Abstract
On December 29, a city court in St. Petersburg acquitted Alexander Nikitin, a retired Russian naval captain, of high treason. Thus ended the first chapter in the Nikitin affair. Whether there will be subsequent chapters is not yet known.
The Cold War nuclear arms race had many costs, many of which are found at naval facilities dotted along Russia's Arctic coast. With the end of the Cold War, Soviet-era secrecy was partially lifted and revelations about how the Northern Fleet dumped nuclear waste into the Arctic ocean caused an international outcry.
The high concentration of nuclear submarines and naval waste near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula and at Severodvinsk on the White Sea were seen as a potential environmental threat to the Russians as well as to their Nordic neighbors and the United States and Canada.
Alexander Nikitin leaving court after his acquittal.
Bellona, a Norwegian environmental organization, published its first detailed report on the Northern Fleet's environmental problems in 1994. In 1995, it enlisted Nikitin to co-author a second report, which was scheduled to be published in April 1996. (Nikitin, who had worked in the Defense Ministry's Nuclear Safety Inspectorate Directorate, retired from the Soviet navy in November 1992.)
In October 1995, after Nikitin delivered his material to Bellona, his apartment was searched by Russia's security service (the fsb). And in February 1996, he was formally charged with treason by way of espionage. Prosecutors alleged that while helping to prepare the second Bellona report, he handed over state secrets regarding accidents on Soviet nuclear-powered submarines and the design of third-generation submarine reactors to a foreign organization.
Further, the charge of espionage implied that the organization–Bellona–was engaged in hostile activities with the purpose of undermining Russia's external security.
Nikitin and Bellona maintained that the information for the second report had been gathered from open sources. Moreover, according to the Russian constitution, information about hazards to the environment could not be kept secret.
Finally, Bellona said, there were procedural irregularities, including the fact that Nikitin's indictment was based on secret Ministry of Defense decrees and a retroactive application of laws and decrees. (The issue of how a small Norwegian non-governmental environmental organization without military forces and armed only with some information and knowledge of the press could pose a threat to the national defense was not raised.)
In December 1996, Nikitin was released after spending 10 months in jail, but he was confined to St. Petersburg. At his first trial in October 1998, City Court Judge Sergei Golets returned the case to the prosecution and the fsb for further investigation. Both the defense and the prosecution appealed the ruling to the Russian Supreme Court, the former arguing the case should be dismissed and the latter that an adequate investigation had been conducted.
However, in February 1999 the Russian Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings and after further investigative work, the case was tried again by Judge Golets last November and December.
When Nikitin was detained in October 1995, I was sitting in my Greenpeace usa office in Washington. A friend in Moscow called to say that the apartment of an environmental activist in Severodvinsk, Alexei Klim-ov, had been searched and materials confiscated.
After a few calls, it became apparent that the fsb had moved against several people related to Nikitin, Bellona, and Klimov, all of whom were ostensibly working on Bellona's second report.
The raids were disturbing. The authorities had harassed other Russian environmental activists before. But Bellona had worked in Russia for almost six years and had encountered few problems. Its first report on the Northern Fleet's environmental problems appeared to have been well received in Russia.
In the course of its investigations, Bellona had developed a reasonable working relationship with the civil and military authorities in the Murmansk area. Bellona also had been instrumental in attracting international funding to deal with the nuclear waste problems of the Russian icebreaker fleet based in Murmansk. (Indeed, virtually throughout the whole period of Nikitin's arrest and trial, Bellona continued its good work in the Murmansk area). Thus, the raids in October 1995 seemed as puzzling as they were ominous.
Old habits die hard
Russia's security service is not the only KGB successor that is apparently having trouble shedding Soviet-style practices. Since last October, the Ukrainian Security Bureau (SBU) has vigorously pursued an investigation at a research institute in Sevastopol, on the Black Sea. The investigation has been criticized both within and outside the country.
On October 16, SBU agents raided the homes and offices of several scientists from the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, confiscated computers and scientific papers, and threatened to charge the scientists with a series of crimes–including treason, espionage, participation in a criminal organization, mishandling funds, and smuggling scientific information out of the country. One scientist, Sergei Piontkovski, was arrested and held for questioning for four days.
After an initial investigation, the SBU charged Piont-kovski with mishandling foreign currency and espionage. The espionage charge, which was later dropped, stemmed from the biologist's research on bioluminescent plankton. The SBU alleged that Piontkovski, who was collaborating with several European scientists, had illegally transferred data to the West.
Some observers believe that it is bioluminescence's limited relevance to submarine tracking that landed the biologist in hot water.
According to Robert Williams, a biologist at the Plymouth Research Center in Britain, which is collaborating on the study, the data was collected by Soviet scientists in international waters between 1950 and 1989 (Nature, October 28, 1999). But Col. Anatoly Sakhno, the SBU press secretary, said the data was a source of “national pride” for Ukraine and that it “had been deemed top secret by the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union” (the Russian newspaper Express-Chronicle, December 20, 1999).
Many scientists, however, say the data is harmless. Williams told Science (October 29), “This is simply absurd. [The data were] not classified in any way.” Luis D'Croz, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, said, “I can hardly see how this kind of plankton study can represent a risk to the national security of any nation.”
Intas, a European organization that promotes scientific research in the former Soviet republics and a principal funder of Piontkovski's work, was also bewildered by the espionage charge. In a press release, the organization stated that the agreement between Intas and the Ukrainian government had clearly outlined all the activities to be undertaken by the joint project.
