New evidence has emerged of a government coordinated campaign against Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia. As UCSJ reported earlier this week prosecutors in Asbest and Taganrog have brought charges of extremism against Jehovah's Witnesses congregations. According to the religious freedom watchdog Forum 18, local authorities have also prevented eight Jehovah's Witnesses meetings from taking place in cities all over the country, and tried to obstruct to various degrees around 30 others. According to the Forum 18 report: "The FSB security service, local administrations and Prosecutor's Offices have all been involved" in this campaign.

In addition, in the course of just two days this week, UCSJ has discovered articles in the local newspapers of four regions that demonize Jehovah's Witnesses, including a sensational account that accused them of kidnapping a man from within a Russian Orthodox Church in Elista, capital of the Republic of Kalmykia. Whatever the truth behind this account, which was written up in all the republic's major papers as well as papers beyond the region, its timing is suspiciously reminiscent of Soviet-style propaganda campaigns featuring spectacular accusations against various "enemies of the people."

The most credible description of the event came in a July 23, 2008 article in the local official newspaper "Pravitelstvennaya Gazeta." According to the article, the incident took place over the weekend at Elista's Krestovozdvizhensky Russian Orthodox Church. The paper cited the following "official version" of the events: Four men entered the church, grabbed a young man named Yuri Vorozhbitov and forced him into a car. Yuri is the 20-year-old son of the local head of the Jehovah's Witnesses community who had reportedly gone to the church looking for help against his parents, who allegedly forced him into the Jehovah's Witnesses "sect." He allegedly said that his parents had used physical force against him and that he was on the verge of suicide. A spokesman for the local diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church confirmed this account and reported it to the police, who after a brief search, found Yuri in a mental institution, where his parents had placed him.

An appeal from a local nationalist organization led to a police investigation of the putative kidnapping. However, the young man's father, Vasily Vorozhbitov, told the author of the article that he and his wife had Yuri hospitalized because of his deteriorating mental health. He stated that his son was taken to wandering off and thereby endangering himself, which is why when the Jehovah's Witnesses found him inside a church, they felt the need to take him away by force. A psychiatrist who treated Yuri before confirmed that he has a history of mental illness, and that lately he has tried to avoid treatment, which he still needs. The doctor did insist, however, that any further treatment should be voluntary.

A July 23, 2008 article in the Volgograd edition of the national daily "Kommersant" interviewed Mr. Vorozhbitov, who stated that his son, who suffers from schizophrenia, has the right to choose his own religious faith, and that the story about the "kidnapping" within the church was a planned provocation by the local diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. A spokesman for the diocese cast doubt on assertions that Yuri Vorozhbitov is mentally ill and demanded another medical evaluation of his mental health. Whether or not prosecutors will bring charges against Mr. Vorozhbitov remains to be seen.

The story led to a predictable firestorm on web sites and media linked to the far-right, including a July 22 report on the web site "Russkaya Liniya" which quoted the head of the missionary department of the Yaroslavl diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church calling for Jehovah's Witnesses to be banned as an extremist organization and compared them to a disease that needs to be extirpated from the body of Russia.

Meanwhile, articles appeared in three local newspapers in Yekaterinburg, Vladimir, and Arkhangelsk over the course of just two days demonizing Jehovah's Witnesses. In an article entitled "Poisoners of Minds," the July 22, 2008 edition of the Yekaterinburg paper "Uralsky Rabochy" opens by warning that: "A religious fanatic with a rifle on a rooftop can take the lives of several dozen people. And if he gets his hands on a nuclear power station--the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people." The next paragraph begins with quotations from Jehovah's Witnesses literature that proclaims their faith superior to other "false religions" and predicts an apocalypse that will consume the followers of other faiths, but not the Jehovah's Witnesses themselves. While the author admits that most religions contain similar tenets, he sees a threat in the beliefs of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who supposedly inspire their followers to, "hasten God's punishment" by "grabbing a rifle." "In the end, we will mourn both this person and his victims. But should we let things get to this point? Wouldn't it be simpler to deal with these 'poisoners of minds' before it's too late?"

The next day (July 23), the Vladimir supplement to the popular national daily "Moskovsky Komsomolets" ran an article that began with a quote from the Bible warning about false prophets. The author of the piece claimed to have several friends and acquaintances who have been abused by "sects" and listed them only by their first names, making it impossible to verify the truth of his stories. He lumped genuinely dangerous groups like the Japanese death cult Aum Shinrikyo in with Jehovah's Witnesses and others under the rubric of "sects" which he defined as, "destructive religious trends led, as a rule, but one or two leaders who have unquestioned authority within the group and power over its believers." "The ultimate goal of a sectarian organization," the author writes, "is control over many, and ideally, over all spheres of a person's life" using hypnosis and drugs. "Many sects, like the Unification Church of Moon, the 'Jehovah's Witnesses,' the Scientologists of Ron Hubbard, and others are in fact huge commercial and financial 'empires' that aim to acquire power over the whole world."

The author ends with the following warning: "Dear Vladimir residents, don't believe that a volunteer from the 'Jehovah's Witnesses' with a rolex on his wrist can make your life better. Don't fall for the provocations of the sectarians. In other words, be vigilant!"

That same day, an article in the local paper "Pravda Severa" in the far-northern city of Arkhangelsk summarized the conclusions of a conference held in the city on "Sects and Psychotherapy." On speaker called "sects" "non-lethal weapons of mass destruction" that "cause psychological harm to people and to the mental ecology of Russia." The bulk of the article is an interview with Father Evgeny Sokolov, a Russian Orthodox priest based at Pomorsky State University in Arkhangelsk, whose accusations against Jehovah's Witnesses and other "sects," in the typical style of "pay to order" journalism in Russia, go unanswered within the article by any contrary views.

Father Evgeny warns that without a state religion, "the state and society fall apart when people believe in various spiritual values." He then hints at the accusations of many within Russia's security services that minority Christians are tools of foreign intelligence services: "Any enemy who wants to destroy society and the state will allow false and different spiritual orientations. The truth is always indivisible. If you need to divide a people, you need to deprive it of a united truth. That is the task placed before sects."

He then makes the false claim that, "Every Jehovah's Witness, for example, is a citizen not of our country, but of a different state with a center in Brooklyn (the USA)" yet "the government does nothing to fight them." "Such impudent, cynical missionary work needs to be stopped," Father Evgeny then says that he can't imagine going to Germany to proselytize Russian Orthodoxy, a clear indication of the link between faith and nationalism in Russia. He made the astounding claim that the government of Germany would actually prevent him from doing so. The author ended by calling for a united effort by psychiatrists, Orthodox clergy and law enforcement agencies against Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists and other "sects."

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