Jehovah’s Witnesses Under the Yoke of Repression — 2023 Overview
In 2023, the number of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses criminally persecuted for their faith reached almost 800, and the number of searches exceeded 2,000. Cases are fabricated against the elderly, women and the disabled. More than a quarter of all persecuted are persons over 60 years of age. By the end of the year, there were already six Jehovah’s Witness women in prison. The tendency to persecute entire families has increased. The maximum length of imprisonment requested by prosecutors has reached to 10 years. Statistics and details are included in this article.
A Year in Numbers
As of December 25, 2023, the total number of searches of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses is 2,058. In 2023, violent raids took place at 183 addresses, 43 people were detained, 15 of whom have been or are still in pre-trial detention.
During the year, Russian courts ruled against 147 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 47 of whom were sentenced to imprisonment for a cumulative term of more than 257 years. One year earlier, 44 people were sentenced to a cumulative term of 244 years in prison. Thirty-three people received prison sentences of six years or more. Of these, the longest term of eight years of imprisonment in a prison colony was received by Dmitriy Barmakin, whose story will be discussed below. On December 22, 2023, the court sentenced Aleksandr Rumyantsev from Moscow to seven-and-a-half years in prison. Sean Pike, a citizen of Guyana, and Eduard Sviridov from Moscow, are in the same case and were sentenced to seven and six-and-a-half years in prison, respectively. Astrakhan residents Rinat Kiramov, Sergey Korolev and Sergey Kosyanenko, as well as Aleksandr Skvortsov from Taganrog and Evgeniy Bushev from Chelyabinsk received seven years in prison. In the Bushev case, it took the court just five sessions to conclude that talking about a Biblical topic was a serious crime. Later, it turned out that an officer of the National Guard had participated in the conversation, pretending to be someone interested in the Bible.
On December 19, 2023, a court in Novosibirsk sentenced Marina Chaplykina to four years in prison. She became the sixth woman from among Russia’s Jehovah’s Witnesses to receive a real sentence for her faith.
Eight of Jehovah’s Witnesses were released from prison this past year. Seventy-nine people remain in prison colonies.
"With release from the prison colony, the believers trials do not end," explains Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a representative of the European Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses. "Believers continue to serve additional punishments. For example, during the period appointed by the court, they cannot leave their city of residence. An electronic tracking bracelet is put on the ankle of some for many months, by which the authorities track the location of the person. This device must not be removed. Many people are forbidden to work in certain areas, such as in education, after serving their sentences."
Most of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are prosecuted for their faith are included in the list of extremists and terrorists maintained by the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring). The state imposes a number of serious economic restrictions on those who are listed in it; for example, their bank accounts are blocked, which makes it difficult to receive salaries, pensions and other activities. At the time of publication of this article, there are 521 believers on the list, 72 of whom were added to the list in 2023.
Terms are Breaking Records
In Magadan, the case of 13 believers, including Ivan Puida, the son and grandson of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been repressed under Soviet rule, reached the finale. Now he too could recieve a lengthy sentence of 10 years. That is how much the prosecutor asked for in the pleadings on November 24, 2023.
If Puida gets 10 years in prison, it will be a new unprecedented record in the cases of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses. Currently, the maximum term of imprisonment is eight years, and five believers are serving it; Aleksey Berchuk, Rustam Diarov, Yevgeniy Ivanov and Sergey Klikunov.
On December 4, 2023, in Irkutsk, the prosecutor requested terms ranging from three to seven years for a group of nine of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the longest for Yaroslav Kalin, Nikolay Martynov, Aleksey Solnechny and Sergey Kosteev. Yaroslav Kalin also comes from a family of those repressed for their faith. Kalin’s lawyer said: "My client is being tried for the same thing for which his parents were exiled to Siberia for, more than 70 years ago." Ironically, Kalin’s parents have been officially rehabilitated, but their son is again being tried for the same "crime".
