1. Alexander Ioilyevich Ogorodnikov is a former chairman of the Russian Orthodox Argentov Seminar, peace activist, political prisoner and founder of several Russian humanitarian organizations.
10 Facts About Alexander Ogorodnikov
1. 2.
Alexander Ogorodnikov was jailed during one of the Soviet Union's most aggressive crackdowns on religious activity since the Stalinist era.
3.
Alexander Ogorodnikov's father was a member of the Communist Party, while his grandmother had him secretly baptized.
4.
In 1974, as a Russian Orthodox Neophyte, Alexander Ogorodnikov founded a philosophical society with a religious basis.
5.
Alexander Ogorodnikov had been a graduate student at the University of the Urals in Sverdlovsk, and was expelled for attempting to make a film about religious life.
6.
The legal basis for Alexander Ogorodnikov's confinement was that his religious conviction was a mental disorder, due to its beginning and persistence coming after his education.
7.
Alexander Ogorodnikov was again jailed from 1978 until 1987, when he was released by Gorbachev under the Glasnost.
8.
Shortly after the fall of communism Alexander Ogorodnikov returned to Moscow in 1995 and set up the Christian Democratic Union of Russia and the Christian Mercy Society.
9.
In 1995 Alexander Ogorodnikov started what was among other things a drug treatment facility, the Island of Hope.
10.
In 1999 Alexander Ogorodnikov was interviewed following a Russian Orthodox Liturgy in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describing in detail life in a Soviet Gulag, specifically Perm 36, near the Siberian border where he had been jailed.