregubov, did not let up in insisting to his supervisor that "communism is much more successfully and simply achieved by sectarian communes than by soviet communes."

But the sectarian Christ evoked in bolsheviks the same hatred that the Orthodox Christ did. Economic successes of the communes and the strong way of life of the Mennonites, Temperance Christians, or Molokans aroused a primal revolutionary instinct: confiscate and divide. In Minusinsk and the Crimea the Mennonites' land was seized and the newspapers printed all sorts of vile things (a la Dvorkin) and they were pronounced secret enemies of the workers and peasants' government. In the steppes the Molokans' farms began to wither. Twenty-two of the factories that they had built in a short time, which produced tens of thousands of pounds of excellent butter and Russian Swiss cheese, herds of pedigreed and productive cattle, and well-maintained pastures--all were destroyed. The disillusioned Molokans wrote to the government: "If you cannot recognize our communes as useful for socialist construction and give them full freedom in matters of faith and common worship, then permit us to return to our former place of residence."

Before return to their homeland they had lived in Turkey. Now Turkey again took them in, Russian people, Christians, great laborers, and model citizens. Then the society of the "New Israel" invited them to Uruguay.

The New Israelites turned up in Uruguay in 1910, 300 families, 1500 mouths with modest possessions, nearly naked people on a completely barren land. Thirteen years later, setting out on their return trip, they left behind 20,000 hectares of well-groomed fields and pastures, herds of horses and healthy cattle, dozens of tractors, threshing machines, planters, automobiles, two ships and all kinds of other equipment. In Russia they got land sixty versts from the railroad and in the sweat of their brow they undertook to organize the steppe given to them for a new life. In three years of the most difficult labor without any machinery they broke up the virgin land and laid the basic foundations for highly productive farming. They had fewer tractors than in Uruguay, but more than Sholokov's heroes had--eight machines. However the Dvorkins of that time undertook to sic on the New Israelites all the soviet dogs, portraying them as kulaks, counterrevolutionaries, and swindlers. The most just judges in the world deprived the preachers of their electoral rights. To the two associated class enemies, the priest and the kulak, was added a third, the sectarian. In 1929 "New Israel" realized clearly that active faith and conscientious labor in USSR were impossible.

The subsequent fate of Molokans, New Israelites, and all other sectarians who were enticed to the homeland by deceit is unfortunately not known to me. Did their feet manage to carry them away from the soviet regime to reach a normal life somewhere in Turkey or overseas, as P.I. Biriukov managed to do by settling peacefully in Switzerland? Or did they vanish in prisons, camps, or convoys as their unselfish deceiver, Ivan Tregubov, did in 1931? The abandoned machine has not stopped since then.

When I was reading investigative cases in the archives of state security, I copied out the following:

Georgia, 1938. Sentenced to be shot, the Zubkovs, husband and wife, Alexis and Anna. They did not participate in elections. Moreover, leading 300 Dukhobors "with religious songs, they marched past the election polling places." (These Dukhobors will justify Russia before the Creator at the Final Judgment.)

Ulianivsk province, 1950. Baptists Mikhail Trubin, Gavriil Oshanin, Fedor Vaniukhin sentenced to 25 years. In their sect they conducted criminal conversations that in USSR Stalin is praised as even the tsar was not praised and that only God could be so great. (It would have been better for these uncultured peasants to profess the same incorrect faith as the patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus, Alexis I (Simansky), who called comrade Stalin the "God-given leader," and for his courage he received not 25 years but many medals, a fine car, and other awards and pleasant gifts.)

In the same Ulianovsk province, a year later, the Jehovah's Witness Ivan Grigorievich Davydov was sentenced to 25 years in the camps. In interpreting the Gospel the criminal Ivan Grigorievich said that the soviet government is temporary and predicted the imminent advent of another life.

The soviet fatherland, our natural mother, by which exalted word shall we still call you? Mr. Dvorkin, join the authors of these sentences. Join with those who killed and sentenced people only because they were Baptists, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Dukhobors, or Tolstoyans. After all, if you are right it means that the Stalinist executioners also were right.

