Court considered not imprisoning for hookah on Easter cake
Moscow's Lefortovo Court on Wednesday sentenced Ksenia Belousova, an employee of the Moscow bar Kisski, to three years and 25 days in a general regime penal colony. She posted a photo of a hookah cooked on Easter cake and a reel of its preparation on Instagram with the caption, "Even Christ rose from this." The court could have imposed a lesser sentence, not involving imprisonment, two human rights activists told Agency.
Details: According to the Moscow Prosecutor's Office, the 27-year-old woman was found guilty under Part 1 of Article 148 of the Russian Criminal Code (violation of the right to freedom of conscience and religion). She committed the crime during her probation period.
Because Belousova pleaded guilty, the case was heard under a special procedure. In the hookah-on-Kulich case itself, Belousova received 200 hours of community service, Mediazona reported. This amounted to three years and 25 days of actual imprisonment because the court combined the sentence with a suspended sentence for drug-related offenses, which she received in August 2025. When combined, the 200 hours of community service were replaced with 25 days in prison.
The prosecution had requested three years and two months in prison for Belousova, while the defense asked the court to limit the sentence to a fine.
Why such a harsh sentence? The court's decision was influenced by the current suspended sentence, says OVD-Info lawyer Valeria Vetoshkina. Belousova "violated the terms of her suspended sentence, which was replaced with a real sentence," explains Evgeny Smirnov, a lawyer for the First Department.
A sentence of 200 hours of community service is average for this category of cases, says Smirnov.
But the court was not "obliged" to impose such a harsh punishment, says Vetoshkina. "In the case of a repeat offense (committing an intentional crime by a person with a prior conviction for an intentional crime), the law stipulates that a harsher punishment is simply imposed. That is, the court is obliged to take into account the criminal record, but is not obliged to impose the punishment requested by the prosecution," said Vetoshkina.
Whether the sentence could have been more lenient depends on whether the probationary period was extended, whether any violations were recorded, and whether any attempts were made to replace the suspended sentence with a real one, says Smirnov. "If there were no violations, the new sentence could have been limited to 200 community service jobs," Smirnov said.
In similar cases, such harsh sentences cannot be imposed against defendants not on probation. "The sentence [for the first part of the article on insulting religious feelings] is up to a year in prison; it's practically impossible to impose a real sentence," says Smirnov.
Context. The case against Belousova was opened in April. A few days later, a similar case was opened in the Leningrad Region against a 20-year-old resident of Murino, who posted a photo of an Easter cake and a dildo on a Telegram channel with the caption, "Christ is risen!"
The first such case was opened in 2022. Then, a Krymsk resident was fined 20,000 rubles for using a hookah on an Easter cake.
слеп за ќорав се фатил.
