Biography
Ivan Grigorievich Puida was born in 1978 in the village of Kvitok (Irkutsk region) in a large believing family. Ivan has six younger brothers and a sister.
As a child, Ivan loved to read, played the accordion, dreamed of traveling. After graduating from school, he began working as a driver, lived and worked in different places: in Nizhneudinsk (Irkutsk region), Krasnoyarsk, Ulan-Ude, Khabarovsk.
In Krasnoyarsk, Ivan met a girl named Anastasia, a dentist by education. They got married in 2005. Ivan and Anastasia love to travel, play board games, spend time together. Ivan's wife and other relatives are shocked that in a civilized country, peace-loving citizens are thrown behind bars as "extremists".
Case History
After a series of searches in Magadan in May 2018, Konstantin Petrov, Yevgeniy Zyablov and Sergey Yerkin were placed in a pretrial detention center. On the same day in Khabarovsk, the home of Ivan Puyda was searched. He was arrested and taken 1,600 km to a pretrial detention center in Magadan. The believers spent 2 to 4 months behind bars, and then ended up under house arrest. In March 2019, the FSB conducted another series of searches. The number of defendants in the case has reached 13, including 6 women and elderly. The investigator deemed holding peaceful meetings for worship as organizing, participating in and financing the activity of an extremist organization. In almost 4 years of investigation, the case materials against the 13 believers has grown to 66 volumes. The case went to court in March 2022. At the hearings, it became clear that the case was based on the testimony of a secret witness – an FSB informant who made covert recordings of peaceful meetings for worship. In March 2024, the believers were given suspended sentences ranging from 3 to 7 years, and the court of appeal later upheld this verdict.