New Regions
In 2023, the geography of persecution has expanded. In February, the first searches in the Leningrad Region took place in the cities of Kingisepp and Slantsy, five people went to jail, and a criminal case was initiated. On April 4, 2023, searches were carried out for the first time in St. Petersburg.
At the end of February, searches in at least three addresses took place in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia. Kishta Tutinova, 62 years old, was detained, and after two days behind bars she was placed under house arrest.
In total, Jehovah’s Witnesses are already being persecuted in 74 regions of the Russian Federation.
Persecution of the Elderly and Disabled
Almost 26% of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses who have been prosecuted for their faith since 2017, that being 205 people, are over 60 years old. Criminal cases were initiated against 17 believers in this category in 2023. The oldest of them is 85 years old, the youngest is 19 years old.
Law enforcement officers and judges have no shame as to who is accused, not even age, the presence of serious illnesses or disabilities. So, on September 13 of this year, a court in the Amur Region sentenced Vladimir Balabkin, 71 years old, suffering from oncology, to fours years in prison. The prosecutor had requested two-and-a-half times more. Immediately after the verdict, he was taken into custody. About three months later, on December 19, 2023, the appellate court replaced the sentence with a suspended sentence of one year, and the believer was released.
On September 14, 2023, the Maykop City Court sent 68-year-old Nikolay Voishchev to the prison colony. Even before his arrest, he was diagnosed with a tumor that required immediate treatment. He still needs medical care while in prison, but is not recieviing it.
Andrey Vlasov, a 54-year-old disabled person of group II, continues to serve his sentence for his faith in the Novosibirsk Region. He suffers from serious illnesses, including deforming arthrosis of both hip joints, which makes it difficult for him to move around. But both the appeal and the cassation court upheld the conviction.
Repression of Entire Families
By the end of the year, more than 70 families in 35 regions of the Russian Federation had become easy prey for law enforcement officers, for whom this is often an easy way to improve their performance and move up the career ladder. In some cases, husband and wife were sent to prison at the same time, for example, Yelena and Georgiy Nikulin from Saransk. Both received more than four years in prison.
"Other family members who are not under investigation are also subjected to direct or indirect pressure. After the searches, the security forces interrogate them, threaten to imprison a relative or they themselves if the interrogated person does not begin to give the necessary information against the relative and his fellow believers. Simply put, they are offered to be agents of infiltration, to conduct covert audio and video filming of how believers discuss Bible teachings, pray and sing religious songs together, in order to later call it "the activities of a banned religious organization," says Yaroslav Sivulskiy. "Another way of indirect pressure on relatives is by denying visits to imprisoned family members."
Reversal of Acquittals
One of the significant trends of 2023 was the abolition of acquittals of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This happened on July 6, 2023, with the case of Aleksandr Pryanikov and Venera and Darya Dulova, the case reached the Supreme Court, where the acquittal was overturned, although before that the Sverdlovsk Regional Court had twice overturned convictions.
The acquittal verdict was overturned on November 20, 2023, in the case of Ivan Sorokin and Andrey Zhukov in Yugorsk, Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region.
Dmitriy Barmakin from Vladivostok became the first Russian Jehovah’s Witness to be acquitted in a criminal case for his faith on November 22, 2021. But this sentence lasted until April 27, 2023, when the same court, the Pervorechensky District Court of Vladivostok, sentenced the believer to eight years in prison. However, later on August 8, 2023, the Primorsky Regional Court overturned this decision and sent the case for review.
Aleksey Khabarov from Porkhov, Pskov Region, who was initially acquitted, was sentenced at the third trial on October 25, 2023, to two years and six months in a prison colony. The appeal shortened the period by only two months.
The Supreme Court is Not Its Own Decree
It seems paradoxical that acquittals of Jehovah’s Witnesses are consistently overturned by the Supreme Court, whose position is that worship in itself cannot be considered a crime. In the cases of Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is the only corpus delicti.
