THE Russian Supreme Court has banned the “International Satanism movement” after requests that it do so were officially brought forward by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Justice. The Court classified the movement as an extremist organisation, and banned all activity.
After the decision was made, the Prosecutor General’s Office said that “legal force has triumphed” in the “eternal struggle between good and evil”, the Russian independent media outlet Mediazona reported last week.
The report continued: “Followers of this cult, based on hatred and hostility towards traditional religious faiths, publicly call for the destruction of Orthodox shrines,” a statement from the Prosecutor’s press office said. “They deny social norms, justify the ideas of neo-Nazism, and commit ritual and other crimes, including those against minors.”
The actions by the state authorities come after both lawmakers at the State Duma and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow called for the banning of Satanism earlier this year. The Patriarch spoke against “Satanic sects” freely operating in Russia and recruiting young people.
“It is unacceptable that various Satanic sects forming part of the international Satanist movement are freely conducting their rituals in our country, recruiting young people, and openly registering their groups and communities on social media,” he said in January.
Members of the Russian Parliament debated satanism alongside Nazism and LGBTQ+ topics at a roundtable in the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly, which was focused on the “destruction of its traditional confessions”, in April.
The collapse of traditional values is the main target of Satanist movements, which could lead to the collapse of state civilisation, a senior Duma member, Nikolai Burlyaev, who organised the roundtable, warned.
The chairman of the State Duma’s defence committee, Andrei Kartapolov, correlated the Russian invasion of Ukraine with fighting against Satanism, which was compared to “LGBT ideology”.
The “International Satanism Movement” was banned by the same judge, Oleg Nefedov, who, in 2023, outlawed the “International LGBT Movement”. Meduza reported that, in both cases, it could not find any evidence of organisations with those names.