kilometres east of Moscow, after a sermon against contraception, said reports monitored by BosNewsLife Friday, June 7.
A Baptist house is also being threatened with demolition in the city, reported the Keston News Service (KNS), which covers religious persecution.
Lawyer Anatoli Pagasi told KNS that one of the churches, an unregistered Pentecostal congregation, had preached against the use of contraception which he said provoked an elderly mother of one parishioner to complaint to the local authorities.
"SECTARIANS"
In a letter to the Council for Religious Affairs of the region of Tartastan, she asked officials to take measures to stop the "sectarians" from forcing her son and daughter-in-law to have children, explained Pagasi, who investigates the case.
When the Council argued that according to the Russian constitution it was "not her business what they did at night," the woman wrote to Tatar president Mintimer Shaimiyev, from where her complaint was send back to local authorities.
Her letter finally arrived at the desk of officials in Kazan, where the chairman of the Municipal Department for Relations with Social Organizations and the Media, Airat Zaripov "had reacted like Stalin – no person equals no problem," said lawyer Pagasi.
DECREE
The chairman evoked a 1993 local decree ruling that state premises could be rented only with the permission of the local authorities – which the Pentecostals apparently did not have, KNS quoted Pagasi as saying.
While this was taking place, said Pagasi, checks were also made regarding similar rental agreements which lead to the evictions of the charismatic Cornerstone Church, Free Church, the Baptist Free Bible Church and the unregistered Pentecostal congregation.
However the chairman of Tatarstan’s Council for Religious Affairs, Renat Nabiyev, denied that any such decree existed, and said that the only reason for the evictions "could be due to repair work on the building or something."
WIDER CAMPAIGN
The latest development seem part of a wider campaign against active Christians in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, human rights watchers have suggested. In addition to the four evicted Protestant Churches, officials plan to demolish the two-story building of a Baptist congregation in an outlying district of Kazan, because of the construction of a ring road, KNS said.
Officials told KNS they would look for an alternative site for the prayer house, which was built in 1997 with donations from its 400-strong congregation and foreign supporters. But Baptists remain concerned that they may have to build again from scratch with no compensation.
