Witnesses and victims

The Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court on recognizing the extremist organization of the Jehovah's Witnesses Management Center in Russia, its liquidation and prohibition of activities. If the lawsuit is satisfied, this will entail not only the liquidation of a legal entity with the confiscation of all the property belonging to it, but also the ban under the threat of criminal liability of any joint prayers and other assembly of believers, including in their own dwellings.

The managerial center is a centralized religious organization. Its attribution to extremist means an absolute ban on all 2277 local communities included in it and the instant transformation of 175,000 believers into dangerous criminals subject to criminal prosecution. Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code for participation in the activities of the organization liquidated for extremism provides for imprisonment for a period of two to six years. In the same place, in the note to the article that first committed this “crime” is proposed as the first Christians in Rome, to renounce their faith and avoid punishment. The guilty of the “organization of the organization’s activities” (as in the Criminal Code!) Relieves from 6 to 10 years “with the deprivation of the right to occupy certain positions and not engage in certain activities for up to ten years”.

This news means, without exaggeration, the threat of deployment of mass political repression. Their victims - if the lawsuit will be satisfied - will become simple peaceful workers, obedients that they “incorrectly” study the Bible and revere their faith the only true (as well as followers of other faiths, including the “main” in our country - Orthodoxy). After making sure that the resource of religiosity in Russian society has been exhausted, the authorities put the main major competitor to the “official”, as is now customary, Orthodoxy. After all, the idea, according to which the Orthodox in Russia tens of millions corresponds to reality only formally. Is there so many among these millions of people churching? Orthodox are often called themselves and those who, for example, have never read the gospel. But to consider himself a witness to Jehovah, without studying the Bible, is impossible. And this is one of the main reasons for the declared persecution.

The refusal of Jehovah's quotes from military service is absolute and unconditional. And the more aggressive the propaganda broadcast becomes, the higher the degree of militarization, the stronger the pressure on their communities.

The accusations of Jehovah's see in extremism are absurd and wildness. From the day of today, one can still agree with the Soviet definition of this religious group as an anti -Soviet organization. Of course, they did not fight the Soviet government either in the partisan or even in the dissident sense - but their lifestyle itself was anti -Soviet: they simply did not go to the army or the polls. But the current label of the "extremist organization" is lying from any point of view. Witnesses never resort to the power of a fist or weapon, following this Old Testament "do not kill" and gospel "put their sword in the scabbard." The law, as you know, recently established that the Bible cannot be recognized as extremist literature. But the extremist, according to the Ministry of Justice, turns out to be life in the Bible. The fact that the person who read the Bible is unacceptable from a police point of view, Leskov wrote in the "one -year".

On the contrary, the “bearer of national ideology” Moscow Patriarchate sanctifies nuclear warheads and does not spare the holy water to sprinkle the soldiers who are going to die behind Bashar al -Assad. Such, according to officials, should be a loyal and respectable church.

Jehovah's witnesses to repression are not used to. They were driven both in Nazi Germany and in the Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev USSR.

On February 19, 1951, the Minister of State Security Abakumov filed a note in the name of Stalin "On the need to evict from the western regions of Ukraine and Belarusian, the Moldavian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian SSR participants in the anti -Soviet Jehovastes and members of their families." The Minister reported that since 1947, "1048 leaders and activists of the sect were arrested, 5 underground printing houses and over 35,000 copies of leaflets, brochures, magazines and other Jehovahous anti -Soviet literature were seized. According to MGB estimates, 8576 people were subject to eviction, which was carried out in 1951-1952.

According to the secret plan, the operation to evict the "contingent" was carried out at once in one or several areas. Operational groups burst in the middle of the night into the houses of believers, pulled out everyone under the bark of the shepherd, with old people and children, on the street, pushed into trucks and brought to specially prepared wagons, fulfilling the plan, which was launched on top: "To assign the duties of raised families, bring them to the loading station and pass into the echelon."

Are cars already prepared for a new sending? After all, trains will need much more. Although the current "extremists" will not get off with relocation to the Irkutsk region. They are waiting for a general regime colony. In strict accordance with the current law.

Do officials of the Ministry of Justice be aware of what they have reached? After all, the Gestapo-man Eichman, who developed and carried out the “final solution to the Jewish question”, turned out to be in fact not a bloodthirsty malnutrition monster, but simply a zealous careerist who carefully performed instructions that were lowered from above and convinced that there was no blood in his hands.

The text received in the aircraft has not yet been published. But its content is understandable. Since 2009, six local communities of Jehovah's Claus have already been banned as extremist-in 2009 in Taganrog, in 2014 in Samara, in 2015 in Abinsk of the Krasnodar Territory, in 2016 in Old Oskol and Belgorod, as well as in Orel, where the community activities were suspended. So the reaction of the company was checked. She was not followed.

It all began with recognition by extremist materials of several dozen numbers published by Jehovah's witnesses magazine "Watchtower". The grounds for this were literally sucked out of the finger. So, an extremist text was named in which the elderly "witness" talks about how he came to his faith, disappointed in the Catholic Church. The experts of the Ministry of Justice found in this story a humiliation of the dignity of the pater with whom the narrator broke up. And the humiliation of dignity in connection with the attitude to religion is Article 282 of the Criminal Code.

