By Andrei Zolotov Jr.

The Russian Orthodox Church sees the the beast '666' in new tax number.         Archimadrite Ioann Krestyankin said the government issued tax identification numbers were threatening to undermine the church: "Through the effort of God's enemy, through the false rumors about the introduction of three sixes into the tax identification number, the state's problem of INN has assumed the great power of strife in the spiritual world and has become for us a test, which has demonstrated the absence of faith in God and trust to the mother church among the believers." As sad as it was to many participants, Krestyankin was not exaggerating the problem. Archbishop Yevlogy of Vladimir Taking notes during session Speakers at the session of the Theological Commission, which is an advisory body to the church's Synod, said the Moscow Patriarchate, Tax Ministry, State Duma and the presidential administration are flooded with petitions protesting the issue of tax IDs. They warn that Patriarch Alexy II and the Holy Synod will be deemed traitors of Orthodoxy if they give their blessing to Russians to accept the "number of the beast." A volume containing 9,000 signatures gathered in the Ivanovo region alone was presented at the conference Monday. Some churches don't buy wine with a bar code on it on the presumption that it cannot be used for the eucharist. Some priests who accept the INN are ostracized by their parishioners, and there have been cases when people who refused to sign petitions opposing the tax ID numbers were thrown out of churches. The opposition to INN is well funded. Ironically it spreads its ideas about the threat of "totalitarian global control," which comes with computerization, through several Internet sites. It also prints leaflets and brochures, some of which were being handed out outside the gates of the Moscow Theological Academy as the session was in progress. The opposition movement has been particularly successful in monasteries, where apocalyptic fears are traditionally high. Even at the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery — Russia's largest, on whose grounds the Theological Academy is located — a significant number of monks have threatened to leave the monastery if the church leadership accepts INN. "The Holy Scriptures are the highest authority for us," a monk who refused to give his name said Monday. "We have a full right and obligation to disobey the hierarchy if it detracts from Orthodoxy." The problem was "imported" to Russia about two years ago, when the government began to introduce the tax IDs and a bar code was placed on the application form. Under an international system known as UEA/UPC, every bar code has three pairs of thin parallel stripes in the beginning, middle and end of the code, which uses combinations of strips and spaces to signify numbers easily readable by a scanner. These three pairs of stripes, which bear no meaning and separate the parts of the code, look similar to the combinations of stripes used to mark the number six. Thus this gives grounds for fears, shared by arch-conservative Christian groups worldwide, that all computerized accounting is based on the number 666, which is cited in Revelations 13, 17-18 as the "name of the beast," without which "no man might buy or sell."