At the beginning of perestroika, at the time of the first glimmers of freedom of conscience, I once was in a two-story building on Smolensk Boulevard in Moscow, the Council on Religious Affairs. Its chairman was receiving messengers. From all ends of the country people were arriving here and they gathered in the spacious hall and reported by turns to the chairman their complaints against the ferocious regime.

And in the first rows someone in a gray overcoat got up and with an emaciated face and also a gray and quiet voice he asked for justice for his son, who had been arrested, condemned and sentenced for refusing to serve in the army on the basis of religious convictions. "Jehovist, Jehovist," was whispered all around, and I realized with amazement how suddenly virtully among all people there arose a felling of hostility toward this single man.

"Their sons," the chairman shouted, pointing around the hall and with a single intentional gesture depriving the unfortunate father of all hope, "are fulfilling their international duty in Afghanistan! Do you mean to say that they have to die there for your son?"

My dear Orthodox brothers and sisters muttered approviningly. I sat there, crestfallen. A profound scholar in holy scripture, a penetrating and powerful preacher, a resident of Barnaul and parishioner of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Ignaty Tikhonovich Lapkin, wrote in one of his instructional pamphlets: "The true Christian is a pacifist to death. . . ." And further: "Christ removed forever the sword from the hand of his followers." Really, if one does not accommodate the Gospel to political and state needs, then the word of the Savior to the rich young ruler, "Do not kill," can have only one, definite, and unquestionable meaning. If you want "to enter into eternal life" (Mt 19.17), don't kill anyone.

In the Christian sense it was not those Orthodox who without complaint surrendered their sons to the Afghan war and took pride in the sacrifices they made who were right, but that fearless Jehovah's Witness, who taught his son to say "no," was right.

What sufferings the Witnesses suffered in Hitler's Germany and in USSR only God himself can honor.

But we know in any case (but we do not recall, we do not want to recall, the Dvorkins have erased all memory for us!) that in March of 1951 the Council of Ministers of USSR, under the chairmanship of the still living and pipe smoking native father resolved "to expel all active participants of the antisoviet sect of Jehovists and members of their families," and 9,389 men and women, old folks and children, on one April night were thrown out of their homes and sent beyond the Urals.

Witnesses, like Christians under the heal of some kind of Diocletian, were subjected in soviet torture chambers to the most refined torture. In the celebrated city of Lviv, for example, investigators enjoyed putting "straight jackets" on Jehovah's Witnesses, putting on them overalls made of rubberized fabric and pumping them up with air. The victim lost consciousness from suffocation. Mister Dvorkin! Take up your pencil. When in the not too distant future Holy Rus is covered with a "network" of "rural rehabilitation centers" created in accordance with your idea, preferably (according to you) in rural parishes or small monasteries, and when "rapid response units" will evict sectarian heretics directly from their homes-- I guess on a thoroughly legal basis on orders bearing your signature, Alexander Leonidovich, and a seal with the image of a broom and a dog's head with snarling mouth [signifying Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina forces--translator's note] --then these magnificent overalls will turn out to be useful for you. Somewhere in a monastery basement: you, Mr. Dvorkin, all dressed in black, with burning gaze and candles burning, and he, the damned, Jehovist, Krishnaite, or Scientologist, brought here for final deprogramming. He turns blue and wheezes, and you speak to him with a voice dried from fasting and suffering: "will you recant?"

Why am I reviewing the pages on which tears and blood have dried? Why am I reviving the past? In order that it not be shut up in the archives and not slumber there, stirring and shuddering from nightmares. Barely altered, renovated, and touched up, it is prospering and flourishing within our present reality, adopting from it several rather evil characteristics. It could not have been otherwise. If a society is assiduously nurtured in a spirit of hatred for people of a different faith, then we do not have the right to claim that it has given up the rubberized overalls once and for all.