Compare several fragments. The first is a quote from the conviction of the 50s against several Jehovah's witnesses:

The actions of the defendants ... expressed in the organization and leadership of a group, the activities of which, conducted under the guise of preaching religious creeds and the execution of religious rites, are associated with harm to the health of citizens, with an encroachment on the personality and rights of citizens, with the motivation of citizens to abandon public activity and the performance of civil duties, are criminal. (Cit. By: N.S. Gordienko. Russian Clothes of Jehovah: History and Modernity. St. Petersburg, 2000. P. 26).

But the decision of the Belgorod Regional Court of February 10, 2016:
The actions of persons who preached the named doctrine violate the legislation on countering extremism, are aimed at spreading the ideas of superiority of one religion over another, give rise to conflicts on inter -religious grounds, and make religious discord.

From a note by Abakumov to Stalin:

Participants in Jehovist underground carry out malicious anti -Soviet agitation, disseminate provocative fabrications about the Soviet government and are propaganda about the establishment of a theocratic system in the USSR, in which power should belong to the clergy. Jehovists are opposed to the events of the party and the Soviet government, especially on collective farm construction, call for the abandonment of service in the Soviet Army, distribute anti -Soviet literature among the population and recruit new participants to the sect.

And in the modern textbook "Sectolation", Professor of the Orthodox Holy Tikhon Humanitarian University, Alexander Dvorkin, accuses Jehovah's Witnesses of "inciting religious growth (along with harm to the health and life of citizens to refuse blood transfusion, coercion to destroy families and refusal to fulfill civil debt)." It is significant that the current Russian Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov also studied at this institute at Dvorkin. Having taken a high position, he appointed Dvorkin as chairman of the expert council for conducting a state religious examination.

In the 1950-1960s, the Jehovist sect was accused of “former war criminals, employees of fascist commandant’s offices, Gestapo scammers, most of whom were recruited in this sect in the camps for displaced persons. Believers who fell under their influence " (" The satellite of the atheist. "M.: Politizdat, 1959).

This propaganda lie is now developing Dvorkin. “As the recently published documents showed,” he writes, “the head of Jehovah's Comfortes in Nazi Germany, Erich Frost, was the secret informant of the authorities.” Whose cow would mumble ... Almost the entire leadership of the religious structure in which Dvorkin works consisted of agents of the MGB/KGB, and the Patriarchal Exarch of the Baltic states Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) met Nazi troops with a procession. But no one requires the ban on the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church MP.

Explaining what Jehovah's cubes are so dangerous, Dvorkin writes that their doctrinal texts "sharply set up Jehovists against adherents of all other religions, primarily against adherents of the traditional faiths of those countries where the sect is operating. This aggression is bursting out and, of course, gives rise to the response of people insulted as the blasphemous statements Publications regarding the revered shrines, as well as the annoying harassment of sect members.

The late professor Nikolai Semenovich Gordienko wrote in the 2000 work mentioned: "The period of illegal confession by the Jehovah's Certificates in his own country was left behind, and, presumably, forever." It would seem that he was mistaken. But since the Higher Law is not the Criminal Code, but the Constitution of Russia, the actions of the Ministry of Justice against this faith must be considered unlawful. Not only because the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly defended its followers from the attacks of the Russian authorities, but also because Jehovah's Witnesses for the suffering they had experienced are already recognized as the victims of political repression.

The elders are still alive, who survived the persecution and rehabilitated on the basis of the 1991 law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions." Later, the law was explained by the Decree of President Yeltsin of March 14, 1996, published "in order to restore justice, legal rights of Russian citizens, freedom of conscience and religion, guided by a sense of repentance." The decree condemned "many years of terror unleashed by the Bolshevik party-Soviet regime against believers of all faiths." The Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB was prescribed to “rehabilitate Russian citizens who were unreasonably accused of political, state and criminal offenses, lost their freedom, and were subjected to other restrictions on rights in connection with their religious activities and beliefs.” Many Jehovah's witnesses were rehabilitated. Among them is the head of the governing committee of the faith Vasily Kalin. He was still a teenager when his family was forcibly sent from the Ivano-Frankivsk region to Siberia. In the pocket of Vasily Mikhailovich lies the certificate of the victim of political repression.

According to the law of rehabilitation as victims of repressions, everyone who, religious, and national characteristics was subject to restriction of rights, starting on October 25 (November 7), 1917. The law does not contain the final date. The main thing is that article 5 of the Law establishes that the acts that are not containing public danger are recognized and rehabilitated regardless of the actual validity of the person’s prosecution, who are also convicted of “an encroachment on the identity and rights of citizens under the guise of the execution of religious rites”. This is exactly what Jehovah's Witnesses are charged today.

If the ministe’s lawsuit is not withdrawn and if the Supreme Court satisfies him, this will inevitably lead to a massive violation of the rights of believers - and each of them will have the right to apply to the Prosecutor General’s Office to recognize his victim of political repressions.