Georgian activist ordered detained for defacing Stalin icon in Tbilisi

A court in Georgia has ordered five days' detention for a woman who defaced a religious icon depicting Soviet leader Josef Stalin, an act which ignited large protests last month in the capital Tbilisi.

The Georgian Young Lawyers' Association, who defended the woman, Nata Peradze, could not be immediately reached by phone, but told local agency InterPressNews on Friday that she was jailed on petty hooliganism charges, an administrative offence.

The news agency did not say what was her lawyers' line of defence.

A thousands-strong protest erupted in mid-January to demand harsh punishment for Peradze.

She was accused of splashing blue paint onto an icon on display in Tbilisi's Holy Trinity Cathedral in an act of protest that exposed deep divisions in Georgia over the former Soviet dictator's legacy in his homeland.

Agitated for criminal investigation

Orthodox Church activists and believers as well as far-right groups agitated for Peradze to be subject to a criminal investigation and be potentially jailed for what they say was an act that insulted the icon and their beliefs.

Alt-Info, the pro-Russian ultra-conservative movement that organised the protest last month, used a post on the Telegram messaging app to compare the "desecration" of the icon to repression of religion that occurred under Stalin's regime.

"We express our position regarding the current events and emphasize that the fact of pouring paint on the icon in the Patriarchal Church is a kind of raid on the church and repeats the experience of the Bolshevik past," it said.

A side panel of the icon includes a depiction of the Georgian-born Stalin - an avowed atheist who violently repressed religion across the Soviet Union - being blessed by St Matrona of Moscow, a Russian Orthodox saint, during World War Two.