WHEN police found her body, Elizaveta
Kuzmina was lying with her throat slit on the floor of her flat in western
Moscow.
Chillingly, on the door, someone had written in red chalk:
"My matrix has found me."
Friends said Ms Kuzmina, 19, the daughter of a popular
Russian rock singer, Vladimir Kuzmin, had been dabbling with the occult.
It was a claim taken seriously by detectives; they said
their inquiry was starting with acquaintances of the young woman, who had been
known to frequent Satanist groups.
Muscovites are facing up to the disturbing fact that Ms
Kuzmina’s murder in December might not be a one-off occurrence.
This week, worried officials from Russia’s interior
ministry admitted they have been forced to set up a special unit to investigate
the activities of devil-worshipping sects.
A spokesman for the ministry’s chief criminal directorate
said satanic groups had several thousand participants in Russia, about 500 of
them in Moscow.
Ritual sacrifices and savage physical attacks are
commonplace among the worshippers, said Aleksandr Grichanin, deputy chief of
the directorate.
Mr Grichanin stressed that Satanists were recruiting
disaffected teenagers, mostly aged 13 to 17, some of who might also be
attracted to racist skinhead gangs.
Moscow alone has about 15 Satanist groups , including the
Black Angel, the Left Path, the Church of the 13th Apostle and the Order of the
Silver Star.
Such groups are feared to have committed rapes, killings,
dismemberments, orgies and church and grave desecrations.
Their worship is thought to revolve around black magic and
reverence for numbers and symbols such as "666", "A", an
upturned five-pointed star within a circle, a skull split in half, crosses
turned upside down and swastikas.
The Satanists are part of a growing phenomenon of extremism
in Russia, which has seen up to 20,000 people join skinhead gangs.
The state’s action to tackle the occult comes in the wake
of a campaign by the Russian Orthodox Church to stamp out such worship.
Three years ago a priest in a small Siberian town was
ritually slain. Gennady Yakovlev was stabbed in the heart and neck with a pick
by a vagrant he had befriended, who then cut off his head with a pocket knife.
The man then carried Fr Yakovlev’s severed head into the
chapel adjoining the priest’s home and circled the altar, leaving a ring of
blood on the floor and placed the head on the altar.
A statement at the time by the Krasnoyarsk diocese said:
"We see the tragedy as a consequence of wide advertising of all sorts of
pseudo-religiousness, a return to the wild pagan cults of Satanism and
cultivation of new types of polytheism."
Some Orthodox priests see the spread of devil worship as a
direct consequence of Russian teenagers’ obsession with doom-laden western rock
music and the drug abuse some of it appears to endorse.
"Satanism has a tendency to grow, and that tendency is
a very threatening one," said Father Anatoly Berestov, a priest who chairs
a centre for the rehabilitation of former sect and occult members.
"Satanism is closely connected with people’s lifestyles. We are looking at
the West, at the USA, and this trash basically comes from there."
But the fight could be creating its own problems, with the
witch hunt appearing to be running out of control shortly after the death of
Kuzmina, the rock star’s daughter.
The Moscow prosecutor’s office announced it was launching
an investigation into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets after a complaint
from the International Foundation of Slavic Culture. Charges that the book
contained "signs of religious extremism and involved pupils in religious
organisations of a satanic character" were dismissed.
This week, the pro-Kremlin youth organisation Moving
Together threw its weight behind the campaign to stamp out ungodly worship.
The group placed a five-tonne stone at the entrance to St
Petersburg’s mayoralty in the Smolny palace, an act designed to "give
weight" to their call for the city’s Scientologists’ Church to be closed.
Moving Together considers the Scientologists to be a "satanic and criminal
sect" whose premises should be closed down.
Activists have put up a tent in front of the
Scientologists’ Church on the city’s Vosstaniya Square. "We have spent
almost two weeks in front of the church and managed to reduce the inflow of new
members to this organisation and to collect thousands of signatures under an
appeal to the city authorities to close the sect," said a spokesman for
the youth movement.
The Scientologists have protested that "those who
oppose us are possibly trying to incite religious enmity".