We have the misfortune of wanting to see everyone around us, and even more so our relatives, as like ourselves. But making everyone the same happens either in the army or the camp. The free person must be different, and diversity is the ground for nourishing high culture. Contradictions that are inherent to the world and to humanity promote either the mightily creative act, and this is good, or revolution, which is worse than the plague. Christian achievement is first of all a matter of creativity, freedom, and love, and neither the State Duma with its political arrogance, nor bureaucratic offices with their dejected attempts to separate everything right away into black and white, ours and theirs, nor least of all the contemporary inquisition, no matter what noble clothing it may sport, have anything to do with it. We prohibit them today--we will arrest them tomorrow; we deny registration today--tomorrow we exile them; we close their prayer buildings today--tomorrow we open the gates of the camps. There has never been a third way in our fatherland.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Galitskaia has been summoned by the procurator of the northern administrative district of Moscow to the session of the Golovin interregional court. Procurator A. Viktorov hopes that even the ghost of the Jehovah's Witnesses will not exist in the capital, neither juridically nor actually, and he counts on Irina Alexandrovna's coming to his aid

The procurator also sets his hopes upon Mr. Dvorkin. At least, he sent him the appropriate request and received on the awe-inspiring letterhead (Moscow patriarchate; Holy Synod; Department of Catechesis and Religious Education) from the chief sect-fighter the corresponding certification about the Witnesses: "socially dangerous, pseudo-Christian, international religious organization." The same answer, in essence, came from sect-fighter number 2, the priest Oleg Steniaev. And after all, dear sirs, this is unheard of in a state which is separated by law from the church, but it still is habitual. In the best soviet traditions, the procurator tried to snuff out the Jehovah's Witnesses and he is being encouraged in his good intentions by the Orthodox clergy and the Orthodox inquisitor. Yesterday the CPSU directed the investigation; today it is the Russian Orthodox church. Yesterday the secretary of the district committee phoned with the words, "Look into this;" today the theologian and religious minister scribble out the lines. Dear Lord, My God, have we really angered you so much that we are doomed to wander in a circle, treading today in yesterday's bloody tracks?

And the case itself, no matter from what angle you view it, is an amazing stretch. The attempts to get the Witnesses on a criminal article has failed three times in the capital, but every time either the procurator general or the procurator of Moscow insisted on further investigation. Finally, as a result of almost two years of dreaming up the matter: ask the court to deprive them of their registration and prohibit them.

Meanwhile I am not a completely unaware blockhead and I understand fully, and even sympathize with, our people whose children and relatives have received baptism and become Jehovah's Witnesses. Our people are so structured that they like things as they have been. The well-worn ruts are the dearest heritage. So when a young man, a son, perhaps an only son, suddenly goes out of his mind obviously. Away with all amusements; family traditions, forgive me, to the dog's ass; sober and dull on red-letter days; disrespect for the state or at least only tolerance; refusal to defend the fatherland; and preference for the Bible over all other books. Really, isn't it clear that he is out of his mind? Theologians and Orthodox pastors declare this to our people: "They are out of their minds. They must be deprogrammed."

Deprogramming, which Mr. Dvorkin and his associates have injected into Russian reality, has been condemned by the whole world as a crime against the individual. But nobody is now talking about this. The mother of a fine twenty-year-old youth, who had been searching for God and became a Jehovah's Witness and transformed his life accordingly quite abruptly, told me in despair: "They want to destroy our nation. This is one hundred percent hostility. We should have Orthodoxy." He became different, and she doesn't want to reconcile with him.

Our people generally don't like people who are different. And having associated themselves with the Committee for the Protection of Youth, they demand of the government that it use an iron broom to sweep all sectarian dirt out of Orthodox Russia.

Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unification Church, the Church of the Last Covenant, and its founder, Vissarion, (to whom young, and not so young, people have flocked in Siberia and Minusinsk, abandoning Moscow and St. Petersburg, while their relatives weep), the Orthodox Church of the "Sovereign" Mother of God, the Society of Krishna Consciousness--all step forward, and get out of Russia! God, have mercy. Why? Does not every faith require that a person devote to it one's heart? Did not the apostles forsake all to follow Jesus?

