Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Divination and fortune-telling services Veliky Novgorod, Novgorod Oblast, Russia · 2019

Russia: told she would not live until Easter and that her relatives would die if she refused the rite

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

a woman who stopped a stranger in the street, told her she was under a curse and had a bad aura, and offered to remove it

Organization

Novgorod District Court, Novgorod Oblast (Новгородский районный суд Новгородской области)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The authority is the defendant's claimed capacity to see a curse and to remove it. What distinguishes this judgment is that the coercion is stated in terms the court quotes directly: the victim was given a deadline for her own death and told that refusing the rite would kill her relatives as well. The rite was then performed on the victim's own body — a strand of her hair — in a place chosen because it was unpeopled. The money was requested only after the rite had been staged, so the demand arrived as a step within a cure already under way rather than as a price quoted in advance.

  • Curse or witchcraft threat
  • Spiritual healing or treatment

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2020-01-08 · conviction and sentence at first instance

    Novgorod District Court, Novgorod Oblast, Russia (Новгородский районный суд Новгородской области), sitting at Veliky Novgorod. The defendant, anonymised in the published judgment as ФИО1, was convicted of fraud causing significant damage to a citizen under ч.2 ст.159 of the Criminal Code for an offence committed on 17 April 2019 between 14:30 and 15:26. The court found she approached a stranger in the street and told her, falsely, that she was under a curse and had a bad aura, that she would not live until Easter, and that she could help remove it; that she insisted the curse had to be removed and that if the victim refused, the victim and her relatives would die; that she led the victim to a secluded location behind railway tracks, recorded in the judgment by coordinates, where she pinched off a strand of the victim's hair, passed it from hand to hand saying 'As the stream flows, so the curse will go', and threw it into a ditch to create the appearance of a rite; and that she then asked whether the victim had money with her and required her to produce her purse. The loss was 30,500 roubles. The court recorded voluntary compensation of the loss as a mitigating circumstance and sentenced her to 360 hours of compulsory labour. Defence costs were met from the federal budget.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • a death prediction with a fixed deadline: the victim was told «не доживет до Пасхи» — that she would not live until Easter
  • the threat extended to the victim's family: that if she refused the removal, she and her relatives would die
  • the victim led away from the street to a secluded spot behind railway tracks on the pretext that the rite required it
  • a performed rite using a strand of the victim's own hair, moved from hand to hand with the words «Как ручей течет, так порча уйдет» and thrown into a ditch, «создавая видимость проведения обряда»

Cited record

Sources

court of record criminal judgment Приговор № 1-1051/2019 1-111/2020 от 8 января 2020 г. по делу № 1-1051/2019, Новгородский районный суд (Новгородская область) — Уголовное.

The full text of the criminal judgment, read directly from the Russian judgments database sudact.ru. The court records that the defendant «сообщила ФИО11 заведомо ложную, несоответствующую действительности информацию о том, что на ФИО11 порча, плохая аура, ФИО11 не доживет до Пасхи и она (ФИО1) может помочь снять порчу», and that she «настаивала на том, что порчу необходимо снять и если ФИО11 откажется от снятия порчи, то ФИО11 и ее родственники умрут». The victim, «будучи доверчивым человеком, введенная ФИО1 в заблуждение», followed her «до участка местности с координатами 58.517936, 31.242866, расположенного за железнодорожными путями», where the defendant «отщипнула прядь волос у ФИО11 и, перекладывая прядь волос из одной руки в другую, говорила: «Как ручей течет, так порча уйдет», после чего ФИО1 прядь волос бросила в канаву (в воду), создавая видимость проведения обряда по снятию порчи». She then «спросила у ФИО11 о наличии при ней денежных средств» and «потребовала ФИО11 достать кошелек». The operative part convicts under ч.2 ст.159 and imposes «360 часов обязательных работ», with voluntary compensation of the loss recorded in mitigation.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis
https://sudact.ru/regular/doc/D6IoNzCr1PQN/ Corpus classification: court-of-record; evidentiary role: criminal-judgment.
Retrieval
2026-07-29 · Preserved
Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Russian-language sweep; full judgment read via the browser pane; the death prediction, the threat to relatives, the staged rite and its incantation, the coordinates, the loss and the compulsory-labour sentence taken verbatim from the judgment)

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