After brushing up against the persecution of religious activists in the former Soviet Union throughout his life, Okhotin has been subjected since March to the very phenomenon he watched happen to his father, agitated against with Pitts and studied at HDS.

It is a coincidence Little can only call “ironic and tragic.”

The Wrong Line

Okhotin’s account of his treatment might be taken as a comedy of errors were it not so grave. After deplaning in Moscow in March, he says he took his luggage—cash and customs form in hand—and made a mistake which has dogged him since.

Faced with a choice between a green corridor, designated for those with nothing to declare to customs, and a red corridor for those with declarations, Okhotin says he got confused and inadvertently entered the green one.

He says he was immediately confronted by a series of customs agents, who confiscated the money and browbeat him.

According to Okhotin, they also rang up the secret service.

“Even while I was detained, they’d already placed a call to the FSB, the successor to the KGB,” he says.

Meanwhile, Okhotin alleges, customs officials proceeded to make the first of several explicit offers for him to bribe them with a portion of the money he had brought for impoverished protestant churches. After asking for $10,000 initially, Okhotin says—upon the delivery of which he says they promised he would be released—an official knocked the offer down to $5000.

“It was a very explicit form of extortion,” he says.

He says he refused both offers on the grounds that the charitable donations were not his to give.

“They simply thought because I had money, maybe they could take one-fifth of it,” he says.

But Okhotin says he suspects that his treatment was based on more than simple greed on the part of the Russian officials.

“The group that this help was intended for is protestant, which does not receive many favors from Russia’s government,” he says.