Russian Whistle-Blower Calls Closed Trial ‘a Crime’ : Rights: Scientist who publicized chemical arms program faces arrest after refusing to appear in court.

A Russian scientist who publicized a covert chemical weapons program and is now being prosecuted for revealing state secrets said he expects to be arrested today after refusing to appear at a closed-door trial that he calls a Stalinist farce.

Vil S. Mirzayanov, the first dissident under the government of President Boris N. Yeltsin, said a warrant was issued for his detention Tuesday after he failed to appear in court to participate in what he calls “a crime” against human rights and the new Russian constitution.

The 59-year-old chemist expects to be sent back to Lefortovo Prison, the notorious former KGB jail where he was held for 12 days in October, 1992, after publishing an article saying the top-secret Moscow laboratory where he worked had produced a binary chemical weapon more potent than any previously known.

If convicted of revealing state secrets, Mirzayanov will face up to eight years in prison.

The decision to prosecute the whistle-blower--and to do so behind closed doors--raises questions about Russia’s commitment both to human rights and to chemical disarmament. It dismays U.S. officials, who have broached the issue with the Russians repeatedly, and who lodged another diplomatic protest on the eve of President Clinton’s recent visit to Moscow.

Mirzayanov argues that he did not reveal state secrets, because he neither had access to nor disclosed any technical information on the making of the chemical weapon.

Moreover, he argues that his prosecution violates Russia’s newly adopted constitution, which requires that a law be published before it can be used to prosecute. The government’s definition of what constitutes a state secret has never been made public, according to his lawyer and the human rights defenders who have rallied to his side.

Among the evidence against Mirzayanov is an order marked “Top Secret” and signed by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. The order, which Mirzayanov obtained while preparing his defense, states that information about chemical weapons shall be added to the list of state secrets.

Chernomyrdin’s order is dated March 30, 1993--months after Mirzayanov’s arrest. Mirzayanov’s lawyer argued that such a retroactive prosecution is unconstitutional--a position that Russian and Western human rights defenders have championed.

“If Dr. Mirzayanov is convicted, would it mean that every time the state agencies find it unpleasant to have certain issues raised, there will be a new law adopted to retroactively punish disseminators of information?” said a statement from the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, a human rights group named for the Nobel Prize-winning dissident physicist and headed by his widow, Yelena Bonner.

None of this seemed to influence the three-judge panel, which denied each of Mirzayanov’s motions and appeals Monday, according to the chemist and his lawyer, who emerged periodically from behind the worn courtroom door to brief reporters waiting in the dingy hallway.

Mirzayanov likened the proceedings to “something from a movie about trials in the 1930s,” in which an avenging prosecutor denounces “enemies of the people.”

Prosecutor Leonid S. Pankratov told the judges that Yeltsin had said that although the Soviet Union no longer exists, “Russia has the same secrets, so let’s proceed on that basis,” Mirzayanov said.

Mirzayanov, a mild-mannered ethnic Tatar, is an unlikely dissident. His very name, Vil, is an acronym for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and he spent 30 years quietly serving the Soviet war machine.

He believes his prosecution is intended to intimidate other scientists who might challenge Russia’s still-powerful military-industrial complex.

Mirzayanov alleges that field testing in the chemical weapons program continued as late as 1992--after Yeltsin had promised to abide by an earlier Soviet-U.S. pledge to ban large-scale chemical weapons production.

The program may not be a violation of international agreements, however, as Russia had not specifically pledged to ban development of chemical weapons. In January, 1993, Russia did sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans development, production and storage of such weapons. But the treaty has not yet been ratified and will not come into effect until January, 1995, at the earliest.

Mirzayanov warns that the Russian chemical weapons research Establishment wants to keep the new binary weapon secret precisely to avoid having to destroy it.

Ironically, Mirzayanov’s trial comes at a time of Western optimism about Russia’s willingness to dismantle its chemical arsenal.

Two chemical disarmament accords, signed earlier this month during the Clinton-Yeltsin summit, were described by U.S. officials as “a breakthrough” and “real progress.”

The accords commit the United States and Russia to eliminate chemical weapons stockpiles, and they allocate U.S. money to help Russia safely reprocess its poisons.

The prosecution of Mirzayanov for squealing on the chemical weapons program is perplexing because Russian officials have made a point of publicizing and repudiating many Soviet-era sins, from 1950s radiation experiments on soldiers to recent leaks at nuclear power plants.

Mirzayanov said the explanation is simple: The Yeltsin government is too weak to control the military-industrial complex and could not stop his trial even if it wanted to.

“Tell everybody that the totalitarian regime in Russia has changed its form, but not its essence,” Mirzayanov said. “The KGB, the prosecutor . . . and, as you see today, the court all serve the military-industrial complex.”