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February 21, 2001
Extremists in the Fatherland
The real threat to the security of the state lies in the hate groups that seek to destroy religious minorities
The Constitution of Russia was drafted to provide tolerance in the society. It postulated the equality of citizens, including their equality on the basis of religious beliefs. However, the totalitarian past still alive in the minds of people of the post-Soviet period, the majority of Russians are not used to thinking or acting as “free” people. Further, a dissatisfaction from social and economical conditions in the country plays into the hands of those who call for strict limitations of rights and freedoms in Russia.
In the West, groups of such people who call for the severe restriction of rights of others are identified as “hate” groups, as each tends to single out a particular segment of the population—whether because of that segment’s religion, race or other factors—for extinction of their rights.
The extremist elements, tending to violence, are of especial danger to the society because they, being different from registered associations, are not controlled by law enforcement bodies yet most tend towards the commission of crimes.
Serious concern of Russian leaders over the growth of extremism is understandable. In several public statements, for example, Vladimir Putin has expressed his concern about anti-Semitism.
In an April 2000 report of the Regional Social Organization for the Support of the Freedom of Conscience on the subject of political and religious extremism, Valery Nikolsky explained, “All those [extremist] movements are united by a certainty that strict limitations of freedom of conscience and human rights, based on regimentation (discipline of daily life, similar to the military), are necessary to bring true order into the society and to make moral values dominate in the society. With the purpose of realizing such changes, they form up the semi-military groups for radical action, disseminating paranoid ideas of global conspiracy controlled by the world zionistic elite....
“They are calling upon orthodox Russians and Islamic radicals to unite in order to fight the ‘danger.’ They get as far as being a marginal concern, uniting only wild racists and anti-Semites. Regulations of administrative power and the statements of some politicians currently support their activity. Such clericalism is undoubtedly bringing about political extremism, which in turn brings about acts of violence on religious and national grounds.”
Hate Influence in Russia
Extremism on religious grounds is not limited to well-known anti-Semitism. It involves hate activity against virtually any religion other than the religion of the extremists involved.
Such anti-religious extremism gained its strongest foothold in America in the 1970s and 1980s, through an organization known as the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). Extremists involved in this group were willing to use force—including kidnapping, assault, battery and even rape—to suppress or destroy the beliefs of anyone choosing to follow a different religious path. They called this coercive activity “deprogramming,” in which they used techniques of mental conditioning and breakdown not dissimilar to that of the psychiatric methods once used on prisoners in the dungeons of the Serbsky Institute.
Justice caught up to CAN and it was put out of business. But the idea of deprogramming still can be found. It took hold in Germany and Russia.
The promoter of this business in Russia is, in fact, a United States citizen, Alexander L. Dvorkin—a Russian-born American who returned to Russia in 1990 after 20 years in the USA. He was dismissed from Moscow State University in 1994 because of his increasingly intolerant behavior towards religious minorities; he is currently with the Russian Orthodox University and acts as a spokesman against minority religions ["sects"] for the ROC.
Before CAN in America went out of business, Dvorkin publicly stated on Russian television that he was the group’s Russian representative.
In 1994 he also became the Russian counterpart for the infamous “Dialogue Centre” in Denmark. In fact, most people who know of this facility refer to it disparagingly as the “Monologue Centre” because of the well-known refusal of its director, Johannes Aagard, to engage in dialogue, while conscientiously issuing false and bigoted statements about other religions and even advocating violence towards their members.
Over the past few years, Dvorkin has increased his contacts to the extremist anti-religionists outside of Russia, continuing to put Russia in less and less favorable light when it comes to the motherland’s human rights commitments.
Dvorkin recently hosted in Moscow the leader of the extremist anti-religious movement in France, Alain Vivien, who heads the so-called “Inter-Ministerial Mission to Fight Against Sects” (“MILS”). The MILS has caused considerable damage for France’s reputation internationally.
The MILS operates a blacklist of 173 religious groups deemed “cults"—including Christian denominations, branches of Eastern faiths, and a number of other minority and newer religions—and has systematically embarked on a campaign of destruction of their rights.
As a Swedish government report of 1998 expressed it, “[I]n France the state has on the whole made common cause with the anti-cult movement,” in order to “declare a war on new religious movements.”
In June 2000, the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation (IHF), Aaron Rhodes, issued a scathing letter to Vivien, who had accused the Vienna-based IHF of being “infiltrated” by “sects” because it criticized the MILS and its agenda. Rhodes told Vivien he was “astonished” at the charge and that he was “embarrassed for you and your fellow French citizens by your recourse to methods of denunciations and insinuations that remind us of those sometimes used by totalitarian and backward regimes.” Rhodes charged that, against non-traditional religions, France has “an approach that contravenes their international obligations.”
Paranoia and the Spread of Extremism
One objective of the French anti-religious clique, like others before them including the American CAN, is to influence other nations with their paranoia about minority religions. Russia has not been invulnerable to such influence.
According to a report of the Moscow Helsinki group, state officials in a number of regions are taking the reference book of the Russian Orthodox Church, “New Religious Organizations of Destructive and Occult Character” which contains a “black list” of 83 religious and social organizations, and are using it along with tendentious documents as a reference for preparing religious “expertises.”
The extremism thus spreads. The Deputy Mayor of Rostov was quoted in an interview stating his intentions to “push all sects out of Rostov.” The Express-Chronicle earlier reported about the dismissal of a Scientologist from the bodyguard service of the Governor of Kaliningrad’s region solely due to his beliefs. In the same region, the sons of the orthodox priest beat the wife of a pastor of a Seventh-Day Adventist community, which resulted in her hospitalization. The reason given for the beating was simply that the Seventh-Day Adventists held a service in the local house of culture. Later, police workers tried to persuade the victim not to file a complaint on the beating with the prosecutor’s office; the case was turned over to the prosecutor office only after the intervention of human rights advocates.
There are people in any society who are not responsible for the consequences of their actions and statements. In the age of mass media, incautious or completely false statements and actions, especially those touching such a delicate sphere as freedom of conscience, spread by such people often bring about senseless and crude conflicts.
For example, in April when Orthodox priest Father Georgy was viciously murdered by the self-made knife of a criminal, a Roman Gavrilov from the Siberian town of Tura in the autonomous Evenkian region, “sect-expert” Alexander Dvorkin did not hesitate to call the murderer a follower of Hare Krishna. Yet, Krishnas are well known for their peaceful nature, including not even killing animals for food.
Finally, the Russian information agency Novosti reported that Lyubetsky, which is the real name of the murderer, was a military deserter.
Dvorkin seems to find his own senseless and bigoted explanation for a murder more logical than the conclusion of the investigator. Later, the investigator of Tura, Peter Plokhov, told the correspondent of Ng-Religii that “the murderer denies a connection with the center of the Societies of Krishna Consciousness in Russia” and asked the media to not make any conclusions about the murderer before a professional conclusion on his mental condition is done.
But Dvorkin and other extremists in the fatherland never miss an opportunity to tarnish other religions, regardless of the facts or truth, or whose lives they damage in the process.
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