In 2012, the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot created a “performance” in a Moscow cathedral protesting Putin’s support for the Orthodox Church. Three of the women were arrested, charged with religiously-motivated hooliganism, and sentenced to two years in a “penal colony” (the modern-day gulag). One was freed on appeal, and two of them were given amnesty in December, 2013. But that wasn’t the end of it.
After this performance, the Russian government decided to get tough on such protests, and so passed a law in 2013 (see also here), whose title tells the tale: “Law Amending the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and Some Legal Acts of the Russian Federation Aimed at Countering Insult of Religious Beliefs and Feelings of Citizens, Desecration of Religious Objects and Subjects of Worship (Pilgrimage) and Sites of Religious Ceremonies.”
It is under this new anti-“blasphemy” law—signed by Putin—that, according to the Guardian, Viktor Krasnov, 38, was arrested this year for a simple expression of atheism.
The charges – which carry a maximum one-year jail sentence – centre on an internet exchange that Krasnov was involved in in 2014 on a humorous local website in his hometown of Stavropol.
“If I say that the collection of Jewish fairytales entitled the Bible is complete bullshit, that is that. At least for me,” Krasnov wrote, adding later “there is no God!”
One of the young people involved in the dispute with Krasnov then lodged a complaint against him accusing him of “offending the sentiments of Orthodox believers”.
Krasnov, whose case began last month, spent one month in a psychiatric ward last year undergoing psychiatric examinations before he was finally deemed to be sane.
This is what the Russians used to do with dissidents like Roy Medvedev: “examine” them and put them in psychiatric institutions, branding them as mentally ill for simply opposing the State. Such a neat trick! But it’s hard to believe that this old Khrushchev-era technique is still being used.
Just consider yourself lucky to be in a country (if you are in such a country!) where you can declare scripture “bullshit” without going to jail. This just goes to show that Russia, after years of nonreligious communism, has done a 180° turn, and is now defending faith as vigorously as it once defended its ideology.
And no kudos to Thug Putin, who could have put a stop to all this.
h/t: Grania
A far cry from the officially atheist Soviet.
To my knowledge Soviet was never “officially” atheist as opposed to Albania, the only state that has declared itself atheist.
Stalin’s state on-and-off relationship with the church he studied in is a matter of record.
Not quite like Albania, but kids were taught at school that God does not exist, Jesus never lived and religion is the opium of the people. People who expressed their faith were harassed and sometimes even persecuted. Ginsburg writes in her memoirs about women sent to Gulag because of their faith.
All true, but it wasn’t officially illegal. One Russian friend put it, “it was kind of like smoking pot. It was something that as a child you learned to never mention outside the home.
Okayyy…but did you not read the OP? That is obviously not the state of affairs anymore.
Not officially, but in Stalin’s era being openly religious means one way ticket to Gulag, and in 60s-70s – to psychiatric institutions.
In 80s orthodox faith was associated with growing anti-government sentiments (which is why many protest rock musicians from 80s are very religious). Young men used to go to churches and monasteries in large groups, and, when, police tried to stop them, fights and clashes were very common. A desire for religious freedom was one of the important drivers of revolution of 1991.
It all went wrong in Putin’s era, where orthodox faith became de facto state religion and form of tribal identification. Anti-west propaganda renders those who don’t comply certain social norms (the insane mixture of nationalism, stalinism and religiosity) as the enemy of the state.
Krasnov gets persecuted for exactly the same reason – he failed the tribal identification test. Religious views are secondary here.
It would be unfair not to mention that in the West it’s almost the same – those who don’t pass tribal identification test loose everything (except that prison is rarely involved).
Then how can you explain this?
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/637237443499008000
Note that the relationship between Stalin and the church was a lot more complex than the simplistic story of the regime trying to completely destroy it.
It indeed did try to do that, but during the war the policy was reversed because they needed to unite and mobilize the population to fight against the Germans.
Also note that almost all Orthodox priests were in fact recruits of the secret services (that was how the church was controlled), many still are, and even if they weren’t, there is a long tradition of the church collaborating with the state, so they would still be doing whatever is politically expedient.
There is no contradiction with what I said:
> social norms (the insane mixture of nationalism, stalinism and religiosity).
