Inna Zagrebina. The campaign to discredit Evangelical Christians is gaining momentum
Most ministers of evangelical churches are at children’s camps this summer, but judging by recent events, in the fall many may end up in real ones…
Over the past year, we (the Guild of Experts on Religion and Law) have regularly informed believers about the campaign to discredit evangelical churches in Russia.
We have made public how the local Grace Church in Khabarovsk has suffered, and indeed continues to suffer to this day. On its event called “Tres Días” (Three Days with God), in the “best” traditions of the KGB, “false brothers” were sent in, pretending to be brothers and sisters in the faith, but who were in fact followers of Mr. Dvorkin. The actions of these “brave scouts” resulted in two criminal cases being opened against ministers of the local church, as well as a case seeking the liquidation of the Grace Church in Khabarovsk itself.
We publicized the facts of provocations directed against the New Generation Church in Blagoveshchensk, which, with the participation of those same “brave” Dvorkin followers, led to the prosecutor’s office initiating numerous lawsuits.
We are making every effort to ensure that what has happened and is happening to believers in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur is not hidden from the public. There, the evangelical Christian and city mayor, Pyotr Volynsky, endures slander for his faith. At this moment, he is already being prosecuted on criminal charges.
All year, attempts were made to discredit the mayor on the basis of his personal relationship to religion, but without success. When the ploy of accusing him of sectarianism and personally ‘zombifying’ the city’s residents failed, complaints about the mayor exceeding his official powers poured into various authorities.
For a long time, law enforcement agencies refused to act on all these complaints. But, as the saying goes, constant dripping wears away a stone. Recently, the Prosecutor’s Office of Khabarovsk Krai finally found elements of a criminal offense under Part 2 of Article 285 of the Russian Criminal Code.
But the most interesting part is that the first to learn of the criminal case being opened were neither the accused himself nor even the press, but those who had taken part in the campaign to discredit the ‘sectarian’ mayor.
I would like to particularly draw readers’ attention to the following facts.
Today, most of the persecution of evangelical Christians has taken place in the Far East. And the situation does not receive an adequate public response due to the shameful fact that the majority still lives by the traditional Russian principle: ‘my hut is on the edge, I know nothing.’ All the warnings that have been sounded about what is happening, apart from the lamentations of individual believers on social media, fail to receive proper attention.
This leads to the fact that anti-sect fighters, sensing impunity, have become increasingly active and engage in legal trolling.
In various regions of Russia, ‘trolls’ have appeared who do nothing but set up Churches that are especially active in the region. In some cases, they infiltrated religious organizations using methods of the former KGB, and in others they simply wrote piles of complaints to every possible authority.
And their ‘work’ does not go in vain. Let me give just a few examples.
On February 3, 2012, a sentence entered into legal force against Nadezhda Antonenko, whom many to this day, despite the court’s decision, consider an Orthodox healer.
The reason for the criminal prosecution was accusations that Antonenko committed fraudulent acts allegedly by treating people with holy water. The accusers were associates of the fighter against dissenters, Alexander Dvorkin: T.S. Karpacheva and E.A. Levshina (the country must know its ‘heroes’!), who came to Antonenko posing as sick people.
As a result of Dvorkin’s ‘witch hunt,’ a 67-year-old elderly woman, mother of four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, with no previous convictions, was sentenced to three years of actual imprisonment to be served in a penal colony settlement.
It was not without his involvement that the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, and Hare Krishnas began.
However, evangelical Christians may object, saying that they are sectarians after all, and that’s what they deserve—let them get out of Russia. But that logic has been and remains mistaken. After the new religious movements, evangelical Christians followed.
Rostov-on-Don, Saratov, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, and now Novokuznetsk as well.
And it seems this is only the initial stage of the campaign directed against evangelical Christians. In support of my words, I will quote an adherent of Dvorkin on one of the forums: “Neo-Pentecostals are already being prosecuted. Suffice it to recall the case in Khabarovsk. The main defendants in that case are already ‘on the run’… And there will be more and more such cases. The court decision in Blagoveshchensk is also taking place.”
“Neo-Pentecostals and Hare Krishnas are dangerous totalitarian sects. Neo-Pentecostals have a bad reputation as sects that practice harsh brainwashing of their followers. What goes on at the orgies in these sects is hard even to describe. When I showed video recordings from these sects to prosecutors in the Far Eastern regions, they were simply in silent shock. It is a horrifying sight. Suffice it to say that rehabilitation after being in these sects sometimes takes up to 10 years, and the consequences of being in the sects rarely disappear completely for anyone. Hare Krishnas are one of the most aggressive and criminal sects. Pedophilia, arms trafficking, drugs—this trail follows the Hare Krishnas all over the world. Sects in general are a terrible sphere.”
However, again, the reader might think that we don’t know who these Neo-Pentecostals are, and that they certainly have nothing to do with evangelical Christians, but that is not the case. The same anti-sect fighter, combatting ‘ignorance,’ clarifies that “ROSkhVE is an umbrella Neo-Pentecostal structure. The ringleader of this structure is the notorious Sergei Ryakhovsky.”
And while the anti-sect fighters actively work for the ‘good’ of the Motherland—holding various academic conferences against ‘sectarians,’ publishing collections of their proceedings and distributing them to government bodies; traveling around regional prosecutors with horror films; speaking in city administrations; training law enforcement personnel—and while our brothers in the regions alone endure serious court cases and try to fend off false accusations, we, evangelical Christians, are strategically losing, squandering precious time, carelessly occupied with spiritual matters, not thinking that the next accused could be one of us, and that no one will help us then either.
The Guild of Experts on Religion and Law, as long as it is able, will ring all the bells, calling upon all clergy who are not indifferent to the fate of evangelical Christians to join in joint efforts and to stop, before it is too late, the campaign to discredit the evangelical churches of Russia.
Chairman of the Board of the Guild of Experts on Religion and Law Inna Zagrebina
Contacts of the Guild of Experts on Religion and Law:
President Roman Lunkin [email protected];
Chairman of the Board Inna Zagrebina [email protected]
Social media address: https://www.facebook.com/innasclj
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