On October 28, 2021, the Plenum of the Supreme Court published a ruling stating: "If a court adopts and enters into force a decision to liquidate or ban the activities of a public or religious association or other organization in connection with the implementation of extremist activities, subsequent actions of persons that are not related to the continuation or resumption of the activities of the relevant extremist organization and consist solely in exercising their right to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, including through individual or joint confession of religion, worship or other religious rites and ceremonies, in themselves, if they do not contain signs of extremism, do not constitute a crime" (emphasis added).
However, in practice, some judges of the Supreme Court do not consider it necessary to follow it’s own position. They simply repeat the prosecution’s narrative that any collective practice by Jehovah’s Witnesses is "extremist. "
In total, the Supreme Court has already overturned two acquittals of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In addition to the above-mentioned case of Pryanikov and the Dulovs, a similar decision was made on December 15, 2022 in the case of the Bazhenovs and Vera Zolotova.
Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights
On January 31, 2023, the European Court of Human Rights considered seven complaints by Jehovah’s Witnesses from Russia related to the events from 2010 to 2014. In all of them, the court sided with the applicants and ordered them to pay compensation in the amount of 345,773 euros and another 5,000 euros as legal costs.
This is the second judgement of the ECHR in the case of Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses in the last two years. In the summer of 2022, the ECHR also acquitted believers in a larger lawsuit related to the illegal liquidation of all legal entities of the Witnesses and the seizure of their property. The total amount of compensation under this decision exceeds 63 million euros.
Alas, so far the decisions of the ECHR have no visible impact on the practice of the Russian law enforcement system. The Russian authorities are in no hurry to pay compensation to acquitted believers, and continue to sentence them to long prison terms.
Exactly on the day of the decision of the ECHR, June 7, 2022, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted laws under an accelerated procedure, according to which ECHR judgments issued after March 15, 2022 are not enforceable in Russia.
The Case of the Eighteen in Surgut, "Faith is a Crime, Torture is Heroism"
In 2023, a high-profile case in Surgut came to the finish line, which received wide publicity due to the torture of believers. The case against 18 men and one woman from Surgut, including a man whom the investigation mistakenly mistook for one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, has been dragging on since February 2019. Seven defendants went through severe torture during interrogation, and one of them, Timofey Zhukov, was forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital and later obtained compensation for this.
The situation around torture in Surgut was widely covered in the Russian media, believers met with the Human Rights Ombudsman for the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region and employees of the offices of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, conferences were held with the participation of human rights defenders.
In November 2023, the prosecutor requested strict terms for believers, up to nine-and-a-half years in prison for Sergey Loginov.
On December 5, 2023, all the defendants in the Surgut case were convicted with suspended sentences ranging from four to seven years. The longest sentences of seven years were received by Sergey Loginov and Timofey Zhukov.
At the same time, not a single criminal case has been initiated by the fact of the torture of the believers. Moreover, later the head of the investigative department of the Investigative Committee, where Jehovah’s Witnesses were tortured, Vladimir Ermolaev and his subordinate Sergey Bogoderov received awards, and the soldiers of the Russian Guard who participated in the operation were given promotions.
"Is There Any Success in Intimidating Jehovah’s Witnesses?"
Sergey Ivanenko, Ph.D., a religious scholar who was present as an expert in 14 criminal trials against Jehovah’s Witnesses in different regions of Russia, describes his impressions in his book "About People Who Endure Persecution" published in 2023: "Jehovah’s Witnesses… believe that it is their religious duty to preach Christianity to law enforcement officers, judges, as well as prisoners… Is there any success in intimidating Jehovah’s Witnesses? No, there is not. They continue to preach, help each other, and support prisoners of conscience. They believe that persecution strengthens faith in Jehovah, and strong faith brings peace of mind. Those who know the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses understand that they have endured severe persecution and have not departed from their faith. Nor are they frightened by persecution in modern Russia."