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 Russian
Conservation News #18, Samples articles and
excerpts:Bulletin Board Siberia's Lake Chany Nikitin Wins a Battle as War Continues Biosphere Reserves in Russia
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Russian environmentalist Aleksandr Nikitin won a court battle in St. Petersburg on October 29, 1998 when Judge Sergei Golets told the Federal Security Service (FSB) that the espionage and treason indictment against him was too vague to hold up at trial. However, by then sending the case back to the investigators, the judge invited continued foot-dragging by the KGB's successor while Nikitin's fate remains undeter-mined. Golets' ruling was confirmed by the Supreme Court on February 4,1999 when the highest Russian tribunal rejected appeals by both prosecution and defense.
Nikitin maintains that all information in the heavily footnoted report is based on openly available documents. The 648 footnotes on its 163 pages refer to Russian and Western research institu-tions, military journals, and reports, but also to sources as secretive and unusual as Tom Clancy. The FSB refused to state exactly which parts of the report were secret, thus making it impossible for Nikitin to identify his sources for such passages. In June, 1998 three Russian admirals issued a report comparing the Bellona report to openly available materials. They concluded that Nikitin had not revealed any classified information. They further found "inadequacies in the findings of the so-called experts of the Russian naval headquarters," upon which the FSB had relied in charging Nikitin. (For a copy of the report, contact Bellona&emdash; please refer to Conservation Contacts at the end of this issue.) The dismissal of the indictment against Nikitin--although not of the case itself--shows that the FSB's three years of "investigative" work could not withstand judicial scrutiny by an independent tribunal. Nevertheless, the FSB can prolong its trench warfare by continuing to investigate, while Nikitin, because of the still pending espionage and treason charges, cannot leave St. Petersburg. This situation has left his important work on the safety of spent nuclear fuel on hold. Furthermore, the FSB's activities in the Nikitin case have a significant chilling effect on other environmentalists and nuclear scientists in Russia. The FSfls investigative methods tell Russian scientists, especially would-be whistle blowers, that some powerful entity can use existing law against the author of an article or a research paper criticizing it. The new Law on State Secrecy helps the FSB with future "espionage" cases, as it contains phrases such as "may be secret" or "can be judged secret," which are open to interpretation by military commissions. The FSB jailed Nikitin for ten months and harassed Nikitin and his family. Bellona employees and colleagues of Nikitin who helped write the report were denied visas, preventing them from testifying in his case. Nikitin was initially denied a lawyer of his choice, and instead was offered an FSB attorney. |
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The photo of Aleksander Nikitin was obtained from the Bellona website at http://www.bellona.no |
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Nikitin,
a former submarine officer who lost a brother-in-law to
radiation exposure, was indicted because he wrote two
chapters of "The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of
Radioactive Contamination," a report the Norwegian
environ-mental organization Bellona issued in 1996. The
report is available in print in English, Russian, and French
and on the Internet in English, Russian, and Norwe-gian, but
the FSB has banned it as "forbidden literature." The Bellona
report, describing naval disposal of nuclear waste on- and
off-shore of the Kola Peninsula, is the first publication to
be banned in post-Soviet Russia.
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