MOSCOW, AUGUST 1, RIA NOVOSTI - Federal President Boris Yeltsin had a long telephone conversation with His Beatitude Alexis II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, to discuss the vetoed bill, On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organisations.

"It was a long, hearty and mutually well-wishing talk," says presidential press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembsky.

The President shares the Patriarch's apprehensions as sinister sects and cults are mushrooming in Russia to bring moral and physical damage to people they entice. The President is sure that they will be neutralised through official efforts, and their proliferation stopped, the presidential press service says in a statement circulated today.

The President and the Patriarch agree that Russia needs the freedom of conscience law after all its premises are amended into constitutional compliance. They regret that they are both absent from Moscow--Boris Yeltsin on vacation, and Alexis II on ecclesiastical affairs--and so cannot confer eye-to-eye about the disputable bill. If it had taken place in due time, such a conference would have prevented many misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the developments by the mass media.

The President and the Patriarch agreed to join hands for bill amendment and adoption.

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Johnson's Russia List

#1110

2 August 1997

djohnson@cdi.org