Biography
Yevgeniy Abramov was born in 1976 in Osinniki, a small town in the south of the Kemerovo Region. He has two sisters, one older and one younger. Their father, who was a miner, and their mother, who was a midwife, are now retired.
Yevgeniy is a qualified biology teacher. He developed a love for this science in childhood: his family lived in the countryside, so he spent a lot of time growing plants and taking care of livestock. After school, he entered the Siberian State Medical University and then moved to the Tomsk State Pedagogical University. During his student years, he began to study the Bible with Jehovah's Witnesses and was baptized in 1996.
After graduation, Yevgeniy got a job at a secondary school as a teacher of biology and life safety. Later, he changed his line of work — he worked at a construction site until his arrest — but he did not lose his love for nature: he still enjoyed gardening and beekeeping for some time. "I was always more fascinated by the process of growing fruits and observing plants rather than the final product," he said.
This is not the first time Yevgeniy has defended his peaceful beliefs: having reached military age, he faced repeated pressure from the staff of the military registration and enlistment office, who were forcing him to do military service. "There were even instances when I was forcibly taken to the recruiting station at gunpoint," the believer recalls. "But I always cited the Constitution and demanded alternative service. The military commissar was so irritated by this that he issued several illegal fines at once, which totaled a huge sum." Yevgeniy appealed to the court, which in the end found these fines unlawful.
Since 1999, the believer has been married. His wife, Yana, has also faced prosecution for her faith and, like her husband, ended up in a pretrial detention center after the search. Relatives consider what is happening to the Abramov family illegal.