Christian Contraband

One result of treating religion as the opium of the people is that, like the dope traffic, it goes underground and thrives. A glimpse of this Russian underground was visible last week when Communist authorities announced a double haul netting several makers and pushers of religious objects, whose private manufacture is forbidden.

Haul No. 1 caught two oldsters who used a new Moskvich sedan to make the rounds of Moscow churches. One of them would dress in rags and rattle a tin cup at the church door while the other whipped out of the car's luggage compartment an assortment of crucifixes, icons, tracts and lamps and did a brisk business at a fat profit until the counterfeit beggar tipped him off that the cops were coming. One day the agents of the Department for Fighting Theft and Speculation seized him.

In their second haul, department men arrested an artist named Valerian losifovitch Labzin in the act of turning over two heavy foot lockers to a charwoman on a platform in the Kursk railway station just before a train to the Urals pulled out. Inside the boxes were 1,000 small icons, 1,000 prayer leaflets, and 2,400 little crosses on chains, which the charwoman was to have taken with her to the Caucasus. Artist Labzin turned out to be a hardened criminal in Soviet eyes; he had two previous convictions for "underground printing of religious literature,'' which had been distributed all over Russia by a well-organized network.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.