At Samara, a city of 1,160,000 inhabitants in the Volga region, Christians and Muslims run the risk of having their communities indexed by the local administration. The religious organizations must provide the local Department of Justice with the names, age and addresses of the members of the various churches registered on the territory. “We know that the aim of this request is to acquire the names of parishioners in order subsequently to exert pressure on them”, said the leader of the Pentecostal Church in Samara, Vasili Lyashevsky, in a statement to the Oslo-based press agency “Forum 18 news service”, which deals with the defence of religious freedom. Lyashevsky added that “similar requests have been made in the regions of Irkutsk, Perm, Tambov, Udmurtia and Yekaterinburg” and declared that if the State continues to ask for the personal data of churchgoers, his “Church will take refuge in the underground”. The Irish Philip Andrews, Catholic parish priest of Samara, Ulyanovsk and Penza, declared to the same Norwegian agency that he had informed the civil authorities each year about the activities of the parish and to have furnished them with the names of the priests of the diocese. “Only the authorities of Samara he points out have requested the personal data of parishioners over the last two years”; but these data Andrews has always refused to provide. The Baptist pastor of Samara, Vitali Sobolev, says he “has furnished, without demur, the list of the ten officeholders” of his Church, “as prescribed by Russian law”. The Orthodox archbishop of Samara and Syzran, Sergi Poletkin, while recognising that “order needs to be maintained”, says: “If this measure violates the rights and liberties of man, it ought not to be applied”. For his part, the regional representative of the Moslem community, Minnakhmet Sagirov, declares that senior Moslem clerics “have never furnished the information requested and never shall!”. The local administration plays down the furore. Referring to art. 25 of the law of 1997 on religious activities in Russia, the Office of social and religious organizations of Samara has made it known: “All we need to know are the names of the founding members of a religious organization, so that they assume legal responsibility for it”.
