MOSCOW -- As a child in the Soviet Union, Oleg Marchenko would often sneak out of the house with his parents for late-night meetings. Secret police would sometimes raid their home, seizing forbidden literature and threatening Marchenko's mother and father with imprisonment.

The Marchenkos were not political dissidents. They were Jehovah's Witnesses.

Today, Marchenko is a 40-year-old husband and father, and he is living in fear again. The Moscow City Court yesterday affirmed a ban on Jehovah's Witnesses.

There is no doubt that Jehovah's Witnesses, who preach strict adherence to the Bible and zealous evangelizing, are controversial. Officials in many countries have tried to curtail their activities.

But few have gone as far as the city of Moscow, which in late March won a lower court ruling that they could be banned from conducting religious activities in the Russian capital. Prosecutors argued that the group is "breaking up families, inciting its members to suicide and harming their life and health [by forbidding blood transfusions]."

Lawyers for the Witnesses filed an appeal, which was rejected yesterday by the Moscow City Court. This means the ban now can take effect, making it illegal for Jehovah's Witnesses to hold meetings or services, even in private homes, or to import or distribute their literature, or to carry out missionary work.

The group is expecting its large Kingdom Hall in Moscow to be sealed and for lease agreements at 55 sites where other congregations worship in the city to be abrogated,.

The group , which now has about 133,000 members across the country, has a long history of persecution in Russia. Under Stalin's state atheism campaign, thousands were exiled to Siberian labor camps in the early 1950s, including Marchenko's grandparents and their five children.

The group remained illegal until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, its members subject to official harassment and occasional imprisonment. In the heady days that followed the end of Soviet rule, Witnesses registered congregations across the country and built dozens of Kingdom Halls.

The atmosphere started to change when Russia adopted a new law on religious worship in 1997 that enshrined Orthodox Christianity as the country's predominant religion. The law pledged respect for Russia's three other "traditional" faiths -- Buddhism, Islam and Judaism -- but gave local and federal authorities the power to limit or ban other faiths. It has been used against the Salvation Army, which has been denied registration in Moscow.