A Russian Goes on Trial, Soviet Style

Environmentalist Alexander Nikitin had been in jail more than six months on espionage charges when one of the key secrecy acts he is accused of violating was finally adopted.

The act, a Defense Ministry decree, is itself so secret that Nikitin and his lawyers had never even seen it until this week. Neither had the three judges who will soon decide whether Nikitin is guilty of treason.

But that did not keep the trial of the former navy captain from starting Tuesday in what has become Russia’s foremost human rights case since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Nikitin, 46, a former nuclear submarine inspector for the Defense Ministry, faces up to 20 years in prison for helping a Norwegian environmental group document extensive radioactive pollution by the Russian navy north of the Arctic Circle around Murmansk.

The espionage trial, more than three years in the making, has become a test of the military’s power to hide its degradation of the environment behind a curtain of national security. While Russia’s fiscal crisis has sparked fears of a return to Communist control of the economy, Nikitin’s case has made activists worry about the revival of Soviet-style political repression.

“The outcome of this trial will be the single most important indication of whether Russia will become a society of law or whether it reverts into a society where security forces can bring to bear secret evidence on a retroactive basis against scientists who speak the truth,” said Stephen Kass, a New York environmental attorney and board member of Human Rights Watch who is here to observe the trial.

On Tuesday, Judge Sergei Golets, the head of the three-judge panel hearing the case, rejected Nikitin’s motion for an open trial and closed the proceedings to the public.

Prosecution Case Already Presented

The prosecution already has presented its case against Nikitin in 21 volumes of material prepared by the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.

Nikitin is scheduled to testify for two days behind closed doors and then offer two witnesses on his behalf. The trial could come to a close as early as Friday.

Golets said in an interview before the trial began that the essence of the case is whether two Defense Ministry decrees governing secrecy can be applied retroactively, as a commission of experts already has ruled. Nikitin’s attorneys argue it is unconstitutional to do so.

“Today, everything that Nikitin has said in his report--it all constitutes a state secret,” the judge said. “Had he written it today, there is no question that what he wrote would be regarded as secret.”

Amnesty International has declared Nikitin to be Russia’s first “prisoner of conscience” since Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s best-known dissident. International human rights groups and Russian environmental organizations are closely watching the case as a measure of the extent of freedom of speech Russians will be allowed in the future.

Last year, Nikitin was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize by the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation, but he was denied permission to attend a White House reception honoring the winners.

The United States has urged Russia to drop the case against Nikitin. Canada has invited Nikitin and his family to emigrate there. Officials of half a dozen countries, including the U.S. and Canada, were among more than 150 observers and reporters at the open portion of Tuesday’s hearing.

Nikitin, who spent 11 years as a nuclear submarine engineer, began working with the Bellona Foundation, the Norwegian environmental group, after he retired from the Defense Ministry in 1992. He had written a section of a report for Bellona on pollution by the Northern Fleet when he was arrested in February 1996 for allegedly passing secret information to the group.

Nikitin was denied a lawyer for more than two months after his arrest and spent more than 10 months in jail. Since his release on bail in December 1996, he has been prohibited from leaving St. Petersburg.

He says that the information he provided Bellona was based entirely on public sources and that he did not divulge any confidential information.

“The indictment says I have violated a law on state secrets,” Nikitin said in an interview. “But when we ask them to cite the exact article of the law, the paragraph, the point, the prosecution has a problem answering us. It’s like saying I violated the criminal code but without pointing out which article.”

A 45-page indictment charges Nikitin with violating the government’s official secrets law along with two Defense Ministry decrees that spell out what the law covers.

While the law is a matter of public record, both decrees are closely guarded secrets.

The law was adopted in December 1995, three months after Nikitin turned in his part of the report to Bellona. The first Defense Ministry decree was issued in 1993, the year after he retired from the military. The second was issued in August 1996, after he had already been arrested.

Alexander Kolb, a Federal Security Service investigator who helped build the case against Nikitin, said the secret information that Nikitin revealed in the Bellona report included a record of Russian naval nuclear accidents.

“Nikitin has single-handedly exposed a history of accidents which led to the deaths of many, many people,” Kolb said. “The loss caused by his actions is immense. I don’t think it can even be expressed by any amount of money.”

Since the easing of Soviet-era controls starting about a decade ago, reports have revealed a series of accidents involving nuclear submarines, several of which killed crew members.

Report Focused on Dangers in Arctic

The Bellona report, released while Nikitin was in jail, primarily documents nuclear contamination above the Arctic Circle near Murmansk, not far from the Norwegian border, where the Northern Fleet bases its nuclear submarines.

Frederic Hauge, Bellona’s president, said there are 274 nuclear reactors in the region--nearly one-fifth of all the nuclear reactors in the world. Many of the reactors are on decommissioned subs and pose a serious danger of pollution.

There are also 11 dump sites with vast stores of nuclear waste in hazardous condition, Hauge said. At one point, he said, Russia dumped 17 decommissioned reactors into the sea nearby.

The purpose of the Bellona report was to help develop a cleanup plan for the area. After the report’s publication, the Norwegian government provided Russia with nearly $50 million in aid to address problems the authors detailed. But Hauge said the Nikitin case has had a chilling effect and has frightened away Russians who might have joined the cleanup effort.

“A lot of people in the region are afraid of working on this issue,” he said. “Even though this is clearly legal information, what is legal to talk about today can be secret tomorrow, and you can be charged for it under secret, retroactive laws.”

In a similar case in Vladivostok, navy Capt. Grigory Pasko, a military journalist, has been charged with treason for exposing the navy’s dumping of nuclear waste into the ocean.

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to make it secret, a well-known formula of the Soviet Union,” Nikitin said. “It was the method of military people in the Soviet Union for a long time.”

Nikitin says he has been the victim of frequent harassment by men he believes are government agents who follow him and members of his family around St. Petersburg. His tires have been slashed, glue was poured into the locks of his car, and one of his lawyers was accosted. He assumes the Federal Security Service listens to all his conversations.

Not long after he moved into a new office, he noticed that a small hole had been drilled into his ceiling from the attic. The hole is just the size for a small microphone.

“I think they were trying to force me to make a mistake by keeping me under pressure all the time,” he said. “For instance, I could have run away and thus violated my promise not to leave town. And that would have given them the opportunity to put me back in jail.”