Jehovah's Witnesses build center in St. Petersburg
Blagovest (Samara), no. 22, November 1996 (complete text)
Saint Petersburg. With permission of the administration of Saint Petersburg, construction has begun in one of the northern regions of the city on an administrative center of the "Jehovah's Witnesses" of Russia. Approval for construction, which is projected to be completed in 1998, was signed by the former major Anatoly Sobchak in his last days in office.
The decisive argument in favor of construction for the city investment commission was the claim that the administration's department on relations with religious associations does not intend to be an administering agency. At the same time numerous complaints against the Jehovhists from the Committee on the Defense of the Family and Personality were ignored.
The adoption of a favorable decision by the city administration for construction of a "Kingdom Hall" of the Jehovists near the "Akademicheskaia" metro station was successfully prevented by the efforts of relatives of victims of the sect.
As is known, "Jehovah's Witnesses" are a pseudo-Christian sect that is growing extremely vigorously in Russia. Experts on new religious movements note the special danger of the sect for society. One fearsome deception of the Jehovists is the categorical prohibition on blood transfusions. The sectarians believe that "to receive blood into the body either through the mouth or veins is a violation of the law of God." The religious prohibition on the simplest of medical procedure makes "Jehovah's Witnesses" guilty of the death of people, adults, children, and infants, who could have been saved by a blood transfusion.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES HAVE SETTLED IN THE SUBURBS OF SAINT PETERSBURG
Michael Jackson donated 1.5 million dollars to his Russian brothers and sisters.
by Oleg Silin
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2 July 1997
In the suburbs of St. Petersburg in Solnechny village Russia's first administrative center of the Christian religious organization "Jehovah's Witnesses" has opened. The vast scope of this action is demonstrated in the fact that more than 2,000 delegates and guests from 44 countries attended this event.
The Jehovah's Witnesses religious association arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in the USA. At present this organization number more than five million adherents. In our country is received official registration in 1991. Before that its activity was banned "because of its antisoviet tendencies." But as the members of the association emphasize, to this day the Jehovah's Witnesses do not know what the government actually accused them of.
Whatever may be the case, the most widely varying rumors circulated, even including the claim that "members of the sect brutally murder their children, sacrificing them, and they even commit suicide themselves." "In fact," the director of the Russian administrative center, Vasily Kalin, declared at a press conference, "Witnesses do not hold radical views and they do not advocate practices that are different from what society recognizes as normal conduct. This is what principally distinguishes us from cults and sects." In his words, the basic goal of the Jehovah's Witnesses is the study of the Bible. They give chief honor to God the Father, whom the Bible calls Jehovah, and they do not believe in the immortality of the soul.
More than 600 volunteers participated in the construction of the center in Solnechny village over the four and a half years it took. More than half of them were Russians and people from the republics of the former USSR. The rest came from Denmark, USA, Switzerland, Chile, Finland, Australia, and elsewhere. They deserve their due: they worked completely without pay and they center was built to European standards. In place of ruins of the remains of a Pioneer summer camp build in the 1960s they erected a four storey building complex equipped with state of the art technology, including a laundry and dry cleaners, a small furniture factory and clinic, cafeteria with its own bakery and kitchen, and seven residential blocks. At present about 300 Jehovah's Witnesses live and work in the administrative center.
As Vasily Kalin emphasizes, because the construction was done by their own efforts, including their own concrete factory, and much of the equipment and plumbing was a gift from the Scandanavian firm the construction cost extremely little.
However, justice requires that we note that evidently no small part was played by the contributions of well to do Jehovah's Witnesses. One of them alone, Michael Jackson, who came from a family of Witnesses, is said to have donated his Russian brothers and sisters one and a half million dollars.
