Russia’s Silent Bells

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 874, 18 January 1930, Page 9

Russia’s Silent Bells

CHURCH TREASURES DESTROYED Soviet Anti-God Campaign CEMETERY RAILS USED AS JUNK United P. A. —By Telegraph—Copyright Received 9.5 a.m. LONDON, Friday. ACCORDING to “The Times” Riga correspondent, what is described as the biggest bell ever hung, namely, one of t>s tons, at Troitske Monastery, 40 miles from Moscow, has been taken down in accordance with the Soviet campaign to melt down church-bells for industrial purposes as part o£ the .Anti-God policy. The lip of the bell is 30 inches thick.

LONDON, Friday. It is not the biggest bell ever cast, as the Russians made one of 193 tons for Kremlin, but it fell during hoisting operations nearly two centuries ago and was smashed. Thousands of bells have been taken down during the last few weeks under the supervision of the Anti-God Society. The Soviet Government has issued a decree empowering local authorities to inaugurate bell funds and superintend melting operations. The Soviet authorities, in order to dissipate the impression that the

Anti-God campaign is directed only against Christians, have begun closing synagogues and mosques on a large scale. They cannot sequestrate the bells in these cases, hut have begun an intensive raiding of candlesticks and also sentenced two doctors in Petrozavodsk for performing a Jetvish religious rite. The Soviet has closed the great Leningrad Choral Synagogue, the Lutheran Church, the Evangelist Church and four others in the centre of the city in order to convert them as offices for the Anti-God Clubs for soldiers. Communist children and workmen. It has also decreed the removal of crosses from churchyard cemetery railings, announcing that these-yield “thousands of tons of castiron.” Communist reports from Moscow declare January promises “a record advance on the Anti-God front.” Since the confiscation of church treasures in 1922 at Leningrad the Soviet has decreed the removal of the hells of the famous Saint Isaac’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, but these cannot be shifted whole, therefore the workmen are sawing them to pieces where they hang. They are expected to yield 100 tons of pure copper. The cathedral becomes a “great central Anti-God museum.”