SOVIET ACTIVE.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 January 1930, Page 5

SOVIET ACTIVE.

-IN ANTI-GOI) CAMPAIGN.

MELTING CHURCH BELLS

United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright).

RIGA, Jan. 16,

What is described as the biggest bell ever hung, namely a sixty-five ton bell at Troitske monastery forty miles from Moscow, has been unhung in accordance with the Soviet campaign to melt down church bells for industrial purposes, as part of the anti-God policy. Its lip is thirty inches thick. It is' not the biggest bell over cast'as the Russians made one weighing 193 tons for Koremlin, but it fell during hoisting and was smashed.

A thousand bells have been unhung in the last feiv weeks under the supervision of the anti-God Society. The Soviet issued a decree empowering locail authorities to inaugurate bell funds and superintend melting operations.

Soviet authorities in order to dissipate the impression that the anti-God campaign is directed only against Christians, has began closing Synagogues and Mosques on a large scaleThey cannot sequestrate bells in these case, but have begun intensive raiding of candlesticks and also sentenced two doctors in Petrogravodsk for performing a Jewish religious rite ai the request of Hebrew parents.

The president of Leningrad Soviet closed the great Leningrad Chorat Synagogue, Lutheran Church, Evangelist Church and four others in the centre of the city in order to convert them into offices of anti-God clubs for soldiers, Communist children and workers. He also decreed the removal of crosses from the churchyard in the cemetery and railings, announcing those would yield “thousands of tons of cast .iron.”

Communist reports from Moscow declare January promised a “record advance on the anti-God front,” since the confiscation of church treasures in 1922. ' LENINGRAD, Jan. 16. The Soviet decreed the removal of the bells of the famous Saint Isaac Orthodox. Cathedral, but these cannot be shifted whole, therefore workmen are sawing them in pieces where they hang. They are expected to yield one hundred tons of pure copper. The Cathedral becomes “Great Central Anti-God Museum.”