Russia Bans Jehovah's Witnesses As Extremist

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 20 April 2017 Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses constituted an "extremist" organisation, a designation that carried the force of outright prohibition. The ruling liquidated the movement's Saint Petersburg headquarters along with all 395 of its local religious organisations spread across the country, and ordered their property seized by the state.

The ban was unprecedented in its own right: no other registered national centralised religious organisation had ever received an extremist designation inside Russia before that ruling. It reversed the legal standing Jehovah's Witnesses had held since 1991, when the Soviet collapse had ended four decades of earlier suppression and allowed the movement to organise openly for the first time in generations.

What the 2017 ban changed for the movement's presence in Russia was the return, in a single court ruling, of a status it had spent twenty six years believing settled. Congregations that had rebuilt themselves in the open after the Soviet Union's collapse found their entire national structure dissolved and their property confiscated at once, closing off the same legal ground that legalisation had opened to them barely a generation earlier.