It's been almost impossible to reach this site, and because of that, I didn't put it in yesterday. Joycelist had the entire article, so here it is. If you'd like to try to reach the Moscow Times for yourself, here is the address:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/02/21/003.html

Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2001. Page 1

Antichrist Fears Put Church in Crisis

By Andrei Zolotov Jr.

Staff Writer SERGIYEV POSAD, Moscow Region

The lights in the hall of the Moscow Theological Academy went off and a frail 90-year-old starets, one of the Russian Orthodox Church's most authoritative spiritual leaders, appeared on a giant video screen.

Speaking from his monastery cell in northwestern Russia, he tried to help bishops, monks and theology professors decide how to handle an unlikely problem plaguing the church: a mass refusal by church members to accept the government-issued tax identification numbers, or INN, because they see them as the sign of the Antichrist.

Archimadrite Ioann Krestyankin said it was threatening to undermine the church:

"Through the effort of God's enemy, through the false rumors about the introduction of three sixes into the tax identification number, the state's problem of INN has assumed the great power of strife in the spiritual world and has become for us a test, which has demonstrated the absence of faith in God and trust to the mother church among the believers."

As sad as it was to many participants, Krestyankin was not exaggerating the problem.

Speakers at the session of the Theological Commission, which is an advisory body to the church's Synod, said the Moscow Patriarchate, Tax Ministry, State Duma and the presidential administration are flooded with petitions protesting the issue of tax IDs. They warn that Patriarch Alexy II and the Holy Synod will be deemed traitors of Orthodoxy if they give their blessing to Russians to accept the "number of the beast." A volume containing 9,000 signatures gathered in the Ivanovo region alone was presented at the conference Monday.

Some churches don't buy wine with a bar code on it on the presumption that it cannot be used for the eucharist. Some priests who accept the INN are ostracized by their parishioners, and there have been cases when people who refused to sign petitions opposing the tax ID numbers were thrown out of churches.

The opposition to INN is well funded. Ironically it spreads its ideas about the threat of "totalitarian global control," which comes with computerization, through several Internet sites. It also prints leaflets and brochures, some of which were being handed out outside the gates of the Moscow Theological Academy as the session was in progress. The opposition movement has been particularly successful in monasteries, where apocalyptic fears are traditionally high.

Even at the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery Russia's largest, on whose grounds the Theological Academy is located a significant number of monks have threatened to leave the monastery if the church leadership accepts INN. "The Holy Scriptures are the highest authority for us," a monk who refused to give his name said Monday. "We have a full right and obligation to disobey the hierarchy if it detracts from Orthodoxy."

The problem was "imported" to Russia about two years ago, when the government began to introduce the tax IDs and a bar code was placed on the application form. Under an international system known as UEA/UPC, every bar code has three pairs of thin parallel stripes in the beginning, middle and end of the code, which uses combinations of strips and spaces to signify numbers easily readable by a scanner.

These three pairs of stripes, which bear no meaning and separate the parts of the code, look similar to the combinations of stripes used to mark the number six. Thus this gives grounds for fears, shared by arch-conservative Christian groups worldwide, that all computerized accounting is based on the number 666, which is cited in Revelations 13, 17-18 as the "name of the beast," without which "no man might buy or sell."

To Orthodox theologists, the Holy Scriptures are the highest authority.

The theory runs as follows: Antichrist will come in the form of global computerized control of individuals, who will have computer chips implanted in their hands. Tax IDs, which "replace" the name given at baptism with a number, are the first step toward such a satanic goal.

Such fears, which previously caused mass protests against European-standard passports with magnetic strips in predominantly Orthodox Greece and Cyprus, found fertile ground in the Russian Orthodox Church where apocalyptic expectations are high and conspiracy theories about the desire of a Western "global government" to destroy Russia abound.

"People are not speaking against the tax number," one of the anti-INN movement leaders, Konstantin Gordeyev, said Monday at the conference. "They are simply afraid that having made one step [accepting INN], they will be gradually involved in this global information mechanism, and they will not be able to stop."

The hierarchy has found itself completely unable to deal with the problem. "It has spread so fast, we were taken off guard by it," one prominent bishop, who has strong opposition to INN in his diocese, said in a private conversation at the conference Monday.

The hierarchy attempted to calm the waters in March of last year, when the Synod issued a statement titled "To Respect the Feelings of Believers and Maintain Christian Sober-mindedness." It called on Christians not to see too much in the numbers and on the government to come up with an alternative system of monitoring taxpayers.

But the statement had no effect. The opposition movement has only broadened, and the Tax Ministry's decision, after negotiations with the Patriarchate, to change the application form made no difference to the INN-refuseniks.

Valentina Kazakova, head of the Tax Ministry's sub-department tracking taxpayers, said Monday that about 1 percent of Russians have so far refused to accept the number. That may seem small, but given that the number of regular churchgoers is estimated to be between 2 percent and 4 percent, it could constitute a sizeable portion of practicing Orthodox Christians.

Some members of the Theological Commission had hoped that this week's conference could lead to a tougher decision and the church would come out against superstitions, even at the cost of a schism.

But the final decision adopted Tuesday fell short of these expectations and followed the Moscow Patriarchate's policy of the past decade: to see the prevention of a schism as its highest priority.

"The church does not condemn people who refuse to accept INN, but expresses concern about the spiritual health of those who are proud of their refusal," the ruling said.