Is it safe to be against Putin’s war if you are a Russian in Kazakhstan?

A majority of the ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan appear to support Putin’s war on Ukraine, even if not publicly. And they try to silence those few among them who vocally oppose it.

Last month police opened an investigation against one of the most outspoken and ‘visible’ critics of Putin’s war on Ukraine, Hieromonach Iakov Vorontzov, or Father Iakov.

After his calls on Kazakhstan to leave all Russia-led military and economic organisations and ban all Kremlin-controlled public or religious organisations, Kazakhstan’s Orthodox Church, which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church, suspended him from service.

The police probe on suspicion of stirring ethnic discord is based on a complaint by Father Iakov’s former church colleagues.

It concerns his Facebook post from 2 August in which he described the Russian church as “the most repulsive of all the religions on the earth”. He also said that everything Russian “drove him crazy”.

Father Iakov told Exclusive.kz that when questioned by the police over his post, he asked: “How come? It is not 1937, when thanks to informants the whole country was turned into one big labour camp.”

He agreed that his post was “emotional, but is freedom of expression banned in our country?”

Father Iakov said that following the Russian aggression against Ukraine he had tried to convince members of the Kazakh Orthodox Church to issue a collective statement “calling for peace”.

“I found no support. On the contrary, I was warned that if I did not give up my idea, I would pay for it,” he said.

Father Iakov said that a majority of the members of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan “support the aggressor”.

“They say ‘we are for peace’, which means Russia’s certain victory. These people take it as gospel that all Ukrainians are ‘Nazis’, and Putin is almost like a prophet, who is saving the world from Satanists.”

Father Iakov said his reading Gospels in Kazakh in spring this year triggered a further backlash — “complaints and lashing out” at him — from the Russian community.

“They were saying that we [ethnic Russians] are already being discriminated, facing problems because of having to learn Kazakh, and on top of that they [Kazakhs] are now interfering with our Church.”

Father Iakov said he had to change his phone number because of “constant threats”. But cannot escape “cyberbullying”.

“Russian people write to me nasty things, publicly and privately. They wish me jail, death at the hands of my ‘nazi’ friends … There have been some real threats, like physical punishment.”

However, he said some Orthodox Christians in Kazakhstan have stopped attending church services “because Russian priests bless missiles and tanks that kill people”.

“Many understand that the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyayev) is a war criminal,” Father Iakov said.

Another anti-war Russian Galina Akkuzova has described the past year of her life as “hell”.

The troubles followed her media interview in which she said that after the start of the bloodshed in Ukraine many Russians were ashamed of being Russian.

Akkuzova faced intense harassment from her neighbour, who is ethnic Russian, who wrote a string of false reports to authorities accusing her of everything from running a drug lab and a brothel, to planning a government overthrow. 

“The cherry on the cake was [the accusation] that I am in 24-hour contact with the Ukrainian army,” she said.

The harassment stopped only after Akkuzova had taken the neighbour to court.

By Merey Sugirbayeva

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