WHEN the KGB men came to his family flat, they split up Yaroslav Sivulsky and his parents into separate rooms. Mr Sivulsky, then a young boy in the Soviet Union, watched as agents searched their belongings for “banned literature”. His grandparents had been exiled to Siberia for belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination founded in America in the 19th century; his parents had kept the faith alive in their home.
Now Mr Sivulsky and the 175,000 other Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia face the prospect of returning to an underground existence. On April 20th, the Russian Supreme Court outlawed the group’s activities, declaring it an “extremist” organisation. “It’s all happening again,” says Mr Sivulsky. “Back then they came after us for ideological reasons, and now because our faith is not of the ‘right kind’.”
The ruling puts the group, whose members preach non-violence and refuse to serve in the military, on the same legal footing as several neo-Nazi groups. Lawyers from the Russian Ministry of Justice argued that they pose a threat to “public order and public security”. The group’s property and assets are set to be...Continue reading
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