MOSCOW (AP) - Two Russian women who helped set up a poetry society that they claimed was aimed at cultivating happiness were convicted Wednesday of harassing and beating its underaged members.
Irina Derguzova and Tatyana Lomakina, both 25, were sentenced to eight and six years in prison respectively by a Moscow regional court. The women and their lawyers dismissed the accusations and promised to appeal the verdict.
Derguzova and Lomakina helped found a group called PORTOS, which is the Russian acronym for the Poetic Alliance for Developing the Theory of Public Happiness, saying they wanted to help members feel happier by living a healthy life and helping pensioners, disabled people and others.
About 150 members of the group, which was established in 1993, were required to daily write a quatrain, regularly maintain a personal journal and unfailingly obey the group's leaders. They were barred from smoking, drinking alcohol, taking drugs and using obscene language.
Prosecutors said that the women punished violators by beating them and depriving them of freedom. Those accusations served as the basis for the conviction.
Derguzova and Lomakina pleaded innocent, and some group members strongly backed them.
"There were no punishments except one case when we punished ourselves for smoking," one teenage PORTOS member, Nikolai Akimov, said on Russian TVS television.
The group also purchased several dozen of shotguns and gas pistols, which prompted the court to also convict them of setting up an "illegal armed group."
An activist with the group, Svetlana Ivanskaya, said on TVS that the weapons had been bought "for education purposes, and, of course, self-defense."
Derguzova and Lomakina, both dressed in black, took the verdict calmly. "Where is your conscience?" Lomakina asked the judge. The two women then spoke to journalists from the cage, insisting they were innocent.