Yesterday in Moscow, pastor of an evangelical Pentecostal church, Vasily Romanyuk, was detained for a gathering on the ruins of a prayer house, deemed by the authorities an 'unsanctioned rally'

· Moscow, Pentecostals, Russia, Contemporary Persecution

Yesterday, September 9, 2021, in Moscow’s Novokosino district, pastor of the Holy Trinity evangelical church Vasily Romanyuk was detained. The worship service Romanyuk held on the ruins of the Prayer House that had been demolished on the night of Wednesday to Thursday was deemed an “unsanctioned rally” by police. The Eastern District prefecture calls the demolition legal and asserts that the prayer house was a temporary structure that had been slated for demolition seven years ago.

The building is destroyed, but the Church lives!

The detention of Vasily Romanyuk was learned from the pastor himself, who at that time was being taken to the Kosino-Ukhtomsky Police Division to draw up an administrative offense report. “We simply gathered at the same place where we always gathered and held a worship service, because after the church was demolished we have nowhere to hold it. Police officers appeared and explained that we, as it turns out, are holding an unsanctioned rally,” Mr. Romanyuk told NI.

The pastor also shared with NI details of the church demolition that took place on the night of September 6. According to Romanyuk, he learned about what was happening around 3 a.m. from the duty officer: “Police officers and plainclothes men burst into the church. They did not present any documents. Then they brought in equipment and began demolishing the building with excavators.” Pastor Romanyuk said that when he arrived at the site where the church stood, the area was guarded by 40–50 plainclothes men, many of whom were drunk. According to the pastor, they declared themselves “vigilantes defending the true Orthodox faith,” but they also had no identification documents on them: “I asked their leader who he was, and I heard the answer: ‘I am the singer Elvis Presley, I sing you these songs, and you listen to them.’ I couldn’t get anything more sensible out of him.”

The chairman of the Russian United Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith (ROSKhVE), Sergey Ryakhovsky, told NI that before destroying the prayer house, the attackers had time to “loot”: they took out audio equipment, scattered church books, and even ate or stole chocolate intended for Sunday school children. Mr. Ryakhovsky filed a complaint about the actions of the destroyers with the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office.

In the prefecture of the Eastern Administrative District, they believe the demolition was absolutely legal: the church was originally built as a temporary structure and was slated for demolition in 2005, when the Moscow Land Committee terminated the contract with ROSKhVE. But the demolition did not occur, and the plot became built up without documents and without coordination with architects. “The State Inspectorate issued a directive to ROSKhVE to demolish the structures by May 26, 2010, which was not fulfilled,” states a declaration on the prefecture’s website. Since the structures were not demolished, the Perovsky District Court on April 3, 2012, awarded the prefecture the right to demolish them independently. In place of the church, according to the district leadership’s plans, a sports complex will be built by 2015.

Sergey Ryakhovsky does not deny that the church knew about the State Inspectorate’s decision and the upcoming demolition and were prepared for it: “But we didn’t think it would happen exactly like that. The plot was provided to a reliable religious organization that has existed since Soviet times and has a large congregation. That is why Prefect Nikolai Lomakin allowed us to occupy this plot for so many years.”

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