Russian government persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Monday 3 August 2026

Before the first church bell rings, before the first commuter boards the Moscow Metro, before the first bureaucrat has opened the day’s files, the machinery of the modern Russian state has already accomplished something extraordinary. It has transformed peaceful prayer into political extremism. It has converted Bible study into a criminal conspiracy. And, most recently, it has converted the homes, meeting halls and lands of thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses into the property of the Russian Federation.

The latest judgment of a Moscow court, ordering the confiscation of 123 properties belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses across Russia and transferring them to the state, is more than another legal decision in a long campaign of repression. It is the culmination of a policy that has steadily erased the legal existence of one of the world’s most resolutely pacifist religious communities. The properties comprise dozens of buildings and extensive parcels of land, confiscated on the basis that they belonged to an organisation Russia has, since 2017, officially classified as “extremist”.

The irony is almost unbearable. Jehovah’s Witnesses are perhaps best known internationally not for violence but for precisely the opposite. They refuse military service. They decline participation in political movements. They avoid revolutionary rhetoric. Their critics have frequently accused them of withdrawing too far from public life rather than participating in it. Yet in Vladimir Putin’s Russia they have somehow become dangerous enemies of the state.

Such contradictions have become increasingly characteristic of authoritarian governments. Totalitarian systems rarely define extremism by violence. Rather, they define it by independence.

Independent churches become extremist churches. Independent newspapers become foreign agents. Independent historians become falsifiers of history. Independent lawyers become traitors. The crime is seldom what one does. It is that one owes one’s ultimate loyalty to something beyond the state.

That has always been the particular offence committed by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the eyes of dictators.

The historical parallels are uncomfortable because they are so exact.

Nazi Germany regarded Jehovah’s Witnesses as uniquely subversive because they refused military service, declined to salute Adolf Hitler and insisted that God’s Kingdom stood above the Third Reich. Thousands were imprisoned. Many were sent to concentration camps, where they wore the distinctive purple triangle identifying them as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Unlike many other prisoners, they were sometimes offered release if they would simply renounce their beliefs. Most refused.

The Soviet Union inherited remarkably similar suspicions. Stalin regarded the Witnesses as ideologically incompatible with Marxism-Leninism. In 1951, under the notorious “Operation North”, thousands were deported overnight to Siberia, their property confiscated and their communities dispersed. Their offence was not espionage or sabotage. It was that they possessed an alternative conception of authority.

One might have imagined that such episodes belonged to history.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Jehovah’s Witnesses were again permitted to register legally in Russia. Congregations flourished openly. Kingdom Halls were constructed. Religious freedom appeared—briefly—to have become one of the ordinary assumptions of post-Soviet life.

Yet authoritarianism has an astonishing capacity for historical recycling.

The legal techniques have become more sophisticated than Stalin’s midnight deportations, but their objective is strikingly similar. Instead of NKVD officers arriving with railway wagons, prosecutors arrive with anti-extremism legislation. Instead of confiscation by revolutionary decree, confiscation proceeds by judicial order. Instead of show trials accusing believers of serving international capitalism, courts accuse them of belonging to extremist organisations.

The language changes.

The logic does not.

Indeed one of the defining characteristics of contemporary authoritarianism is its determination to preserve the outward forms of legality. Modern dictatorships no longer boast about arbitrary power. They legislate it. Every confiscation carries a court seal. Every imprisonment cites statutory authority. Every act of repression is accompanied by pages of legal reasoning whose principal purpose is not justice but administrative respectability.

Law becomes theatre.

Courts become scenery.

Judges become actors reading from scripts prepared elsewhere.

This explains why the confiscation of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ assets matters beyond the immediate injustice suffered by one religious denomination.

Property is never merely property.

Independent institutions accumulate buildings because buildings become centres of independent thought. Churches create communities. Communities generate loyalties. Loyalties beyond the reach of political authority are inherently threatening to governments that seek comprehensive control.

Confiscation therefore performs two functions simultaneously. It punishes today’s believers while warning tomorrow’s.

The lesson is unmistakable: everything may be taken away.

History suggests, however, that this lesson rarely succeeds.

Jehovah’s Witnesses survived Hitler.

They survived Stalin.

They survived Siberian exile, concentration camps and decades of official hostility across the Soviet bloc. Their experience illustrates a paradox repeatedly observed throughout history: authoritarian governments are remarkably successful at confiscating buildings, but remarkably unsuccessful at confiscating convictions.

Ideas are awkward things to nationalise.

One need not share the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses to recognise the broader principle at stake. Freedom of religion exists precisely because governments cannot be trusted to determine which beliefs deserve legal protection. The moment a state acquires the authority to declare peaceful worship “extremism”, every minority faith becomes vulnerable. Today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses may become tomorrow’s Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Orthodox dissidents or secular humanists. Authoritarian definitions possess an extraordinary elasticity.

Russia’s campaign against Jehovah’s Witnesses is therefore not merely a dispute about one denomination. It represents a revealing measure of the condition of the Russian legal order itself. Courts that confiscate churches because believers refuse political conformity are no longer functioning as independent guardians of rights. They have become instruments through which political power acquires legal vocabulary.

There is, finally, something profoundly tragic in the historical repetition.

The twentieth century furnished abundant evidence that persecuting peaceful religious minorities neither strengthens governments nor secures societies. It merely demonstrates official insecurity. Confident states tolerate eccentricity. Strong governments ignore harmless dissent. Only regimes uncertain of their own legitimacy imagine that Bible study groups constitute existential threats.

The confiscated buildings may now belong to the Russian state.

The historical verdict almost certainly will not.