WAR ON CHURCH.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18330, 30 July 1929, Page 9

WAR ON CHURCH.

SOVIET’S ANTI-RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGN.

(UnK“* Press Association—By 4iiectrit Telegraph—Copyright.) (Received July 29, 7.0 p.m.) RIGA, July 28. “The Times” correspondent states after a three days battle the O.G.P.U. police arrested the Orthodox priest Kolerodf, and seventeen believers at Kimry, eighty miles from Moscow. The Soviet decreed the closure of a church in order to convert the building into a leather workers’ club, but when the officials appeared in order to carry out the formal confiscation, they found the doors barred and locked by thirty locks. They attempted to force the doors, but the believers, armed with sticks, beat them off. According to an official Soviet account, a crowd of two thousand gathered round the church and routed the local police. The chairman of the local Soviet appeared with a bodyguard of Soviet officers, but they were all captured and thrashed. Police reinforcements were drafted in, but they met a similar fate. Further drafts came in until the resistance was overcome, but it took three days to do it.