A Baptist congregation in Moscow is meeting for Sunday worship in the city's increasingly chilly parks, just as it did during the Soviet years, because officials now bar it from renting any public building. Its experience reflects an unspoken rule of President Vladimir Putin's Russia: The less you collaborated with the old Soviet state, the more likely you will suffer repression today.
I should stress that the experience of pastor Alexei Kalyashin's Baptist community is unusual. The great majority of Baptists in Moscow will have prayed indoors this Sunday in facilities that the government allows them to rent or own. The difference is that Kalyashin's Baptists are not part of the mainstream Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. Like the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, the leaders of the mainstream Baptist Union made the compromises needed for registration under the Soviet regime. Baptists who rejected such compromises split from the Baptist Union in 1961, forming the International Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.
Russian politicians justify restrictions on religious freedom as "protectionist" defenses against Western missionaries. By that standard, the Council of Churches would deserve not less but more freedom than the larger Baptist Union, the preferred partner of well-funded U.S. bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention. But precisely because most of the Western missionary organizations actively defend only Western missionaries or their Russian partners, the completely indigenous Council of Churches is a vulnerable target.
The Council of Churches reports harassment in other Russian cities as well: confiscation of religious books in the Stavropol region and forcible disruption of open-air revivals and worship services in the Tyumen and Belgorod regions. Geraldine Fagan, Moscow correspondent for the Forum 18 News Service, has tried but failed to get comments from officials dealing with religious affairs in those localities.
Council of Churches spokesman Venyamin Khorev told me in a recent interview that the independent Baptists nevertheless enjoy far more freedom today than they did in Soviet times. But as a whole, he said, the trend is in the wrong direction with more repression today than a year or two ago. The independent Baptists are free to hold small prayer meetings in the homes of individual members, but face increasing obstacles to proclaiming their beliefs in public.
No matter what your own religious beliefs are, one has to respect the independent Baptists for their principles and rejection of opportunistic deals with atheist officials or Western missionaries. Of all the Protestant denominations in today's Russia, they deserve the most support from human rights advocates of all persuasions. That they don't get it is a commentary not on them, but on us.