Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia Now Persecuted Much as They were in Soviet Times, Activists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 16 – Four leading religious rights activists say that Russian officials are now persecuting the Jehovah’s Witnesses in much the same way their Soviet predecessors did, a conclusion that is especially disturbing given that the Witnesses were victims of a little known but horrific event – the deportation of their members to Siberia for their faith.

            The four, Yaroslav Sivulsky of the European Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Aleksandr Verkhovsky of the SOVA religious rights monitoring center, Anton Omelchenko, a lawyer who has defended Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Aleksey Markarov of Memorial, made their comments to the Kavkaz-Uzel news agency (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/324240/).

            They focused their attention on the situation in the North Caucasus, a region to which many Jehovah’s Witnesses came in the 1950s after they were deported to Siberia from western Belarus and western Ukraine during World War II but denied any possibility of returning to their original home areas.

            In the past, Sivulsky says, there was very little persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the North Caucasus region, possibly because there were so many of them, local people knew them and recognized that the charges officials in Moscow were making about them were completely ridiculous.

            Sivulsky speaks from personal experience: His parents were deported from western Ukraine to western Siberia and then came to the North Caucasus.  “In Soviet years, there were several periods of repression, First, in 1951, many were deported and excited from Western Ukraine and other regions of the USSR.”

            Such deportees were prevented from moving out of exile for “more than 15 years.” His own parents were allowed to return from exile in 1967. Some however did leave earlier, the Jehovah’s Witnessses official says.  But on returning from Siberia, his parents like others of the faith remained under the constant observation of the special services.

            They were subject to period searches; and if illegal literature was found, they were charged with crimes and sentenced to prison: his father spent five years in jail for having such literature; his mother, four years, Sivulsky says. Despite this, by the 1990s, there were nearly 20,000 Witnesses in the North Caucasus organized in five or six major communities.

            After a period of relative freedom in the 1990s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Putin period began to be persecuted again even before the entire organization was declared extremist and its properties confiscated. 

            Verkhovsky says that the return of repression resembled the Soviet pattern particularly in one regard.  The siloviki make no distinction between active members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and ordinary people. All have been charged indiscriminately as they had been in Soviet times and their constitutional rights were ignored.

            Omelchenko agrees, and he points to a larger and more distressing situation that affects not only the Witnesses but members of other faiths.  The Russian authorities don’t investigate religions in general but assume that some are dominant in one place and others in another. Thus, Orthodoxy in one oblast, Buddhists in another, and Islam in a third.

            These “traditional” religions interact with the political authorities. But “all remaining confessions,” including the Jehovah’s Witnesses, fall into the purview of the security services; and they approach them the way they approach all who they believe are opposed by the powers that be – by repression and punishment.

            And Makarov says bluntly that “in part, the methods of the persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Soviet and current times intersect,” something that makes the future appear bleak indeed.  “We know about the deportation of peoples” in Soviet times, “but people were also deported on the basis of their religious faith alone.”

            Like the Soviets, the Russian authorities now are persecuting the Jehovah’s Witnesses for their distribution of literature, resistance to the draft, and even meeting together for services.  “On the one, at present, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been put in almost the very same position that they were in Soviet times.”

            Neither then nor now are their religious organizations registered, Makarov continues, and charges against them are often based on falsifications that courts nonetheless readily accept. Thus the future looks almost as bleak as the past.