For Immediate Release
December 15, 1999
(Russian)

'People with convictions': Exiles to Siberia remembered and honored

CHITA, SIBERIA—Jehovah's Witnesses exiled to Siberia were people of conviction who had committed no crimes, an official of the Chitinsk district said today.

"Jehovah's Witnesses are people with convictions and are not afraid to express them, in spite of the consequences that they could be forced to endure," said Alexander Litsus, spokesperson for the Administration of the Chitinsk district, during a conference commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the exile of Jehovah's Witnesses to Chita, Siberia.

In 1949, some 500 of Jehovah's Witnesses from the republics of the former Soviet Union were deported to the Chitinsk district. "What occurred in the 1940s and 1950s with Jehovah's Witnesses was a reflection of politics conducted in that time in the U.S.S.R.," Litsus told the audience of former exiles, city officials and journalists. "There were no crimes to speak of. It could be called distinct genocide."

Jehovah's Witnesses were protectors of human rights, who suffered to confirm certain principles, Litsus said. "Thinking about Jehovah's Witnesses, the parallel case of Andrey Sakharov comes to mind," he said. "He is considered to be the nation's conscience in our time."

Gennadii Zsherebtsov, a legal expert with the Administration of the Chitinsk district, said 42 of the 44 requests for rehabilitation that he has received were for Jehovah's Witnesses. Even Witnesses who were too young to serve in the military received prison sentences for their conscientious objection.

Vasilii Kalin, coordinator of the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia and himself a former exile, explained that these Christians were persecuted because they did not get involved in politics, and because, for them, the authority of the Bible was higher than State ideology, so they could not obey Stalin's dictatorship when it conflicted with the Bible.

"Jehovah's Witnesses could have avoided the deportation if they had only given up their religious beliefs," Kalin said. "Nevertheless, they practically deliberately agreed to hard labor, sickness, and death, all for the sake of keeping their religious convictions."

The commemoration has lessons for today, Kalin said. "We must never allow a return to the past. The responsibility now lies on us, public officials, historians, and journalists."

Jehovah's Witnesses were legally registered as a religion in Russia in 1991 and were reregistered in April 1999. While Jehovah's Witnesses have gained the respect of officials in Siberia, members of this faith continue to suffer harassment in other parts of Russia, most notably in Moscow. Jehovah's Witnesses have been present in Russia for more than a century.

Contact: Aleksei Nazarychev, telephone: 7-812-434-3850 (St. Petersburg)

Profiles of former exiles