GO Ruskies!

I'd say that if anyone in the world would be able from experience to correctly identify something as TOTALITARIAN, it would be the Russians. LOL!

LOL, good for them. Looks like a pretty small movement and will likely pass quickly.

I have a friend with a kid over there - I wonder what missionaries know about stuff like this and how they are told to answer it. And if they are allowed to discuss it in their letters home.

If I know the Russians, then this is probably the opening move in a long planned crack down on the Mormon church. The timing is probably not a coincidence, as they probably waiting to make sure they would not be dealing with a Mormon in the White House before they started the crack down.

Putin is not a big fan of anything non-traditionalist. Give it a couple of months, and Putin will be seizing church property and bulldozing it. Are there any temples in Russia?

Only problem with that is, LDS inc will chalk it up as persecution, so it must be true!

If only they could figure out a way to do it without martyring (figuratively speaking) the church. Maybe catch them on tax evasion or something.

Except for the little revelation one of the prophets had decades ago, how the church would never lose another temple after Nauvoo. When that one temple burned down in the Pacific, that was a major WTF moment for my old TBM self, as I had been told that faith promoting detail a number of times.

Replying to the charges:

"This is absolutely wrong, false [and] not true," says Andrey Filimonov, an LDS spokesman for Eastern Europe, based in Moscow. "The church in every country has nothing to do with political issues at all."

Filimonov has obviously not heard about California's Prop H8 & the LD$ involvement in it.

The cultish brainwashing continues.

This is straight from Putin, and I am not sure this is something to celebrate.

Why not?

Don't get me wrong, I hate LDS inc, but I am not sure that a certain, Conformist, Traditionalist, Totalitarian, ex KGB Spy is the right person to trust with stopping at just the LDS church.

There is that to consider.

On the other hand, I'm not such a huge fan of any organized religion, so if he went after them all I wouldn't feel much sympathy.

I don't know. I kind of suspect that Putin is a radical Russian Orthodox. Not because he is a firm believer in God, but because he believes in the power of that faith to unite his people behind him. I have a feeling that it is going to really start sucking to not be a member of the Russian Orthodox church, if you life in Russia.

Then there is this.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/11/27/russian-cossacks-return-as-part-of-putins-moscow-street-patrol/

If you think those guys are patrolling the streets for free out of the goodness of their heart, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.

Out of those 22,000 members, how many do you think are really active?

"Filimonov argues that the church is not American, but an international organization."

Tell me this guy is not brainwashed and parroting what SLC told him to say...