ABSTRACT
Is Russia reverting to Soviet religious policy? The uncanny similarity between the Medvedev- and Andropov-era campaigns against the Jehovah's Witnesses suggests so. But their representative Aleksei Nazarychev's answer to this question — a quotation popularly attributed to Marx — highlights a crucial qualitative distinction in the new situation: ‘History happens twice — first as tragedy, second as farce.’ 1 Under Medvedev, the relatively disjointed pursuit of Jehovah's Witnesses indeed lacks the relentlessness of the Soviet machine. That would at least require a government network charged with enforcing a common line on religion — a successor organ to the USSR's Council for Religious Affairs, whose brief was to control religious life.
