Monis Svetlana

Name: Monis Svetlana Yakovlevna
Date of Birth: July 15, 1977
Current status: who has served the main sentence
Articles of Criminal Code of Russian Federation: 282.2 (2)
Sentence: punishment in the form of imprisonment for a term of 2 years 6 months with restriction of liberty for 1 year, a sentence of imprisonment shall be considered conditional with a probationary period of 2 years

Biography

Svetlana Monis, similar to her husband, Alam Aliyev, became a victim of criminal prosecution for her faith. For several years, she and her husband were forced to defend their right to freedom of religion and yet Svetlana received a 2.5-year suspended sentence, and the court sent Alam to a penal colony for 6.5 years.

Svetlana was born in 1977 in the city of Lesozavodsk (Primorye Territory) in a simple family. She has a younger brother. Due to her progressive myopia, sports and needlework were not for her, but still she found something she liked—learning foreign languages (German and English).

After leaving school, Svetlana moved to Birobidzhan and entered the Birobidzhan Teaching Institute at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, where she studied Chinese. In the third year, she gave birth to a son, so she failed to finish the university. Svetlana decided to become an entrepreneur, opened a Chinese cafe, and later engaged in foreign economic activity. She also cared for her elderly grandmother.

Even as a teenager, Svetlana was interested in spiritual topics. “There was an incomplete Bible in the house that I read,” she says. “Even then, I was thinking about what is the purpose of human existence, if everything ends with death, and why is there so much injustice in the world.” Svetlana received answers to her questions by deeply researching the Scriptures. Applying Bible teachings helped her raise her son, which she did on her own from when he was four. It made her life more meaningful and happy and she made many friends.

In 2015, Svetlana married Alam. Despite difficulties and the prosecution, the couple try to find positive aspects in everything.

At first Svetlana's parents did not approve of their daughter's religious choice, but over time their attitude changed. Today they empathize with their daughter and son-in-law and cannot understand why this happened to them.

Case History

In September 2019, a criminal case was initiated against Svetlana Monis, a foreign language teacher. A year earlier, an investigator detained her husband, Alam Aliyev, during a massive FSB special operation in Birobidzhan. Monis, along with other believers, was accused of participating in the activities of an extremist organization. For more than 16 months, the believer was under recognizance not to leave. In February 2021, the court imposed a fine on her. But three months later, the appeal toughened the sentence, imposing a 2.5-year suspended sentence on the believer. In December 2021, the Court of Cassation returned the case to the appellate stage, which, in turn, overturned the verdict and returned the case for a new trial. Its result was a suspended sentence of 2.5 years. In 2023, the third appeal upheld this decision, later the cassation left it unchanged.
Timeline