By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Just in case anyone thought democracy and the rule of law were coming to Yeltsin's Russia, the country's security police in mid-June brought additional charges against nuclear safety campaigner Aleksandr Nikitin.
International commentators have condemned the prosecution of the former naval captain for treason and espionage as absurd and unjust, and the case is being watched closely as an indicator of the state of human rights in Russia.
Nevertheless, the general prosecutor's Office has allowed investigations to continue, and the Federal Security Service (FSB) remains intent on bringing the case to trial.
Over the past year, signs have emerged that various state officials are disgusted by the persecution of Nikitin. But the latest developments show that key decision makers in the ruling apparatus believe that arbitrary arrest and the denial of legal rights must be kept as serious, ever present threats to government critics.
After quitting the navy in 1992, Nikitin worked in St Petersburg as a researcher for the Norwegian environmental organisation Bellona. A specialist on nuclear submarine technology, he co-authored a Bellona report entitled The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination.
Late in 1995 early drafts of this report began to seriously embarrass the Russian government, showing that on naval bases in the north large quantities of nuclear waste were being kept in inadequate, decaying storage facilities.
Crude harassment
Bellona's employees and supporters in Russia began to suffer crude security force harassment. By the time the final version of the report was released in April 1996, Nikitin was in jail — arrested on February 6 on preliminary charges of having revealed secret information.
Formal charges of treason, espionage and falsifying documents were filed by the FSB in October. By this time, Nikitin had been adopted by Amnesty International as its first prisoner of conscience in post-Soviet Russia. The European Parliament and officials of the European Union also issued strong statements in his support.
One of the problems faced by the FSB in framing charges was that the supposedly secret information in the Bellona report was all freely available to any researcher with the patience to search it out. In the course of 1996, Bellona and its supporters showed this beyond doubt.
"Nikitin and Bellona have demonstrated that all of the information they published was from open sources", the US State Department observed in a January 1997 country report on human rights.
Another problem was that under Russian law, the information arguably could not be secret. The Law on State Secrets adopted in 1993 states that no information on the conditions of the environment or on extraordinary incidents and catastrophes that endanger human life and health may be classified.
Secret decrees
The solution which the FSB found was Kafkaesque. Nikitin was deemed to have violated two secret Defence Department decrees, so secret that their contents could not be revealed even to his defence attorneys.
These decrees had been adopted in 1993 and 1994. The fact that Nikitin — who had left the navy in 1992 — could not have known of their existence was not considered important. Neither was the fact that under the Russian constitution, no-one can be charged for violating legal acts which have not been duly made known to them.
After more than 10 months in prison, Nikitin was conditionally released on December 14, reportedly on the personal orders of general prosecutor Yury Skuratov.
Deputy general prosecutor Mikhail Katyshev, who had been entrusted with examining the FSB's case against Nikitin, told the English-language Moscow Times on December 15 that in his view the case contained "no hint of espionage".
"It is time for the prosecutor's office to admit that mistakes could have been made", Katyshev said.
But Skuratov, who had responsibility for deciding whether the prosecution should go ahead, did not order it dropped.
Early in March the case was sent back to the FSB, with orders to tighten the allegations. For more than three months, a renewed inquiry was conducted by a group of Defence Ministry officials approved by the FSB.
Meanwhile, the case grew steadily more notorious. In April Nikitin was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the "Nobel" of environmental prizes.
The accompanying publicity was an embarrassment for US President Bill Clinton, a long-time apologist for the Russian regime. In mid-June Clinton was forced to write to Nikitin voicing concern about "violations of procedure" in the case, and saying that the Russian government should organise a "fair trial in accordance with international norms".
Wolf and lamb
On June 17, Nikitin's lawyers were presented with a new set of charges. The Defence Ministry experts had decided that Nikitin had breached another secret decree. This one dated from 1996 — after the Bellona report had been released.
Reporting the response of Nikitin's lawyers to these developments, the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta remarked on July 1:
"In the view of the defenders, the situation more and more recalls the well-known fable about the wolf and the lamb. Nikitin is guilty only of the fact that someone very much wants to eat him."
In redrafting the charges, the FSB set out to maximise the potential sentence. The charge of espionage has now been laid under Russia's new criminal code, which sets a maximum penalty of 20 instead of 15 years' prison. The charge of treason has been brought under the old code, where again the penalty is higher.
"Even a non-lawyer knows that an increase in liability does not have retrospective force", Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented on July 1. "Students in the law faculty get failed for such errors, but for the FSB investigators this is normal procedure."
Nikitin was told on June 30 that investigations will continue for another three months, suggesting that the case may go to trial in the late autumn.
When the court finally convenes, the prosecution is likely to present charges that are incompetently framed, that are very probably inadmissible under the Law on State Secrets and that plainly violate the constitution. But that is not to say that the prosecution will lose.
In June 1996, on a petition from the FSB, the case was transferred from a civilian to a military court. According to Bellona, the FSB wants a military trial because the court will be closed, and the security authorities will have more control over the conduct of the defence.
Russian judges, military or civilian, do not have a distinguished record of denying the security authorities the verdicts they want.
There are no mysteries as to why the admirals of the Northern Fleet, or the generals of the FSB, want Nikitin behind bars. But after a year and a half during which the persecution has alienated liberals at home and outraged environmentalists and human rights supporters abroad, one has to wonder why the authorities allow the case to continue.
Why does Yeltsin not simply order the charges dropped, recoup the support of a forgiving intelligentsia, and reap foreign accolades and aid dollars for having struck a blow against authoritarian conservatives?
The reason is that Yeltsin, along with his new team of aggressive young reformers, has no reason to think he can get by without the FSB and everything it represents.
During May the astronomical total of unpaid wages in Russia rose once again, with no-one expecting a significant fall soon.
Meanwhile, accusations continue to fly of "reformers" delivering juicy chunks of freshly privatised oil company stock to friendly banks at derisory prices via rigged auctions. Called upon to declare their earnings, government ministers put down six-figure dollar sums to "book royalties" or "lecturing fees".
A robber capitalism needs a machine of repression. And to be a credible menace, that machine must be allowed to show potential dissidents that they are not safe from it behind laws, human rights commitments or even the constitution.