If you are reading this, the world did not end yesterday.


You might ask, why should it have?


At 19: 00 Moscow time, the world was supposed to come an end in conjunction with the Second Coming, according to a prophecy made by a South Korean cult.


"Oct. 28, 1992, millions of people inhabiting the earth will disappear in a single moment", said a leaflet distributed around Moscow. "If you are left", it continued, "Seven years of terrible suffering await you".


The prophecy sparked panic in New Guinea and clashes between police and worshippers in South Korea, Reuters reported. In Egypt, religious leaders have spent the last two weeks trying to quell fears of a giant earthquake, prompted by the Korean predictions.


Here in Moscow, however, forecasts of the end of the world are a common thing, and people took a much lighter view of the prophecy.


'"They are calling for the end of the


world", the television news program "Vesti" said at the end of its late night report Tuesday. "But don't pay too much attention to it".


"No one took it seriously. We just laughed at it", Igor Mikhailkov, a keeper at the icon museum at Moscow's Spaso-Andronnikov monastery, said of the leaflet. "People are making predictions like this every day".


The leaflet had a Moscow telephone number on it. When a reporter called, instead of the voice of doom, he reached Per Ambrosiani, a Swedish" citizen living in Moscow.


Ambrosiani said two Korean missionaries had distributed the leaflets, but had "left weeks ago". Since then, he estimated that he had received "50 to 100" calls about a Second Coming.


"They've been making predictions like this since the Middle Ages", he commented. "Why should it be true this time".


And how did the specialists see it?


German Troitsky, a doctor of divinty and a priest at the Church of the Icon of the Virgin in Moscow, said that the Russian Orthodox Church "has never believed in such predictions".


"Two thousand years ago God said that there would be a Second Coming, but he did not say when it would be", he said.


Troitsky said the Orthodox Church believes in the Second Coming, but did not accept predictions on the date, because the prophets who make them are not always reliable.


"Notice that these predictions always come during times of trouble", he said.