I just can’t understand how a priest can be kissing a bust of Stalin, when, as you said “in Stalin’s era being openly religious meant one way ticket to Gulag.” I guess the outright insanity you’re pointing to is the only explanation. Scary…
You are assuming that all Orthodox priests are true believers who put God above everything else.
A minority meet that description.
Evidently it’s a display of ignorance, in more than one way.
“in Stalin’s era being openly religious means one way ticket to Gulag”
Actually – when you look at the figures being openly communist didn’t help much either.
The Memorial group has published a list of the Moscow residents who were arrested and killed during the height of the Stalin Terror years. Most people on the list with identified affiliations were members of a communist party – very few were priests.
There are 11,170 names on the Memorial database. 28 were priests. 5450 were members of a communist party – often a foreign party.
https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/who-were-stalins-victims/
It has to be noted that this does not look like a case of the state repressing the person. Another individual initiated it.
Which was made possible by the state pandering to the church because it was deemed politically expedient to do so a few years ago.
BTW, a lot of the horrors of the Stalinist repressions had nothing to do with Stalin himself — the overall mood was so paranoid that it was sufficient for one of your neighbors/relatives/coworkers, who for some reason had some scores to settle to suggest in front of the right people that you weren’t sufficiently loyal to the state, and you were on the next train on your way to some Dalstroy camp the same night.
This looks like a similar abuse of the law, which in this case, as horrible as it is, is probably not necessarily intended to be applied in such a way. Most of the educated people in Russia are still atheists, and a very highly doubt Putin himself believes in God either.
Putin is very religious and a strong supporter of the Russian Orthodox church. He “saw the light” in the 1990s when his wife had serious car accident and he was nearly killed in a fire. Until then he’d been atheist like his father. He goes out of his way to display his religiosity on frequent occasions.
Putin’s Russia: the delight of the Soviet Union without the saving grace of atheism.
For whatever it is worth, I remember as a boy of 10(?), during the Joseph McCarthy era, my father, who was both religious and a businessman and shop owner, warning me to never, never fib and claim he was a communist.
The Soviets never really eradicated religion, although that was their “official” stance. That statement would be more accurate if it read:
They failed to do it indeed and it is instructive to look into the reasons why — atheism is unsustainable without critical thinking.
But instead of building critical thinking skills through the educational system, they were teaching that there is no God as a secular religion. The end result was that religion made a comeback after 1989 (aided by the political climate changing 180 degrees).
I don’t know whether that was a conscious decision (not to develop real scientific skepticism and critical thinking skills in students) or it was just the result of overall incompetence. The latter would be a sufficient explanation for what happened. But it might have been conscious — had they done so, the system would have fallen apart even quicker, because even more people would have seen through the BS that was the official propaganda.
I think that at least part of the reason is that Soviet-style government was just as ideology-driven as religion is. As I recall, most of their attempts to establish a fully controlled economy failed, but they kept trying anyway. I heard a story (it’s probably apocryphal) about a US soldier attached to the Red Army during WWII. When he complained about his rifle’s jamming problem, he was informed by his unit’s commander that “…weapons produced by a Soviet system do not jam.”
In the USSR, China and North Korea, deity worship was replaced by leader adulation. The Chinese had their Red Books instead of bibles and the Koreans have the Kims and Juche.
I don’t know whether that story is apocryphal, but there have been real examples of such situations in the USSR that are well known, especially in relation to farming.
There were a whole lot of jokes at the time within the country about how communism didn’t work that you could be arrested for telling. This website has a few of them: http://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
I told my Russian friends that Stalin replaced Jesus with Lenin. Everyone agreed wholeheartedly.
Critical thinking skills are an anathema to all ideologies.
Lots of analogies between Marx and religion. Of course he was influenced by Hegel, whose end of history stuff and metaphysics was just utterly off the planet (not to mention the odiousness of the cosmologically significant military destiny of the Prussian state).
Steven Pinker points out
Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy pp 360-361) notes the centrality in the Jewish and Christian traditions of struggle against oppression or unbelief, featuring two dichotomized opponents, and salvation by a Messiah. He argues that this pattern is clear in Marx, whose work can be psychologically interpreted in the following Jewish and Christian terms:
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming= The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth
(Extract from History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell p 361) Pinker adds that the end of history thesis of Marxism and National Socialism promises salvation down the ages to all who convert and continue faithful believers, in the manner of Christianity or Islam, (though not quite eternal heaven or hell).
