Biography
Anatoliy Odintsov has become another Jehovah's Witness from the Murmansk Region, who is persecuted for his faith in God by the authorities. In the spring of 2023, a case was initiated against him under the article on extremism.
Anatoliy was born in February, 1958 in the city of Severomorsk, Murmansk Region. He has a younger sister. Their parents worked at the railway station. His father was a train master, and his mother was a freight forwarder. The parents are no longer alive.
As a child, Anatoliy loved cross country skiing, photographing winter northern landscapes, skating and collecting stamps about flora, fauna and outstanding people. Now Anatoliy is interested in cars and likes to take pictures and travel.
At the end of the eighth grade, Anatoliy entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical Medical College and graduated with a degree in repair and installation of electromedical and X-ray equipment. In 1980, he got a job at a repair and installation company in the city of Murmansk. In the same year he entered the correspondence department of the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad at the Faculty of Electronic Computers. In 1983, Anatoliy moved to the city of Snezhnogorsk and worked there as a foreman of the maintenance point at the medical unit.
Since 1993, Anatoliy worked at a heat and power plant (boiler house) servicing power electrical networks. After fourteen years, he returned to Murmansk to a repair shop. Prior to the persecution, he worked as a medical equipment engineer at the Clinical Pathology Bureau.
In the 1990s, Anatoliy became interested in the Holy Scriptures and began to study this book in depth. He was impressed by the simplicity and clarity of Bible principles, as well as the immutability of moral standards. The study of the Bible convinced him that everything in nature was created, and did not appear by evolution. In 1994, Anatoliy decided to become one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
In the same year he married Svetlana. She works at a gas station in a motor transport company, loves jazz music, plays the guitar. Svetlana shares the religious beliefs of her husband and supports him in everything.
Due to religious repression, the Odintsovs had to leave their usual way of life and faced economic difficulties. Relatives and friends are outraged by the persecution, which, in their opinion, "has no basis."