Amidst Crackdown on Minority Christians in Russia, Regional Media Continues to Whip Up Hysteria

(August 1, 2008)

Regional media is playing a role reminiscent of the Soviet period by demonizing minority Christians at the same time that federal and regional government agencies are engaged in a widespread crackdown. Below are some examples that UCSJ monitoring has uncovered just this week.

In Elista (capital of the Republic of Kalmykia), the local government's main newspaper "Pravitelstvennaya Gazeta" ran an interview in its July 26, 2008 edition with a Russian Orthodox clergyman, who all but admitted that the church cooperates with the FSB in its efforts to suppress competition from minority Christians. He also made several accusations against minority Christians, none of whom were given the opportunity to respond.

Father Anatoly of Elista's Kazan Cathedral listed the "sects" operating in Kalmykia as Baptists, Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. He argued that during the 1990s, the government allowed these groups to use money to "discredit the Russian Orthodox Church" and "buy up buildings and build camps where the psychological brainwashing of children took place." Thanks to the Church's educational work and cooperation with local authorities, all the "sects" but the Jehovah's Witnesses have become inactive. He gave as an example a successful effort to stop "sects" from preaching in the public schools, something that is illegal in Russia, but which the Russian Orthodox Church has been able to do in several regions within the context of a government-approved program entitlted "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture."

The most interesting part of the interview--especially considering the country-wide scale of recent actions against minority Christians in Russia, and past KGB infiltration of religious groups, including the Orthodox Church--concerned ties between the local Russian Orthodox diocese and the FSB. When asked if the Church cooperates with the FSB, Father Anatoly gave the following answer:

"'Cooperate' is too strong a way of putting it: during the years that the FSB has existed it has not held the reigns of power inside the Russian Orthodox Church. But nowadays only that organization [the FSB] can stop the financial flows that come into Russia from abroad that are aimed at dismantling society. Religious sects are directed specifically towards doing that. Both the Church and the FSB in this respect have the same goal--to keep our society whole. We don't want to make sectarians into martyrs, but the religious lives of sects ought to stay within the bounds of their churches."

Another example comes from the July 26, 2008 Krasnoyarsk supplement to the popular national daily "Komsomolskaya Pravda." Entitled "American 'Zombifies' Residents of Zheleznogorsk," the article manages to slander minority Christians and the United States while alluding to charges of espionage that are commonly leveled against foreign missionaries.

The article tells how a 67-year-old American preacher from an unspecified American-Swedish church (most likely the Pentecostal "New Life" church) "penetrated" the closed city of Zheleznogorsk, the site of nuclear waste storage and a secret chemical plant that in Soviet times was knows as Krasnoyarsk-26. Outsiders are forbidden from entering the city without permission, but the pastor allegedly managed to sneak past police controls and was detained during a service he conducted there, fined, and expelled. The story, if true, would constitute a clear breach of Russian law, which the authorities appear to have reacted to appropriately, but the tone of the article, and its context within a wider government-initiated (though so far unstated) campaign against minority Christians, is suffused with paranoia and misinformation.

The opening paragraphs describe the nuclear waste storage facility and then present the elderly pastor as a direct threat to the country's security, the author writing that, "Therefore the appearance of an American prophet inside the closed city had the effect equivalent to a bomb exploding." "Especially because the infiltrator didn't bother to hide himself, but instead gathered city residents for his preaching," the author adds.

"Seeing a foreigner in our city, especially one who is agitating for some kind of religion, wasn't possible in the past," a police spokesman was quoted as saying in the article. "There are off limit sites here which our fellow citizens are not allowed to visit. And here a foreigner is all of a sudden in your face!" The pastor was detained "the moment he put the small crowd into a trance and they started speaking gibberish," the author writes, a possible reference to the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues (which raises the distinct possibility that there are Pentecostals already living in the city who may have even invited the pastor to preach to them, since the author's characterization of mass hypnosis lacks credibility). The FSB "did not find any dangerous items or things that would belong to a spy" on the pastor's person.

Unlike most attack articles written in the provincial press about minority Christians, the author at least gave a pastor from the "American-Swedish church" in Krasnoyarsk a chance to respond. Pastor Aleksey said there was nothing wrong with preaching to people everywhere, since "our task is to bring to them the Word of God."

Meanwhile, in the far-northern city of Murmansk, prosecutors are taking a tougher line than they did earlier this month in the wake of a Jehovah's Witnesses congress in that city. As UCSJ reported earlier, prosecutors issued a warning to stadium owners that they were violating the law if they allowed a Jehovah's Witnesses congress to take place, citing a regulation that stadiums are supposedly only meant for sports-related activities. According to a July 26, 2008 article in the local newspaper "Vecherny Murmansk," the prosecutor of the city's October district, Maria Kravetskaya, gave an interview to a local Russian Orthodox Church publication vowing to "punish those guilty" of allowing the Jehovah's Witnesses' meeting to take place and to "not allow further violations of Russian law." The "Vecherny Murmansk" article then quoted an official from the local Russian Orthodox diocese saying that: "The Murmansk and Monchegorskaya diocese has regularly warned regional and city officials about the illegal activities of this totalitarian and anti-government sect." The author of the article ends by warning that "this sect has followers in almost every major population center of the Murmansk region. The number of its adepts exceeds several thousand people." No Jehovah's Witnesses are quoted to refute the accusatory tone of the article.

In the Sakhalin region, a July 30, 2008 report by the local news agency "Ostrova" revealed that a campaign in Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsk pressured the local mayor into refusing permission for Jehovah's Witnesses to build a kingdom hall there. There is no information in the report about when this happened, but it was announced by an historian with links to the Russian Orthodox Church named Egor Kholmogorov, who was visiting the region. According to Mr. Kholmogorov, the campaign generated 1,000 signatures and managed to persuade the mayor, who even Mr. Kholmogorov admits "had no formal basis to ban" the construction, to prevent the prayer house from being built.

In the Rostov region, the local supplement to the national daily "Moskovsky Komsomolets" reported on July 30, 2008 that Russian Orthodox clergy led a "crusade" against Jehovah's Witnesses in the town of Novoshakhtinsk. Local officials allowed the anti-Jehovah's Witnesses march, and Mayor Aleksandr Brizhanov openly pledged his support, reportedly saying: "The city administration, along with Orthodox residents, are concerned that thousands of followers of alternative 'churches' have converged on Novoshakhtinsk from all over southern Russia."

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