PS but Communism brooked no competition with older (ultimately more potent) brands of belief involving the supernatural. Communism promised effectively infinite returns for current suffering (end of history, following dialectical materialism). It failed so back to the other revelation.
Once Communism appeared to have failed and no longer guaranteed superpower status for Russia, Orthodox Christianity came into the open and whilst I think a lot of Russians are still atheist, a lot are openly devout. Back in the 90s and early naughties the Orthodox Church also won lots of legal protections against the prosyltising of other religions, especially other Christian faiths.
Well, I imagine that in the early naughties the faithful felt things were going too far and they certainly didn’t want to get into the late naughties…, that might mean reincarnations of Dorian Gray and le Comte de Maldoror…
…. my typo **noughties** They wanted to head of ever naughtier noughties
I suspect that almost any ideology could be mapped onto another, so I’m not impressed that Russell was able to do that with Christianity and Marxism.
Non-religious communism? The parallels between Russian/Chinese/North Korean communism are too numerous to count, and too obvious to mention.
What I meant was that communism frowned on the supernatural brands of religion.
Terrifying.
I once travelled through Russia and some former USSR countries (circa 1993-5), and didn’t encounter much of this new Putin-headed authority to the state, not in terms of obedience and the oliteration of freedom now so prevalent.
I’d hate to be in Russia now. Putin has ruined a country already in ruins but even worse is the clampdown on freedom of expression. It’s utterly fucking wrong and the citizens of Russia are screwed in so many ways, not just financially.
Scray scary times. And the West wants nothing to do with it, partly why Putin does as he pleases.
You are very wrong about that — there is a reason why Putin’s ratings are so high, and it is that the country had basically completely fallen apart in the 90s and he is in large part responsible for putting it back together after that. Life in Russia is objectively much much better today than it was 20 years ago.
The average Russian does not care much about free speech and human rights, because he doesn’t know what that is, having lived under a totalitarian Tsarist regime for centuries and then under an even more totalitarian communist regime for another century. These issues are only a concern for the educated elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the diaspora. Which also happen to be the only people you hear from. But outside of those bubbles it is a very different situation, and it is the rest of the country that Putin gets his support from.
A communist leader of another former Eastern bloc country once said something that loosely translates like “The common man understands freedom as having enough to eat and drink”. And he was right.
Interesting.
That ties into the fact many rural citizens I met would proclaim that life was far superior under Stalin and they lamented the state of the country(s) due to the fact nobody had jobs and there was rarely food on the shelves.
You’re right. When Putin came to power he did improve things a lot for the people of Russia.
Just in the last few months though there seems to have been a slight shift. Economic conditions are bad and steadily worsening. Pensions and other social benefits are being cut and Putin’s popularity is reducing as a result.
The problem is that the improvements Putin made were done with oil money, but systems etc themselves were not improved. Now the money is running out because of low oil prices and the increasing amount Putin is spending on the military. That, coupled with the increasing level of sanctions, is taking its toll on Putin’s popularity,
Putin was definitely an improvement on kleptocrat drunkard Yeltsin – and the West stupidly discouraged the gradualism of Gorbachev and encouraged Yeltsin’s rush to full capitalism which just fuelled kleptocracy, economic ruin and dictatorship whilst utterly discrediting democracy in the eyes of Russians. However the economy is too unidimensionally dependent on oil and the Ukraine venture has further tied Russia down.
Which is probably part of the reason he got involved in Syria. Anything to divide the West and make Russia appear great and thereby keep himself in power
Yes!
And that’s precisely what happened in the 90s, from what I remember reading. The SU was a prison, but if people are starving outside the prison, they might be tempted to go back inside where they will at least have a scrap of bread. Mario Bunge told me that prices of the public transit in Moscow went from something like half a hour’s wage of a worker to more than a half a day’s salary over night. I am still amazed that no “loose nukes” happened – there was stuff I seem to remember Vic Stenger bringing up from APS (late 1990s) to help the (then) starving second-tier ex-Soviet physicists in part for this reason.
Not only in the USSR.
It is a general patter throughout history. For example, the feudal system of medieval Europe did not develop entirely in a top-down way, many people became serfs voluntarily because they were forced by the circumstances and that was the better alternative. The same has happened in analogous situations elsewhere.
