The society says its only aim is to promote happiness
Human rights activists in Russia say the authorities have cracked down hard on a youth organisation which claims its only aim is to promote peace and happiness.
A Moscow court has sentenced two female members of the Portos group - Irina Derguzova and Tatyana Lomakina - to eight and six years in prison respectively.
They were accused of setting up an illegal armed movement and bullying and harassing underage group members.
The two women, both aged 25, pleaded not guilty and their lawyers said they would appeal to the Supreme Court.
The 50-member Poetic Society for the Development of a Theory of Public Happiness started near Moscow in 1993 and later expanded to other parts of the country.
Founders of the society took their inspiration from the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who advocated extreme asceticism as a way of achieving moral purity.
Russian media covering the trial said the organisation had a hierarchical structure. The members lived and worked in Kibbutz-style agricultural communes helping pensioners and the disabled.
Punishment
But the prosecution said the organisation was based on severe discipline and unconditional subordination.
It said members were subjected to rigorous punishment if they broke the society's rules.
The organisation first attracted media attention when a special police task force raided a farm in 2000 after several teenagers had been beaten for smoking.
Russian TV later showed pictures of an unidentified teenager, whose body bore the marks of a beating.
He said the beating was a punishment for smoking.
"There were two of them. They gave me 200 lashes," he said.
But the human rights activists who spoke for Portos said the prosecution had no evidence of the beatings.
They said that the teenagers denied their previous evidence in court and said they only gave it under pressure from the police.
Unconventional
The outspoken Russian newspaper Obhschaya Gazeta said the organisation "had existed quietly since the beginning of perestroika".
"While they have a somewhat unconventional, romantic ideology, the members lead the life of any ordinary public organisation," it said.
It added that special police forces had been monitoring the communes for a long time looking for an excuse to clamp down on the organisation.
"The excuse came in December 2000 when the heads of the commune punished two 16-year-old members for drinking vodka and smoking," the paper said.
According to the paper, the teenagers chose to be whipped rather than leave the commune.
But the police closed down the farm and arrested more than 40 people on suspicion of abusing underage members.
Later on, they cracked down on other Portos farms, the paper said.
Two-pronged approach
The leader of the Glasnost human rights foundation, Sergey Grigoryants, rejected claims that the police had found weapons, claiming that the TV footage had been falsified by police.
"They did not have any weapons, no carbines, no automatic rifles," he told Russian NTV.
He told the newspaper that more than 10 leaders of similar youth organisations were awaiting trial on criminal charges.
"These trials have two purposes," Mr Grigoryants told the newspaper.
"On the one hand they need to justify somehow the special services' staff. On the other, young people need to be indoctrinated in a new way."
He said the authorities' crackdown on unconventional groups was part of a drive to demonstrate there is no an alternative to pro-Putin youth organisations, such as "Marching Together".
He added that the authorities also wanted to warn that joining marginal organisations "is as hopeless as it is dangerous".