Russian Navy Whistle-Blower Is Acquitted

Ending a former naval captain’s four-year ordeal, a St. Petersburg court Wednesday acquitted him of treason and espionage for helping to expose nuclear pollution by the Russian navy.

Judge Sergei Golets stunned Alexander Nikitin’s supporters and the defendant himself by finding Nikitin not guilty due to the “absence of a crime.” Members of the defense team and Nikitin’s backers began hugging each other as Golets finished his two-hour reading of the verdict.

“Words fail me. I am stunned and shocked,” said Nikitin, 47, who had faced 12 years in prison. “It was very difficult to live for four years under the pressure of accusations of spying and treason. I am greatly relieved.”

Environmentalists and human rights activists hailed Nikitin’s acquittal as a sign that the rule of law and democratic ideals can sometimes prevail in Russia.

“This day was worth living for, and I will never have to be ashamed of my life,” said Nikitin’s lead defense lawyer, Yuri Schmidt, who couldn’t hold back his tears as he spoke to reporters. “We have left behind four years of impossible work, blood and sleepless nights, but it was worth it.”

In what has become Russia’s most prominent human rights case, the former nuclear submarine inspector was tried twice on espionage charges for helping the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group, document the navy’s nuclear pollution above the Arctic Circle for a 1996 report.

In their determination to win a conviction, federal prosecutors retroactively charged Nikitin with violating laws that weren’t enacted until after he had already written his two chapters of the report and given them to Bellona. Until his first trial began last year, the specific charges remained secret even from Nikitin and his attorneys.

Nikitin, who spent 10 months in jail after his arrest in February 1996, was the first person in Russia to be declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International since Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov.

Prosecutor Alexander V. Gutsan has seven days to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court but didn’t indicate what he plans to do, telling reporters only, “We need to study the verdict.”

In his ruling, Golets rejected 24 volumes of evidence collected by the FSB--the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB--and said the charges were unconstitutional because they were based on laws and decrees that were both secret and retroactive.

He also ruled that the issues of the environment and health that Nikitin wrote about cannot be classified as secret under Russia’s Constitution--and therefore Nikitin couldn’t be accused of disclosing secret information.

“The court has come to the conclusion that Nikitin must be acquitted since he has not committed any illegal actions,” Golets told the court.

Golets had ruled last year in Nikitin’s first trial that the charges against him did not establish his guilt; he gave the case back to prosecutors to conduct further investigation.

After finding Nikitin innocent Wednesday, Golets explained that he couldn’t have made the same ruling last year because the prosecution hadn’t had the chance to present its entire case. An acquittal then, he said, would have been reversed by a higher court.

“This decision has cost [the court] a lot of nervous stress, since there was a lot of paperwork,” the judge told reporters. “But we believe that we have come to the right conclusion.”

The judge ruled that Nikitin, who hasn’t been allowed to leave St. Petersburg without permission for the past three years, is free to travel where he pleases. Nikitin’s wife and daughter are now in Canada and the United States, but Nikitin said he plans to remain in St. Petersburg working on environmental issues.

Bellona has focused much of its efforts on the Murmansk region bordering Norway where nearly one-fifth of the world’s nuclear reactors are located. Many of the 274 reactors are on decommissioned submarines and pose a serious pollution threat. The 1996 Bellona report describes the scene as a “Chernobyl in slow motion.”

“Nikitin was fighting for our right to information about the state of the environment--information crucial to our lives,” said Boris Pustyntsev, the head of a St. Petersburg-based rights group. “Had Nikitin been convicted today on the basis of the laughable charges the FSB had presented, we would have known that our right for such information had been buried. Today there are reasons to believe that democracy in Russia is underway.”

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Anna Badkhen in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.