This is very easy to forget in a culture that cherishes democracy and prides itself based on its democratic tradition while not knowing what it is to go to bed hungry for many generations.
That sort of living experience really skews people’s perspective of things.
But in the real world it is much preferable to be a well-fed slave than to be free and starving.
Whatever Putin’s motives for this defense of religion, it is sure to be coming after careful assessment of the people’s mood and the popularity of the religious comeback in Russia. Kind of like the politicians here in America. God bless the comrade.
American politicians listen to public opinion, or at least pretend to. Putin commands this opinion.
I think that it is impossible to know what proportion of Russians really support Putin (or any other dictator). When those in opposition get imprisoned or shot, any approval rating is expected to be full of false positives.
These supposed new found Christians really just see this as a wonderful new tool to oppress the populace. Funny how all the old guard of the kgb have suddenly found Christ. The assholes could give a fuck about christ as much as me.
Not oppress, control.
As I said above, I highly doubt Putin himself is religious, given his background.
But he has gone back to religion as a necessary tool for unifying the country. Which is a very dangerous game, but he decided to play it. We will see how it will turn out in the end.
Agree with both of you. Putin is trying to resurrect not the Soviet Union but the Russian Empire. And Orthodox Christianity was an integral part of the Empire. Actually, unlike the Catholic church that has for centuries struggled to rule the society, the Orthodox church has from the beginning, or almost, been a servant to the rulers. There is something very wrong in this. All traditionally Orthodox countries lag behind otherwise similar countries. The best one is Greece!
The church is very authoritarian
18 January Article in the Independent – Head of Russian orthodox church says rise of ISIS reaction to rise of godless secularism and acceptance of homosexuality.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/head-of-russian-orthodox-church-blames-the-rise-of-isis-on-the-godless-worlds-acceptance-of-a6818826.html
This church is criminally stupid, more than most other churches. It is also authoritarian, if you mean that it stands for oppression of the weak. However, it is not authoritarian in the sense of “struggling for dominance”. The heads of the church are ready to kiss Putin’s hands, or feet, or any other body part.
Two Pussy Riot members were sentenced to two years in jail, and they were released by amnesty in 2013.
Yes, you’re right; I’ve corrected this above. Thank you.
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
Putin is a god loving thug, arguably the worst kind. I found this from The Hollowverse:
“It wasn’t until the double-whammy of 1) his wife’s car accident in 1993 and 2) a life-threatening house fire in 1996 that Putin began questioning his atheism.”
how the hell does that make one question atheism. I’ll answer that with, since he thinks he so special only evil could bring this upon one so special as me.
“During a vulnerable moment before Putin departed for a diplomatic trip to Israel, his mother gave him a baptismal cross. He said of the occasion:
I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”
Mummies Boy! Pathetic!
“Now, Putin has become a bit of a zealot. He seems to want to reestablish a pre-Soviet combination of church and state, saying:
First and foremost we should be governed by common sense. But common sense should be based on moral principles first. And it is not possible today to have morality separated from religious values.”
and now a delusional and dangerous mummies boy.
‘Mummies boy’. Good one!
It seems that the words “Russia” and “POutin” elicit a Pavlovian response from many Americans and all rationality flies out the window.
Sure this is a bad law but we should not assume, or claim, a prosecution as a fact when it hasn’t happened. A Russian political commentator has said about this:
“This case obviously never should have made it to court, and will of course be dismissed. But it is nonetheless an embarrassment that it made it this far.”
Sergey Brun from the Museum of Russian Icons commented:
“It’s not about the fight between religion and the freedom of speech, or vice versa. We rather see an initiative, brokered by people who identify with a certain religious movement, and their attempt to import a verbal tussle, whether it’s well reasoned or not, from a social media blog to a court issue. It’s an attempt to shut up your opponent on the grounds that he or she insults your feelings. The problem is, if a court rules out that these claims are in fact legitimate, we risk witnessing not just clashes between agnostics and some traditional or non-traditional schools, we’ll see, for example, different branches of the Orthodox religion arguing with each other in court. Take the recent meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba – remember what the reaction was on social media platforms. Some saw it as an important step towards unity, others wrote angry comments.
“If I enter a church, mosque, a synagogue, or simply a club where a conference of agnostics takes place and start screaming against them or insulting them, that is a problem, that’s an attempt to insult someone,” Brun said. “But such spheres as social media, open conferences, platforms for communication between people, have to have quite a wide range of liberties.”
