Yehowists

Yehowists (also Yehowist-Ilyinites, Ilyinists, Ilyintsy, Jehovists, Sect of the Right-hand Brotherhood, The Message of Zion, ) is a Russian Spiritual Christian millenarian religious movement founded by retired army officer and religious thinker Nikolai Ilyin in the 1840s.

==Before the Revolution== During Ilyin's life, groups of Ilyinites were founded in different parts of the Russian Empire. This is due to the bulk sending of booklets, both by Ilyin and his followers. The center of the movement, before the Russian Revolution, remained in Ural, but individual groups were also formed in Transcaucasia, Northern Caucasus, and Ukraine. Ilyinites were persecuted periodically and were often punished by exile to Central Asia and other parts of the Russian Empire. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Russians were populating parts of Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan. There were Yehowists among settlers who discovered that new places provide more religious freedom than they had in Russian regions.