Force Structures, Orthodox Church have Different Reasons for Opposing Jehovah’s Witnesses, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 14 – The Russian campaign against the Jehovah’s Witnesses grew out of Moscow’s crackdown against religious literature that began in 2009 and intensified after Russian courts banned the denomination in 2017 as “extremist.” But the two chief groups pursuing the Witnesses have very different agendas, Irina Kapitanova and Sergey Maksimov say.

            “If the siloviki see in the Jehovah’s Witnesses a totalitarian and destructive sect or an instrument of foreign intelligence services,” the two Newsru journalists say, “human rights activists refer to a possible ‘struggle with heresy’ in the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church, conspiracy thinking among the powers that be, or simply the pursuit of ‘anti-extremist’ statistics by law enforcement” (news.ru/obshestvo/za-chto-ubirayut-svidetelej/).

            Russian officials have responded to criticism of their crackdown by saying that they are not attacking religious beliefs but rather opposed to specific actions such as missionary activity, but in fact, Kapitanova and Maksimov say, they treat any religious activity by the Witnesses as being in violation of the law.

            Representatives of the opposition and human rights communities, the two continue, “frequently treat what is going on as the result of ‘an order’ by the Russian Orthodox Church to eliminate Christian denominations” in Russia which compete with its own.  Pavel Chikov of the Agora Group is one of them.

            He notes that “the persecution of the Witnesses has a long tradition in Russia. They were actively repressed in Soviet times, and I suspect that in our time the cause of this is the coincidence of the goals of the authorities (persecution of those who think differently) and the Russian Orthodox Church (persecution of apostates).”

            Moreover, Chikov continues, Moscow has a well-developed strategy to use against the Witnesses, one developed in the course of its persecution of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

            But SOVA religious affairs expert Aleksandr Verkhovsky disagrees. He says that Moscow would have had more interest in going after the Seventh Day Adventists than the Witnesses if the decision as to which to persecute had been its alone.  The former is as numerous and more of a threat. 

            Moreover, Orthodox priests have generally picked up on the regime’s narrative about the Witnesses rather than coming up with one of their own.  One priest, for example, has insisted that the Witnesses were “created by Western special services for expansion against Christianity and ‘the conduct of a hybrid war.’”

            That is certainly the same line as used by Russian law enforcement whose members point to the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t register with the state in the 1990s when they had the chance and often call on their members to avoid having anything to do with officials. And they argue that US AID is “the curator” for the Witnesses.

            Chikov points out that there is no evidence for such conspiracies, although they are widely promoted and believed.  What accounts for the singling out of the Witnesses, he says, is that the government assumes that few will come to their defense after they are stigmatized in the media as sectarians.

            Verkhovsky for his part says that Moscow may have allowed things to go to far even for its own purpose. “The powers that be above hardly know what is being done with these 100,000 followers” of the Witnesses. And that matters because “each of them could be potentially charged with a crime.”

            But, he says Moscow must know that “it is impossible to have 100,000 cases” all at the same time.