I suspect Mark Slebioda may be correct – but if the case is dismissed will that even be reported in our media?
I suspect not and people will be left with an assumption of a prosecution to further feed their prejudices.
And in the unquestioning anti-Russian mind Putin will once again be blamed for something that hasn’t even happened.
Krasbov was *arrested* for a conversation, on the grounds of a law Putin signed instead of bounce, and that somehow “hasn’t even happened”!?
Scary. Russian propaganda is inhumane through and through.
The Pussy Riot singers did serve 2-yr prison terms for a song, didn’t they? Mr. Krasnov has already been locked for a month in a psychiatric hospital (the “psihushka”, as it was called in the Brezhnev era).
Your stance has little ground, and you are not helping it by repeatedly insulting the intelligence of your opponents.
And I am a middle-aged Eastern European, for the record.
I have no sympathy for the Pussy Riot women – and I suspect most Russians don’t either. But I have pointed out that I think the law is a bad one (and it is worrying that the Orthodox has so much political power). I agree this person should not have been subjected to a psychological investigation purely for an equivalent of a facebook comment.
My “stance” is that the charges against Krasnov should be dropped and I suspect they will most likely be thrown out of court. Included in my “stance” is that the Russian Federation needs to improve their legal system to prevent these sort of things occurring.
You may see “little ground” for that stance – but I think it is logical – and probably has the support of many, if not most, Russians.
But my real point is that even if and when this charge is dropped or thrown out the unthinking consumer of our media will persist in believing that someone has actually been through the legal process and jailed.
Because of the Pavlovian responses we are conditioned with in our reactions to the words “Russia” and “Putin.”
A similar incident occurred recently when people gained the impression that the Russian parliament had passed a law banning expression of homosexual intimacy. And I saw a similar comment -“that thug Putin is a tyrant.” Yet the facts were a bill had been brought to the parliament by 2 members of the opposition it was being roundly condemned by a committee of the parliament and (as far as I know) certainly had not been passed into law.
Yet Putin got the blame for something that never happened!
“I have no sympathy for the Pussy Riot women – and I suspect most Russians don’t either.”
Why did you write this? Not a rhetorical question.
“My “stance” is that the charges against Krasnov should be dropped…”
Your stance, as I understood it from your comment, is that those Americans (and presumably other nationals) who find Putin a dictator and Russia a rogue state are brainwashed non-thinking organisms operating only by Pavlovian reflexes.
“But my real point is that even if and when this charge is dropped or thrown out the unthinking consumer of our media will persist in believing that someone has actually been through the legal process and jailed.”
Mr. Krasnov was jailed already, in a psychiatric hospital, for a month. If I am locked up for a month in a psychiatric hospital because I’ve written on the Web that God does not exist, I won’t call this “psychological investigation”, I will call this imprisonment.
Moreover, if and when the charge against Krasnov is dropped, I will be convinced, together with many Russians, that this has happened only because of pressure by domestic and international public opinion, as in the case of Svetlana Davydova. Unfortunately, this mechanism doesn’t work every time. Oleg Sentsov and his co-defendants are still in prison with no prospects of release.
Sorry – the comment that the case would be rejected was made by Mark Sleboda.
Who put’im in charge!?
“The vast majority of Russians would vote for Vladimir Putin if he chose to run for president for a fourth time—a record high rating since his return to power in 2012, Russian state pollster WCIOM reports.
According to a survey of 1,600 Russians, conducted in January but published on Thursday, 74 percent of Russians would back Putin for a fourth term. The figure is not only higher than in previous such polls by WCIOM but is also higher than the percentage of votes he has received in any election to date.”
“Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Putin has enjoyed a huge spike in popularity.”
[ http://europe.newsweek.com/putin-backed-74-percent-majority-voters-fourth-term-poll-433003?rm=eu ]
Ah, if only I’d spent a few seconds fewer checking my spelling and punctuation.
A nice piece of evidence supporting my contentions below.
Errrr, why is it hard to believe? Just because the people of the Russian Federation had a brief exposure to a slightly more free system, and in the process got seriously, repeatedly burned by people exploiting the new freedom to steal public assets openly, to run Pozni scams under the description of “Bank,” and such like examples of unbridled capitalism. And then they voted for authoritarianism … and got an authoritarian. Who is setting up a new, more repressive regime, and doing it competently and efficiently.
