Georgian Jailed 5 Days For Defacing Church Icon With Stalin's Image

TBILISI -- A court in the Georgian capital on February 2 sentenced activist Nata Peradze to five days of detention after she was found guilty of defacing an image of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on an icon at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi.

Peradze, accused of splattering blue paint on the icon on display at the church as an act of protest, did not attend the court hearing.

After she posted a video online of her actions last month, an angry mob of right-wing protesters swarmed her Tbilisi home, threatening to "carry out what the state and law failed to."

Police prevented a possible attack on Peradze, who later told RFE/RL that she was the person who threw the paint on the icon, though the panel where Stalin was depicted was unharmed.

The icon featured a painting of St. Matrona of Moscow on its main panel, which is surrounded by scenes of her life on smaller panels, including one showing Stalin, an avowed atheist, standing next to the mystic and saint of the Russian Orthodox Church who died in 1952.

David Tarkhan-Mouravi, leader of the right-wing populist Alliance of Patriots of Georgia -- who donated the icon to the church -- told RFE/RL on January 17 that it will be repainted to remove Stalin's image and replaced with a picture of a woman cured of cancer.

Peradze and the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association, which is representing her, confirmed information on the imposition of the five-day sentence. The Interior Ministry initiated proceedings under a petty hooliganism article, an administrative offense.

A group of Georgian civil society organizations assailed the "severity" of Peradze's sentence, saying it wasn't proportionate to a nonviolent administrative offense.

"According to the Code of Administrative Offenses, detention is used only in exceptional cases. Punishing with such severity and duration for a nonviolent [action against] placement of Stalin's image in Trinity Cathedral violates the standards of proportionality established by the European Court of Human Rights," the group said in a joint statement.

Giorgi Kandelaki, a former lawmaker and now part of the Soviet Past Laboratory group, condemned the court's action, posting on social media that the "Georgian government regards condemnation of Stalin as 'attack on the church' but says nothing negative about Stalin...while openly pro-Russian extremists who commit violence on a regular basis enjoy complete impunity."

Photos of the icon that started circulating on the Internet in early January sparked outrage among many Georgians, who condemned the appearance of the image in one of Georgia's main churches of a Soviet dictator who brutally oppressed religious clerics and religion in general while in power.

Despite massive campaigns of political killings and the destruction of churches during his rule from 1924 until his death in 1953, Stalin, who was an ethnic Georgian, is still viewed with pride by many Georgians. Several public monuments to the communist dictator remain standing across the former Soviet republic.