Did not the Savior himself say to the multitude the strange and frightful (from the point of view of our people) words: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and even one's own life, that person cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14.16)?

Fathers and mothers, fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law on both sides, who constitute in the main the Committee for Protection of Youth, burn with the desire to go to war with the sect and to get the State Duma to pass a law prohibiting the Gospel in Russia.The Koran and the New Testament and the Buddhist scriptures are agreed in directing the thoughtful youth to seek not the Mercedes 600 and mansion but spiritual values, enlightenment, and peace, which surely you agree our people also seek.

The person who has become a believer often is the greatest freak that every family, supposedly, has. Relatives sincerely wish to help this person, but as a rule they cannot do anything more than suffer mutual pain. Because they perceive his new spiritual state as a sickness or the result of some fatal attraction that interferes with the person's ability to accept reality calmly, while in the great majority of cases this persistent quest leads the soul to God.

The first issue of the magazine "Prozrenie" (edited by A. Dvorkin) recently appeared and criticized me for my defense of the Krishnaists. In passing he reveals several dark secrets of my past: I worked for a newspaper which "for many years devoutly and faithfully served the soviet totalitarian ideological machine," I was a party member.

For some strange reason Mr. Dvorkin does not hold against me my not fully Aryan descent. But let's not give the public bread, but only call me by my patronymic, Alexander Iosefovich. Do you feel the subtle hatred of this "Iosefovich"? And then add the surname! It's a bad case. The young Deacon Kuraev in his latest pamphlet, "Occultism in Orthodoxy," did not go so far.

Fellows! Don't get worked up. Don't stamp your feet. Long ago I shared with the reading public some details of my biography and I regretted some while regarding others I said simply that my father was not only an engineer but also a Jew and my mother was Russian. As regards the Krishnaites--while you may smother them I will defend them in accordance with my Christian and civic duty. Jehovah's Witnesses, too. Protestants, too. Church of Unification, too. Church of the "Sovereign" Mother of God; all of those whom you deny the right to believe as their conscience demands.

If you think that, having declared a crusade against sectarians, you are bringing closer the hour of the final triumph of Orthodoxy, then you are wrong. There is no more profound historic and religious deception. Because within the shadow of the abbot of Volotsk whom you have injudiciously resurrected everything vital within our church has been destroyed, and then without any doubt the words of the seer must prove pertinent: "You have the name that you are alive, but you are dead" (Rev 3.1)

If you maintian that you are serving the Orthodox church, then it's no use. For whom and for what is it of use: bishops, who cannot be distinguished from the most unbridled politicians; politicians, who are no different from bishops than two drops of water; to your own pocketbook; to the irrepresible desire to achieve fame; simply not for the church. It would be good for you to recall that Judas also served the ecclesiastical leadership; he did his work and was rewarded.

If you claim that you are showing people the path to Christ, then in this you are greviously mistaken. Because people do not flock to Christ by force, under convoy, in handcuffs; they do not come to him with the aid of the procurator and judge, slanders and intimidations. All of this was in our past, "in the ages before us," (Ecc 1.10), and it gave us our present home.

There is no Christianity in the Christian world, the Jehovah's Witnesses say. And really can we not hear the truth in their words that torments us? Metropolitan Antony Blum of Surozh solemnly declared, "There are now millions of us Christians, and we are rather useless," professing an Orthodoxy that has nothing in common with the Orthodoxy of Mr. Dvorkin and all similar pursuers of the sectarian mischief.

They are where the obscuratism of an Orthodox newspaper informs poor people about a temple of Satan which has been constructed by satanist workers and how in various countries children are being trained to be outrageous magicians. They are where the obscurantist, pounding his fist, demands unanimity of thought. Where the priest does not condemn the old tradition about Jews who sacrifice Christian children. Where long ago they have forgotten such love for the brother without which, according to the apostle's words, "I am nothing" (I Cor 13.2). And this, really, is today's chief lesson of sectarian studies.

(tr. by PDS) Russian text on Internet at: http://www.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/sectovedenie100199.html

(posted 14 February 1999)