There is this belief that once exposed to the delights of democracy, people will universally love it, and everything will be sweetness and bunnies for ever after. Around here, people should be used to seeing the concept of a belief and saying “show me the evidence that supports your belief”. So, where is the evidence?
I note that after the Greek experiments with democracy in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, no one seriously tried it again until about 930 CE. After that, it wasn’t until several generations after the institutionalisation of dissent represented by the Protestant and English Reformations, that a sufficient proportion of the population were used to disagreeing with “the authorities” and surviving the experience, that concepts like a “loyal opposition” could also take root (ask yourself, in the Classical Greek democracies, what was the life expectancy of a slave who demanded their right to vote? Or a woman?) . And after that, an approach for democracy. With Trump as it’s claimant to “crowning glory”, I can see that the idea has settled in really well.
This doesn’t bode well for the “fledgling democracies” of the Middle East. And post-colonial Africa. South America seems to be doing surprisingly well. Asia … If I was being ridiculously optimistic, I might go as far as “patchy”.
Democracy is an interesting idea. I wonder if it’ll last.
More repressive?
Surely you are aware of what was going on in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s?
Even the Tsars were not better in terms of freedoms than the current system, as bad as it is.
More repressive and controlling than the mid-90s. 1990s, not 1890s. But I’m sure Putin will get to 1890s levels of control and repression sooner rather than later.
Which country tried democracy about 930 CE?
If I’m not mistaken, that was the year Iceland instituted the Alþing, the first parliamentary government.
However, it was more akin to a republic, since each district goði represented the people who lived in his district. The relationship between the goði and his people was closer to feudalism than democracy.
Iceland
Just a little off course but the subject of the Soviets reminded me – today in the paper a picture of perhaps a squadron of Russian fighters over in Syria. I believe the picture was to show the planes all on the ground while a cease fire was going on for some. Why it got my attention was, all these war planes, in a war zone certainly, all lined up nice and neat, wing to wing. Kind of a Pearl Harbor moment.
Sadly authoritarianism in Russia has deep roots and religion is useful to that. The Tzar actually subordinated the church to his/her power but power was extraordinarily centralised and dictatorial for the Romanovs, and of course before.
The Independent Reported on 18 January this year that the head of the Russian Orthodox church thinks movements like Isis are a reaction to the rise of secularism, and particularly acceptance of homosexuality. In an interview published on the church’s official website Patriarch Kirill claimed he was not surprised that some Muslims are flocking to Isis’ quasi-religious state as a way of escaping the “godless civilization” that celebrates events such as Gay Pride.
Kiril said because the “godless civilization is reaching maturity”, it should come as no surprise that those who are opposed to liberal, secular ideas end up joining terror organisations.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/head-of-russian-orthodox-church-blames-the-rise-of-isis-on-the-godless-worlds-acceptance-of-a6818826.html
This is just the Russian version of political correctness. “Heresy”, “Apostasy” and “Racist/Sexist/Homophobic” are all just different names for the same concept. They are all a kind of social impurity that must be stamped out.
Not to downplay Putin’s authoritarian and repressive policies, but… in the list of incarceration rates per capita the US is in 2nd place and Russia “only” in 12th (wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate). All probably due to the religion called the “war on drugs”. Land of the free indeed.
A petition in defense of Krasnov was sent on Feb. 29 to Novaya gazeta, one of the few Russian media opposing government control. It is signed by 65 atheists, all from Stavropol, Krasnov’s hometown. They write:
“…Now, everybody has rushed to protect feelings of believers. What about the feelings of atheists? We are also living humans, it is unpleasant for us when “Orthodox activists” under some phony justification disrupt performances and concerts that are inconvenient for them. We do not break into their churches, do not disturb their prayers and, most importantly, do not complain to the authorities demanding action against them…”
Then the authors state that they protest only against the Orthodox “activists”, not against all Orthodox Christians, some of whom defend the freedom of their opponents and speak out against injustice.
The letter ends with the hope that “justice will prevail, Victor Krasnov will be acquitted and there will be one less occasion for religious enmity in our multinational, multi-denominational country!”
Source in Russian: http://www.novayagazeta.ru/letters/452.html