As protesters demanding more freedom and fair elections prepared to demonstrate in freezing temperatures in Moscow last Saturday, a major Russian mission group warned of more difficulties for evangelical Christians and other religious minorities in Russia and other former Soviet Union nations.

A Russian court has dismissed a call to ban an edition of the Hindu holy book Bhagvad Gita, in a case that triggered protests in India.

Prosecutors in the Siberian city of Tomsk wanted the edition to be ruled “extremist”.

Moscow police have been searching the Church of Scientology on Taganskaya Street since Thursday morning.

According to a source who spoke to Russian news agency Interfax, “The search could be part of a criminal investigation by the Moscow region’s Investigative Committee into the distribution of scientology literature of the extremist nature.”

The leader of a notorious quasi-religious cult, suspected of recruiting thousands of people and turning them into voluntary sex slaves, has been arrested in Russia.

Konstantin Rudnev, leader of the “Ashram Shambala” sect has been put in custody in the Western Siberian city of Novosibirsk and charged with sexual assault, rape and the creation of a society involved in violence and the violation of human rights, police said.

Russian MPs have backed a bill that bans anyone who calls themselves a witch or a wizard from advertising their services in the media in an effort to combat a controversial national obsession with the occult.

According to the Orthodox Church, Russia has 800,000 practitioners of the occult, many of whom advertise in newspaper small advertisements offering cures for alcoholism and spells to lift curses and return errant husbands for a fee.

One report claims almost one in five Russians have consulted occult ‘healers’ but MPs have warned they are risking their health and possibly their lives by trusting in such quackery.

A four-year-old boy has died during an exorcism ritual carried out by a traditional healer in the Far East of Russia, investigators say.

The boy apparently suffocated during the ritual, after healers held him face-down to the ground.

Seven young members of a satanic sect have gone on trial in Russia accused of four gruesome murders in which they “ritually sacrificed” their victims before cooking and eating parts of them.

The case is being held behind closed doors but local media say all seven defendants admit their guilt. They are officially charged with murder, theft and the desecration of human remains.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal against a previous court ruling of the Rostov regional court issued on September 11, 2009, which declares the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ branch in the southern Russian city of Taganrog an extremist organization and bans its activities.

A plot of land, an office building and other property belonging to the group were also seized.

The leader of a satanist sect in Russia’s Republic of Mordovia that included more than 60 members has been arrested and the group shut down, investigators announced on Wednesday.

Investigators said the members rented a house where they “conducted cult ceremonies, including illegal acts of alcoholic binge drinking, sexual practices and antisocial behavior.”

So far, 130 healers, including Fadkin, have passed the service’s voluntary testing program, which promoters in the government say can determine whether someone has the inherent ability to cure. The program is limited to Moscow, but a Russian lawmaker is pushing to extend it nationwide and make it mandatory.

Skeptics scoff at the notion that such testing is meaningful and criticize the government for lending credibility to people who claim paranormal powers.

Police have detained the leader of Ashram Shambala, one of Russia‘s largest sects, near the West Siberian city of Novosibirsk, a deputy police chief said on Tuesday.

He was put on the federal wanted list in the 1990s after it was determined that the sect’s ideology was “anti-social and anti-family, deliberately opposing itself to society in general.” The police operation was aimed at freeing several sect members, including an underage girl from Belarus.

A court in central Russia ordered on Friday the leader of a doomsday sect that recently spent more than six months underground waiting for the apocalypse to undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment.

“The defendant [Pyotr Kuznetsov] will not be responsible for the crimes he committed when mentally ill. The court has ordered compulsory treatment for him in a psychiatric ward,” Judge Maria Smyslova said.

Two months after a doomsday sect gave up its underground wait for the apocalypse in central Russia, a new cult has been discovered in the same region.

The group, said to consist of a core of about 15 women aged 45-50, is headed by 52-year-old Alexander Zhukov, who calls himself Raphael.

Prosecutors Russian city of Murmansk say that a planned series of Jehovah’s Witnesses services in a stadium cannot go ahead, as they contravene a law on the use of sports facilities.

Meanwhile the Public Prosecutor of the small asbestos-mining town of Asbest in Sverdlovsk Region is pressing for a ban on Jehovah’s Witness literature, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. If Asbest Town Court – or any other Russian court – finds Jehovah’s Witness publications extremist, their addition to the Federal List of Extremist Materials would extend a ban on their distribution to the whole of Russia.

Jehovah’s Witnesses continuing to hand out the texts would risk a four-year prison term under Article 282 of the Criminal Code.

Cult leader Grigory Grabovoi, who among others things promised grieving mothers to resurrect their children for a fee, is jailed in Russia.