Rakovskiy Aleksandr

Updated: December 8, 2023
Name: Rakovskiy Aleksandr Sergeyevich
Date of Birth: August 2, 1980
Current status: convicted person
Articles of Criminal Code of Russian Federation: 282.2 (2)
Current restrictions: Suspended sentence
Sentence: punishment in the form of imprisonment for a term of 3 years with restriction of liberty for a term of 10 months; The main punishment in the form of imprisonment is considered conditional, establishing a probationary period of 3 years

Biography

Aleksandr Rakovskiy is a native of Pavlovo, a city located on the bank of the Oka river in Nizhny Novgorod region. He is a caring father of little son and daughter, IT-specialist by profession. In September 2020, Aleksandr was brought as a defendant in a criminal case for his faith in God.

Aleksandr was born in 1980. He never left his beloved home for a long time, except to study at Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod State University, where he graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics.

In his childhood, Aleksandr was involved in track and field athletics, and in his youth, he learned to play guitar and played in a music group. Even now he plays acoustic and bass guitar in his spare time, pleasing his family and friends with music.

In 2005, Aleksandr married Tatyana. She works as a secretary in a music school. In her spare time she likes to ride a bicycle and take pictures. A few years after the wedding the couple were interested in biblical teachings. From the Holy Scriptures they learned about the wonderful hope for the future and together in 2009 decided to become Christians.

In 2020, Aleksandr and Tatyana had a daughter. The difficult environment in which loving parents have to raise their children (a pandemic and unfair criminal prosecution) is a serious concern for them. Close ones are also concerned about what happened and try to help them in every way.

Case history

In July 2019, mass searches and detentions of Jehovah’s Witnesses took place in Nizhny Novgorod and the city of Pavlovo. The Federal Security Service of Russia for the Nizhny Novgorod Region initiated a criminal case on the suspicion that unidentified persons were participating in extremist activity — this is how the investigation classified the worship of believers. The security forces detained Aleksey Oreshkov and Aleksandr Vavilov and placed them in pretrial detention for 211 and 241 days, respectively. Later, the FSB added Aleksandr Rakovskiy to the same case as a defendant. In January 2021, the case went to court. Despite fabricated testimonies in the case and the fact that there were no victims, in October 2021 the court imposed a 3-year suspended sentence on the peaceful believers. In January 2022, the regional court, and in December the cassation court, left this sentence unchanged.
Timeline