Huh.
Now, when property is the concern, the Watchtower Society becomes a "foreign association" that has been doing business in Russia.
Did you notice that the word "religion" isn't used even once in the above report?
jwleaks: I believe this land was given to Watchtower and the JWs at no cost by the township
I thought the land was purchased. For a nominal amount (a symbolic fee is how this article describes the purchase price).
A comment from the European exJW forum concerning the purchase price:
1. The cost of buying the former pioneer camp
was 135,000,000 rubles.
Yes, it was a time when everything was badly depreciated, but even so, the coordinator of the Bethel in Selters, the German Willie Paul, skillfully traded with the seller, with a smile, but bent his line unrealistically
until he achieved his goal .
Yet this amount was not symbolic.
The construction of the site is described here:
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.