The ‘crime’ of worship

During a speech last week, President Vladimir Putin returned to one of his favorite claims, which is that Russians are guided by a moral and spiritual conservatism that rejects the social experiments and cultural upheaval he sees in the “monstrous” Western concerns about race and gender. “Each of us is a human being,” Putin said. “This is what matters.”

A far different reality — and a more sickening one — was evident four days later in the courtroom of Judge Alexei Semin in southern Russia. Semin sentenced three men, Rustam Diarov, Sergei Klikunov and Yevgeny Ivanov, to eight years in prison, and Yevgeny’s wife, Olga Ivanova, to 3½ years, on charges of organizing and participating in “extremist activities.” What they did was discuss the Bible and worship as Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination that is nonviolent, eschews subservience to the state, refuses military service, does not vote and views God as the only true leader. The Russian courts banned Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2017 as “extremist,” and Putin’s security services have mercilessly persecuted them ever since. This was the longest prison sentence yet in a saga of senseless punishment, although one other believer also got eight years in June.

The attacks on the Jehovah’s Witnesses violate Article 28 of the Russian Constitution, which states: “Everyone shall be guaranteed freedom of conscience and religion, including the right to profess individually or collectively any religion or not to profess any religion, and freely to choose, possess and disseminate religious and other convictions and act in accordance with them.” Since the denomination was outlawed, a Jehovah’s Witnesses spokesman says, the Russian authorities have brought 257 criminal cases involving 559 believers; 70 of them are now in prison, 31 are under house arrest, and 1,594 homes have been raided.

Putin’s declaration of values was cynical fiction. The reality is that he leads a police state that brutally represses the Jehovah’s Witnesses with the entirely false charge of extremism. Putin’s lodestar is not the moral or spiritual conservatism he professes, but rather a kleptocratic authoritarianism that rewards itself and grinds innocent people into oblivion when they dare lift voices in prayer. “Monstrous,” indeed.