Russia moved to seize the Jehovah's Witnesses' $31 million headquarters

On December 7, 2017, a district court near St. Petersburg took a concrete step toward handing the Jehovah's Witnesses' former Russian headquarters to the state.^[1]

The Sestroretskiy District Court annulled the contract under which the property was held, clearing the way for its seizure. It was part of the aftermath of the Supreme Court's April 2017 ruling, which had banned the organization as extremist and ordered its property forfeit to the Russian Federation.^[1]

The complex was substantial. Set in the village of Solnechnoye, on the Gulf of Finland northwest of St. Petersburg, it comprised roughly 14 buildings on about ten hectares of land — the national administrative center from which the Witnesses had run their Russian operations. Independent reporting valued the property at approximately $31.8 million.^[2]

One detail complicated the seizure: the complex was legally owned not by a Russian entity but by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, a United States nonprofit, to which the Witnesses had transferred the property in 2000.^[1][2] That foreign ownership did not save it. A St. Petersburg appeals court upheld the seizure the following May, and the headquarters that had coordinated the worship of well over 100,000 Russian believers passed toward the hands of the state that had outlawed them.^[2]

The seizure was one piece of a broader confiscation. The 2017 ban had ordered all of the liquidated organization's property forfeit, and across Russia its Kingdom Halls, offices, and assembly sites were swept into state hands. The European Court of Human Rights would later rule the whole campaign — the dissolution, the prosecutions, and the property seizures alike — unlawful, and order the assets returned or paid for. By then Russia had left the court's jurisdiction, and the order went unheeded. The complex at Solnechnoye did not come back.