The espionage charge was apparently dropped in December, but the SBU pressed forward with its investigation into Piontkovski's alleged misuse of funds. Like many research institutes in the former Soviet Union, the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas relies heavily on foreign donors to support its work. As a project director, Piontkovski was responsible for using the funds to purchase equipment and pay his colleagues. As a result, he often handled foreign currency, an activity that is heavily regulated by Ukrainian law. One Ukrainian scientist told Science, “It's easy to find a currency law that's broken.”
Intas told Nature that as far as it can tell, all the funds it distributed to the institute were handled properly.
Some observers think the currency allegation was trumped up by the SBU to justify its continued persecution of Piontkovski. What remains a mystery, however, is why the SBU–assuming Piontkovski is innocent–insists on moving ahead with the case.
Both the Ukrainian Ministry of Science and Intas have lodged protests with the government, and the European Commission has requested an explanation from Ukrainian authorities. Two scientific societies in the United States, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), have also spoken out on Piontkovski's behalf.
As the Bulletin went to press in early February, the case was still pending. According to Elisa Munoz of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, the SBU completed its investigation in January and is awaiting a decision from the state prosecutor's office on whether to proceed with a trial. If convicted, Piontkovski could face up to eight years in prison.
–Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn is assistant editor of the Bulletin.
The Nikitin case attracted much attention in the West over the next four years. Bellona stubbornly defended Nikitin through every twist and turn of the investigation and trial. Meanwhile, government leaders and legislators from Scandinavia, Britain, and continental Europe discussed the Nikitin case with their Russian counterparts. Even Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took an interest.
Every major press outlet in Europe and the United States covered the story. Nikitin was awarded several prestigious environmental prizes, including the Goldman Prize, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize” for environmentalism.
Amnesty International declared Ni-kitin a prisoner of conscience, the first person so designated in Russia since Andrei Sakharov was released from internal exile in the Soviet Union.
The Sierra Club, Human Rights Watch, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament were just some of the organizations that actively followed the case and campaigned for a fair trial and Ni-kitin's release.
The case received wide attention in Russia. Duma members from the Ya-bloko and Democratic Russia factions attended the trial now and then. Russian environmentalists and human rights groups like the Russian Socio-Ecological Union, Citizens' Watch in St. Petersburg, and the Glasnost Defense Fund in Moscow supported Nikitin.
Although the eyes of the world were upon the Nikitin case, that seemed to have little effect. The case still ground its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Russian authorities mounted a campaign in the press to discredit environmentalists as spies. Russian Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov said several times for the benefit of the press that the information Nikitin had provided contained state secrets.
And in a well-publicized interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda in July 1999, Vladimir Putin, then head of the FSB and now heir apparent to the presidency, suggested that environmentalists were working for foreign intelligence services.
Other well-known ecologists, such as Alexei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, as well as less well-known activists–including Natalia Mironova at Chelyabinsk, Nikolai Schoor in Chelyabinsk-70, Vladimir Slivyak in Moscow, and Alexei Klimov in Severodvinsk–came under attack.
The FSB also arrested Capt. Grigory Pasko, a reporter for the Pacific Fleet, who had written articles about pollution caused by the fleet, and FSB agents searched the apartment and laboratory of professor Valery Soyfer, a scientist in Vladivostok who had done radiation surveys near naval bases and shipyards in the Russian Far East.
After 20 months in prison, Pasko was acquitted on the espionage charge last July. He ran, unsuccessfully, for a Duma seat in last December's elections.
The activism of the FSB and the attacks on environmentalists in the press made many observers worry about Sergei Golets, the presiding judge in the Nikitin case. His October 1998 decision to send the case back to the FSB for further investigation was not reassuring. It seemed as if he was afraid to confront the agency.
The decision by the Supreme Court to uphold Golets's October 1998 ruling was also worrisome. It appeared that Nikitin might have been dropped into legal limbo, where he would be subjected to repeated investigations while being confined to St. Petersburg with a possible multi-year jail sentence hanging over his head.
Given that, Golets's not-guilty verdict in the November-December trial was stunning. Not only was Nikitin acquitted, but Golets ruled that the FSB improperly collected evidence, declared that secret and retroactive decrees were unconstitutional, and that environmental information could not be kept secret. D.J. Peterson, a Rand analyst and a close observer of Russia's environmental movement, said in an email to me:
“Judge Golets affirmed the principle of freedom of information in general. He affirmed the primacy of the constitution and the importance of due process in the development of law–especially as it relates to state secrets. He stated that the prosecution must follow the law, and he strikes down the legitimacy of secret and retroactive decrees–a mainstay of the Soviet-era repression.”
Golets, Peterson added, cited and cross-referenced numerous passages in the Russian constitution, federal law, presidential decrees, trial testimony, and the like. His earlier decision to send “the case back for further investigation (which was then seen as a judicial waffle in favor of the prosecution) was in fact a means of giving the prosecution more rope with which to hang themselves.”
Thomas Nilsen of Bellona said after the verdict that many other environmentalists and scientists were now more likely to publish material about nuclear and environmental problems, which they had been afraid to publish after Nikitin's arrest.
Although Nikitin's acquittal was astounding news, it remains to be seen whether the verdict signified a great step forward for civil rights and the rule of law in Russia. The prosecutor said he would appeal the case to the Supreme Court. If it accepts the case, it might not deliver a final verdict until next fall.
Moreover, the December verdict was sandwiched between a semi-rigged Duma election and a blatantly rigged presidential succession. Conservative nationalistic forces in Russia continue to gather strength and Vladimir Putin's statements last July about environmentalists are hardly a cause for celebration.
Interpreting the Nikitin verdict against such a backdrop is difficult. It may have no lasting impact. Or the fact that it could happen at all–despite such a backdrop–may be a source of hope for the rule of law in Russia, as well as for the environment.