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Photo: Gary Gnidovic
Every day, flowers are still placed in the gym where most of the hostages were held in the Beslan school siege of September 2004. Caucasian Islamic insurgents and Chechen secessionists took 1,200 school children and adults hostage. More than 350 were killed, half of them children.

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Copyright 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

CT's full coverage of Russia is available online, as is "The God Who Lives and Works and Plays in Russia," the article that corresponds to the photo essay.

Gary Gnidovic's essay and the accompanying photo essay on the Amazon Basin are also online.

BBC's country profile of Russia is a good resource on the regions of Russia, including North Ossetia.

The fragility of religious freedom in Russia has been "of consistent concern" in the Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2005).

The USCIRF has a transcript of a roundtable discussion "Assessing U.S. Human Rights Policy Towards Russia," a press release on the increasing religious intolerance, and has an opinion article on the difficulties that face evangelicals in Putin's Russia.

Russia put non-Orthodox Christians at the top of its list of security threats.

In September 2006, the Russian Justice Ministry drafted a law on "Counteracting Illegal Missionary Activity."

U.S. News and World Report has an article on the situation of missionaries in Siberia.