Russian
Baptists face persecution
In
the grindingly poor village of Lyubuchany, Russian Baptists are patiently
rebuilding a house church that was deliberately burned down last October. The
arsonists escaped, but evidence suggests that they were connected with
Russia’s secret police. Earlier this year a house church of the same
denomination in Tula, 60 miles farther south of Moscow, fell victim to a
similar attack. Strikingly, both congregations have hosted major regional or
national conferences for co-religionists from across Russia.
The
timing of the Tula attack was especially suspicious. In January the house
church there was about to host two gatherings: a meeting of about 70 of the
denomination’s pastors from places as remote as Kazakhstan, then a
conference on evangelization for some 400 rank-and-file Baptists from various
towns. Some of these visitors had already arrived, and were sleeping next door,
when an explosion devastated the house church’s interior between 3 and 4
a.m. on Jan. 13. The explosion warped the brick walls and nearly collapsed the
roof. Two church members were hospitalized.
Pastor
Aleksandr Lakhtikov told the Forum 18 News Service that the firemen who
responded to the blast were accompanied by an official from the FSB secret
police. Local officials and the state-controlled media quickly announced that
the explosion had been caused by a natural-gas leak. But the pastor noted that
municipal gas inspectors who visited the site about five hours after the
explosion found no trace of domestic gas. Such traces usually linger for days
after an accident.
One
might think that this was just vandalism by petty criminals - but two
well-targeted acts of vandalism within one year, against two different
congregations, seem unlikely.
The
Sept. 14 torching of the Baptist house church in Lyubuchany was more directly
linked to state harassment. Yelena Kareyeva, a member of the congregation, told
International Religious Freedom Watch that just three days before the fire her
son had seen two suspicious-looking men loitering in the adjacent forest. Her
son recognized one of them: In August he had taken part in a massive police
operation against a gathering hosted by the congregation for several thousand Baptists
from all over central Russia.
As
many as 200 servicemen from various security agencies, including the local
police and the FSB, showed up to disrupt that open-air gathering. They even
brought along laborers to remove the Baptists’ tents and pews, and
plainclothes personnel to film them. As pastor Nikolai Dudenkov told
International Religious Freedom Watch, they came “prepared as if for a
terrorist attack”-with machine guns, helmets, and gas masks. They
brandished an official decree barring “unsanctioned gatherings of a
religious nature”-even though this gathering was on privately owned land,
with the landlord’s consent. They set up roadblocks to keep outsiders
from arriving by car.
The
Baptists nevertheless persisted in exercising their constitutional right to
preach and worship on private property; many of them traveled the last few
miles on foot. The police in turn persisted in trying to intimidate the
worshippers, checking identity papers and recording names. One plainclothes
official said, “Do you think that all of this is taking place without the
consent of the president’s administration?”
Just
three weeks later the Lyubuchany house church was burned down. The local
Baptists believe that the government agent seen reconnoitering the site a few
days earlier helped to plan it.
Lyubuchany
and Tula Baptists are especially vulnerable to a state-sponsored strategy of
intimidation that plays into larger goals of restoring Kremlin control to
everyday life. For the last decade the Russian government has followed
“divide and rule” tactics of discriminating not just between
religions but between factions within a single religion: Russia now has favored
and disfavored Jews, favored and disfavored Orthodox Christians, and so on.
Among the Baptists the disfavored group is the unregistered Union of Baptist
Churches, which split from the larger Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists
in 1961 after the latter agreed to compromise with the Soviet regime on issues
such as a ban on teaching religion to children. Precisely because they chose a
principled stance, following the apostles’ example to “obey God
rather than men,” the unregistered Baptists still endure extra hardships
under Russia’s current rulers.
This article originally appeared in World magazine and is published through E.P. News with permission.