Keeping the Faith

In the midst of such a dizzying array of possible outcomes, Okhotin said the night before his court date that he took some solace in what appeared to have been an end to the most outright alleged improprieties in his case—the repeated bribe solicitations which he said filled the first weeks of his case.

“I think in part because of publicity they must have implemented some sort of internal controls, which is really good,” he said.

And despite the possible scenarios which filled his head, Okhotin said he had more than his own immediate fate on his mind on Tuesday night. He stressed that no matter the outcome of the trial, he would still not be satisfied until the money he brought overseas this spring finally reached its intended recipients—the destitute evangelical Protestant congregations which dot the Russian landscape.

“There’s also still the unanswered question which no one here wants to talk about, and that deals with the religious part of the case,” he said. “Will the funds ever get to the evangelicals? People here just don’t want the money to get ever to the Protestants.”

Okhotin’s devout Baptist faith has been a defining force in his protracted legal battle. He has said that his father, Vladimir Okhotin, was detained by Soviet authorities for several years in the 1980s for no crime but his activist Protestantism—and Andrew Okhotin and his supporters have said they have no choice but to wonder if lingering contempt for Protestants on the part of the Orthodox authorities is behind his ordeal this year.

“The question is what is pushing them to through the book at him,” Sonnenberg said. “Maybe Andrew stepped on very corrupt toes. Maybe people are just covering their own tails.”

Okhotin said that he thought his trial might have been scheduled in advance for Wednesday because Aug. 13 marked the forty-second anniversary of the start of an underground church movement.

Among many other sources, perhaps the greatest pillar of support for Okhotin since March has been the Baptist community, which has organized numerous prayer vigils and letter-writing campaigns on his behalf.

Susan Clark, who has been active in such activities, said that she contacted “a leader of the large Mennonite community in Paraguay” to pray for Okhotin as soon as she heard of his trial’s start this week.

“They are descendants of the ones who emigrated out of Russia in the 1930s because of intense persecution...and I thought they could relate to what Andrew is going through right now,” she wrote in an e-mail. “They will not take what is happening to Andrew lightly. Their memories of the persecution in Russia have not died.”

And Christel N. Clark—Susan Clark’s daughter and a friend of the Okhotin family, who was present in Moscow for the trial—said she thought thousands of Baptists the world over were praying for Okhotin.

“It’s quite a shock that they could do this to a humanitarian over a technicality,” she said.

A profound faith colored Okhotin’s behavior immediately surrounding his trial Wednesday. Before and after the hearing, he gathered in the hall with his mother, brother and friends for a short prayer. The family was joined by a Baptist minister, Peter Peters, who Okhotin said was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for 11 years because of his religious beliefs.

On the way to the courthouse on Wednesday morning, Peters made a more mundane query—whether he’d packed a bag in case he were convicted that day.