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70 MIN READ TIME

Bible Thumpers

Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez

It WAS JUST AFTER SUNRISE ON APRIL 10 WHEN THE DOORBELL rang at Anatoly and Alyona Vilitkevich’s apartment in Ufa, an industrial city in central Russia. Their early morning visitors: masked police officers armed with automatic weapons. “Open up!” the officers shouted. Inside, the married couple hurried to get dressed and call their lawyer. “There were 10 of them, including plainclothes investigators,” Alyona, 35, tells Newsweek. “One of them was filming everything. They said I wasn’t allowed to use the telephone.”

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