Kremlin Views Genuine Religiosity as a Threat to Putin Regime, Lunkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 5 – The Kremlin views all Russians who take their religions seriously rather than simply observing public rites inside a religious facility as a threat to the regime and, despite its self-proclaimed religiosity, is moving to drive the practice of religion in Russia back into Soviet-era limits, despite its own ostensible religiosity, Roman Lunkin says.

            The Russian specialist on Orthodoxy and other religions who is also deputy director of the Institute of Europe of the Academy of Sciences says that the bureaucratic state does not want any collective action by religious groups of any kind to occur lest it be an alternative to the state (ng.ru/ng_religii/2020-08-04/9_491_religion.html).

            The Putin regime has now introduced new legislation designed to reduce religious life to the individual choice and action, Lunkin notes, by banning any religious activity outside religious facilities unless it has the written permission of clergy or other religious leaders, thus extending the Yavoraya “package” of discriminatory legislation still further.

            Since that set of laws was adopted, the religious affairs specialist says, the state has brought about 2,000 cases against religious individuals and their leaders and fined them a total of “more than 10 million rubles” (130,000 US dollars), an enormous amount for often poor Russians and impoverished religious groups.

            The proposed legislation will tighten state controls over religious activity still further. It will require all groups to report to the government every year, exclude from leadership of any religious body of anyone who has been adjudged a terrorist or extremist, and broaden the definition of religious group to informal meetings in homes.

            That will mean that the state will have the legal right to do what many Russian siloviki have already been doing and break into such meetings and bring charges against their participants, something that up to now has been illegal even though it has become an ever more frequent event.

            In documentation accompanying the draft law, the Russian government says that it has information about 560 religious groups which have not bothered to inform the state of their existence and 800 other groups that don’t identify themselves as groups at all, an indication of just how sweeping the impact of the new measure could be.

            Particularly worrisome, Lunkin suggests, are provisions in the draft law which make religious training institutions on Russian territory part of the Russian state education system and which require all religious leaders trained abroad to be recertified by these institutions before they can work in the Russian Federation.

            That too will provide legal cover to what the Russian authorities have already been doing in recent months when they have shuttered religious training schools attached to the Lutherans, Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals and Muslims, despite the fact that many of these schools had the reputation of operating according to the highest standards.

            All of this is not going to achieve what the Russian government wants. It will not reduce the religious practice of most to what it was in Soviet times but rather increase the alienation of believers from the regime and drive at least some of them into the catacombs much as happened under the communists, Lunkin concludes.

            Over the last decade, the Russian government has been repressing various religious minorities including Muslim groups, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Krishnaites, Scientologists, traditional religions including those led by Shamans, and fundamentalist Orthodox groups.

            But the group subject to the greatest repression has been the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose treatment by the Putin regime, religious affairs experts say, is “unprecedented” in its sweep and violation of the constitutional rights of believers (russian.eurasianet.org/россия-чем-объясняются-и-к-чему-приведут-гонения-на-свидетелей-иеговы).

            Since the denomination’s ban by Russian courts three years ago, dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses have landed behind bars and thousands have chosen to emigrate.  And Russian journalist Ivan Aleksandrov (the name is a pseudonym) says that “tens of thousands remain under threat.”

            These are enormous numbers, Aleksandr Verhovsky of the SOVA Information-Analytic Center says; and consequently, they reflect not simply pressure but a government campaign to eliminate the denomination entirely.

            Prior to the ban, there were between 100,000 and 300,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia (iz.ru/news/610157 and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/300617/).  While there have been members of this group in Russia for more than a century, the Jehovah’s Witnesses rapidly expanded in number after 1991 when they could operate legally.

            The authorities object to many aspects of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs and activities: their opposition to the draft and blood transfusion, their foreign ties, and their missionary activity, to name only a few.   But, Aleksandrov says, the authorities object most of all to the commitment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses not to have anything to do with the state.

            That is their real crime, in the eyes of the Kremlin and its supporters, who believe that such a position is simultaneously impossible – they sometimes argue that the Witnesses are foreign agents – and unforgiveable – the powers say it represents a direct attack on the spiritual “bindings” of the Russian state.

            Other groups, including some within Russian Orthodoxy, have similar positions; but none has the complete mix that the Jehovah’s Witnesses do. And what is most striking, Aleksandrov says, is that the government’s repressive action shas not led to the radicalization of the Witnesses or a massive turning away from the faith.

            From the point of view of the Russian authorities, now seen so clearly in the new draft law, their steadfastness is yet another reason that the Kremlin believes they must be suppressed lest their example infect others.