Biography
Yevgeniy Abramov was born in 1976 in Osinniki, a small town in the south of the Kemerovo region. He has two sisters, an elder and a younger. Their father, a miner, and their mother, an obstetrician, are already retired.
Yevgeniy is a biology teacher by education. He developed a love for this science in childhood: his family lived in the countryside, so the boy 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, the young man 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, the man changed his occupation—he worked at a construction site until his arrest—but he did not lose his love for nature: he was still engaged in gardening and raised bees for some time. "To a greater extent, I was fascinated not by the final product, but by the process of growing fruits and observing plants," he said.
This is not the first time Yevgeniy has defended his peaceful beliefs: having reached military age, he faced repeated pressure from the employees of the military registration and enlistment office, who forced him to military service. "There were even cases of forced delivery to the recruiting station at gunpoint," the believer recalls. "But I always referred to the Constitution and demanded alternative service. The military commissar was so irritated by this fact that he issued several illegal fines at once, which together amounted to a huge amount." Yevgeniy appealed to the court, which eventually found these fines illegal.
Since 1999, the believer has been married. His wife, Yana, also faced persecution for her faith and, like her husband, ended up in a pre-trial detention center after the search. Relatives consider what happened to the Abramov family illegal.