Jehovah's Witnesses are an international religious organisation whose followers hold pacifist convictions. They study the Bible and preach. Since 2017, following the recognition of the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses and nearly 400 other congregations as extremist organisations in Russia, such peaceful activities have become grounds for the systematic prosecution of hundreds of believers. In October 2023, the Prosecutor General's Office added the American, German, and Ukrainian organisations of Jehovah's Witnesses to the register of "undesirable" organisations. This further restricts contacts between believers inside the country and abroad and creates additional risks of prosecution for them.
Historical context of persecution
The religious movement of Jehovah's Witnesses formed in the 1870s among American Protestants and was originally known as the "Bible Students" movement. Its members sought the most faithful reading of the Bible, "purifying" traditional Christian doctrine of what they saw as non-biblical teachings.
Today the denomination has around 8.7 million members worldwide. The Governing Body — the central authority of Jehovah's Witnesses — is based in the United States and consists of nine members elected from the most active believers. Many countries have branches of the Governing Body that coordinate the distribution of religious literature and organise congresses of believers.
In the USSR, the number of Jehovah's Witnesses grew sharply in the 1930s and 1940s following the annexation of territories in Moldova, western Ukraine, western Belarus, and the Baltic states. The organisation was completely banned in the USSR. Believers were mass-sentenced to labour camps for "anti-Soviet propaganda" and refusing military service. In April 1951, the authorities carried out Operation North, deporting nearly 10,000 Jehovah's Witnesses and their families to Siberia.
In Nazi Germany, believers were sent to concentration camps for refusing to give the Nazi salute, join the NSDAP, and for their pacifism. There they were identified by a special mark — the "purple triangle". Under the Afwerki dictatorship in Eritrea, Jehovah's Witnesses have been held for decades in extremely harsh prison conditions without trial. The movement is also strictly banned in a number of Islamic states.
In the post-Soviet space, members of the movement face persecution in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Various restrictions exist for believers in Uzbekistan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, while in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, Jehovah's Witnesses are registered and operate freely. In Europe, the activities of Jehovah's Witness congregations are more likely to prompt public debate and additional government scrutiny than mass criminal prosecution.
Pressure on Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia has been conducted under the banner of fighting "totalitarian sects" and "destructive cults".
The Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia — a branch of the Governing Body — was officially registered in 1991, before the dissolution of the USSR. But as early as the 2000s, dozens of Jehovah's Witness publications began appearing on the Federal List of Extremist Materials, local congregations were regularly subjected to inspections, and some — for example in Moscow (2004) and Taganrog (2009) — were dissolved.
Courts found signs of "propaganda of the exclusivity of one religion", interference in private life and "intrusive preaching" in the actions of believers.
The ruling dissolving the Taganrog congregation mentioned a case in which one of the congregation's leaders died after refusing a blood transfusion. Such a procedure is indeed condemned in Jehovah's Witness religious literature. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled in favour of the believers, clarifying that adults have the right to independently choose their methods of treatment.
Ultimately, in April 2017, the Russian Supreme Court declared the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses and 395 of its regional divisions to be extremist organisations.
Cases against Jehovah's Witnesses are often built on covert recordings made by undercover agents and the testimony of "secret witnesses". The investigation regards any shared prayers, singing of religious hymns, or reading of the Bible over video calls as "continuation of activities" of a banned organisation. Experts engaged by the investigation frequently interpret believers' conviction in the truth of their path — a characteristic common to any religion — as a sign of "religious supremacy" and extremism. Pacifism and refusal to perform military service are treated as incitement to evade civic duty.
Jehovah's Witnesses were most actively persecuted
Persecutions are distributed unevenly across regions. The intensity of repression often depends not on the actual activity of believers, but on the initiative of local FSB directorates and Centres for Countering Extremism. In some regions, the activities of the "extremist organisation", judging by the parts of