Vishnevsky reconstructed the chronology of events in detail. At noon on 17 February, the priest was detained at the entrance to his building. He spent about eight hours at police station No. 43, from where he was to be taken to court. However, due to his state of health, the case never reached a hearing: the lawyer Andrei Chertkov called an ambulance, Mikhonov-Vaytenko was hospitalised with a stroke, and the hearing was postponed. Thus, the court proceedings scheduled for 19 February did not take place, and the defendant ended up in hospital.
What the priest was charged with
Mikhonov-Vaytenko faced charges under Article 20.2.2 of the Code of Administrative Offences. This article concerns violations of the established procedure for organising or holding a public event. In early 2024, St Petersburg courts handed down administrative arrests of three to fifteen days under this article, and the list of grounds for such decisions included even people who had come with flowers to memorial sites. It is this practice, which Vishnevsky points to, that made the case notable for the liberal public and the media.
St Petersburg’s law on assemblies, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets regulates public actions in the city. It provides for notifying the authorities about events held in public places. For religious rites, such rules are applied controversially, since religious worship and prayer are not political or public actions in the usual sense of the word. It is on this distinction that the column’s argument is built.
The author’s position
According to Vishnevsky, a memorial service does not fall under St Petersburg’s law on assemblies, because it is a religious rite, not a public event. He emphasises that punishment cannot be imposed for the mere intention to hold something. The requirement to notify and subsequent claims against the organiser, by the author’s logic, should be considered through the prism of what actually happened on the spot, not through formal suspicion. The relevant passage of the column reads:
“And, of course, the claims against him, in my opinion, have no relation to the law whatsoever.”
The column immediately goes beyond a single episode. Vishnevsky addresses the question of how the administrative article is applied in St Petersburg to people who gather for commemoration, prayer or assistance. His text is written in the genre of opinion journalism, so the assessments and conclusions belong to the author, not to the court, which, at the time of publication, had not yet considered the case on its merits.
The subject of the publication is presented by the author as an archbishop of the Apostolic Orthodox Church. This community operates outside the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church and is not recognised by it, so the priest’s status has repeatedly been a matter of dispute. In his text, Vishnevsky describes Mikhonov-Vaytenko as a human rights activist and one of the organisers of aid to refugees in St Petersburg. These characterisations also come from the author of the column.
Vishnevsky himself occupies a dual position: he is simultaneously a columnist for Novaya Gazeta and a deputy of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly. This combination makes his column notable for the city’s political environment. The piece appeared against the backdrop of general tension around public actions in the city, where administrative cases under Article 20.2.2 had become a frequent instrument of pressure on participants in events that were far from always connected with politics.
At the time the column was published, the main fact remained that the court hearing in the priest’s case did not take place on the appointed day. Mikhonov-Vaytenko was by then already in hospital after a stroke, and the hearing had been postponed.
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