Turning A Quad Into A Buggy

Sixty years after the mass forced deportations to Siberia of Jehovah's Witnesses

Information release
12 April 2011

Sankt-Petersburg. On the basis of a secret order for the Council of Ministers of the USSR in the first week of April 1951 thousands of men, women and children from the western republics of the USSR were sent to Siberia - "the eternal settlement ". The only reason such mass expulsion became a religion those Soviet citizens: they were Jehovah's Witnesses, and this conflicted with the ideology of the state in that time.


Five thousand families of Jehovah's Witnesses were placed in cramped huts, some with their children planted directly in the taiga, where they were forced to dig in frozen ground dugouts. Banished for many years endured cold, poverty, hunger, exhaustive work. Illegal Bible study and preaching to the late 1980's, many were sentenced to prison camps. In his book, Prof. NS Gordijenko described, which led to the efforts of the perpetrators: "As a result, they achieved the opposite of the expected results: they wanted to weaken the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union, and in fact strengthened it. settle in new places , where the confession no one had heard that Jehovah's Witnesses "infects" his faith and constancy of its citizens. "


In the early 90's exiled Witnesses Jehovah's officially restored the good name and no longer consider them "enemies of the nation." Recently, on the occasion of Memorial Day of victims of political repression, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sternly condemned political persecution from the Soviet era, stating that "there is no excuse for repression. " However, in February 2010, Jehovah's Witnesses were forced to refer to countrymen with a special treaty: "Does history may repeat itself? Question to the Russians " . Why? authorities of the state in all of Russia began a coordinated campaign to suppress our rights and liberties - said Vasily Kalin, chairman of the Regulatory Committee of the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia .- The principal instrument of repression, this time it is unreasonable to apply the provisions of law antyekstremistycznego. We pray that the Russian authorities have not recurred the tragic mistakes of the past and understand that Jehovah's Witnesses not only affect the peace, but they give a beautiful example of respect and kindness to those who believe and think differently. "


source: ; http://www.jw-russia.org/news/stpetersburg/release20110412_u.htm
translation: Rikardo