A man in Yekaterinburg has just been placed under arrest for two months for “catching Pokémon in a church.” You can read the live coverage of the hearing here. (As an aside, this is such a sign of the times: a major gaming website, Kanobu, is running a Mediazona-style live blog of the arrest hearing.)
This is real, and it’s not a joke. Two months in an actual pre-trial detention cell, with the prospect of a two- or three-year prison sentence.
I have Pokémon Go on my phone too, and I play it sometimes, so I know for a fact: Pokémon do not exist. The game generates that image on your phone based on your location and your in-game progress. Catching a Pokémon is no different from playing one of those balloon-popping games. The presence or absence of a Pokémon in the game has absolutely nothing to do with a church, faith, God, the ritual structures around it, and so on.
So the arrested man, Ruslan Sokolovsky (I don’t even know what to call him — a teenager? a student? judging by the photos, just a very young man), simply took out his phone and tapped the screen with his finger. In other words, he interfered with believers performing their rites far less than these people did:
Or especially these ones, covered in pagan patterns:
Taking photographs in church, selfies in church, is rude behavior, and it really does disturb worshippers. Nevertheless, unfortunately, it is very common.
But sending text messages or playing Pokémon doesn’t bother anyone at all. At any service, you’ll see a dozen people who from time to time pull out their phones and poke at them with a finger. That’s not great either, but there’s nothing to be done about it — that’s just how the modern world works. At least people seem to talk on the phone out loud in churches less often now.
Today’s arrest, besides being a monstrous crime against justice, will obviously turn into a trial even bigger than Pussy Riot, will receive enormous media coverage, and will do great harm to the Orthodox Church.
I believe that the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Kirill personally should demand Sokolovsky’s immediate release, including because our faith itself requires it: Pokémon do not exist, and God does not need to be protected from them. Otherwise, it turns out that what we have in our churches is not worship but magical rites, and that we must protect our idols from alien ones — Pokémon.
Now for the secular side of the story:
The police officers who opened the case, the prosecutor, and the judge who ordered the arrest are unquestionably criminals. They are the ones who should be put under arrest, and I hope that happens someday.
These are the most harmful and dangerous kind of people. They abuse their power and throw people in prison simply for the thrill of it, because they can.
And all of this is accompanied by monstrous hypocrisy.
Take note of the words of Gorelykh, the head of the regional police press service:
What a hypocritical, lying bastard, huh?
The creep was born in 1966, so if he wasn’t a member of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), he was definitely in the Komsomol (the Soviet youth communist organization). He would have taken exams in scientific atheism and Marxist-Leninist theory.
He swore an oath to President Yeltsin, who, for God’s sake, had the Ipatiev House — where the imperial family was executed — demolished precisely so it would not become a place of pilgrimage.
I’m sure he stood there with a solemn mug at the recent opening of the Yeltsin Center and didn’t squeal there at all about “red obscurantist fanatics.” Of course not — they would have cut him down to size there in no time, but here he suddenly feels brave.
I do not doubt for a second that in the entire leadership of the Sverdlovsk Region police or the regional court, there is not a single person who was not a member of the CPSU — which means an official communist atheist who supported both the demolition of churches and the execution of the imperial family.
And now they are teaching us not only how to love our Motherland, but also how to believe in God.
P.S. It turns out Sokolovsky is 22 years old and lives alone with his disabled mother. In other words, they have literally deprived a disabled woman of her breadwinner.