LAUDED ABROAD, VILIFIED AT HOME

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

June 5, 1997

[for personal use only]

by Geoffrey York, Moscow Bureau

[St. Petersburg, Russia] In the five months since his release from a former KGB prison, Alexander Nikitin has been offered a Canadian immigration visa and a prestigious U.S. environmental award. In his home city, however, he is vilified as a traitor and a spy. He is trapped in St. Petersburg, banned from travelling to foreign countries or even to cities within Russia. Treason charges are still hanging over him, and the former KGB is watching his every move. Mr. Nikitin, the Russian environmentalist who was jailed for 10 months on espionage charges last year, is still not a free man. He was unable to accept the Canadian visa, and he could only send Ins wife and daughter to the White House ceremony that honoured the winners of the $100,000 environmental prize.

During his 10 months in prison last year, Amnesty International described Mr. Nikitin as the first Russian political prisoner since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The harassment of Mr. Nikitin by the domestic branch of the former KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), is part of a larger campaign against the handful of foreign environmental groups that remain active in Russia today. The security agency's director, Nikolai Kovalyov, has made it clear that he suspects the environmentalists of being spies for foreign countries. He has called them a priority target for his agency's work.

The biggest target of the FSB campaign is the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, which had employed Mr. Nikitin as co-author of a report of nuclear waste in Russian military submarines.

The FSB has confiscated almost all copies of Mr. Nikitin's report, which is regarded as forbidden literature. Norwegian members of Bellona have been refused permission to enter Russia. And a Russian member of the enviromental group is in exile in Oslo, fearing arrest if he returns to his home country.

In St. Petersburg, the FSB has continued to tap Mr. Nikitin's telephone and monitor his movements. It often searches his apartment when he is out. When his wife went to the United States to receive the enviromental award, a stack of documents mysteriously disappeared from one of the bags at the city airport.

Mr. Nikitin, still thin and haggard from his prison ordeal, is fighting for the espionage charges to be dropped permanently. A decision on the charges is supposed to be made before a deadline this month, although Mr. Nikitin expects that the FSB will try to extend the deadline.

"One of the reasons that the FSB is so afraid of an outcome favourable it me, is that they want to prevent people from cooperating with foreign environmental organizations," he said in an interview in St. Petersburg.

"They're obviously hungry for the atmosphere that existed in this country in Soviet times. They feel nostalgia for those times. When they talk to me they're openly resentful that people can be outspoken these days."

While many people in St. Petersburg have supported Mr. Nikitin's cause, he was surprised to discover how many others were afraid to talk to him after his release from jail in December.

The Russian defence ministry, he believes, has prohibited its soldiers and civilian employees from having any contact with him. Older people, especially older Russians who remember the terror of the Stalinist times, are worried about repercussions from the Russian authorities if they talk to him.

"They remember when the KGB was omnipotent," he said, "A lot of people remember Stalin's rule. Some of my neighbours stopped saying hello to my wife after my arrest, and they pretended not to notice me when I was released."

Some commentators in the Russian media have portrayed Mr. Nikitin as a traitor and a foreign agent. They seized on his U.S. environmental award as proof that he is paid by foreign countries.

Shortly before he was jailed last year, Mr. Nikitin had obtained approval from Canada for his immigration application. Today, when Russian journalists ask him whether he is still planning to emigrate to Canada, he refuses to give a direct answer because he knows they would see it as further evidence that he is unpatriotic.

To a Canadian reporter, however, he reluctantly discloses the truth. He is still planning to emigrate to Canada-if he is ever permitted to leave St. Petersburg.

In the meantime, he is working with Bellona and other groups to establish an International Centre for Environment and Law in his home city. The centre could open as early as this summer.

Mr. Nikitin's environmental work was given a new urgency last week when an out-of-service Russian nuclear submarine in the Far Fast began to sink in its harbour. Authorities denied there was any danger of leaking radiation, since the nuclear reactor had already been removed. But it was exactly the kind of environmental hazard that Mr. Nikitin had warned about.

Knut Erik Nilsen, a researcher from Bellona in 0slo, says the environmental group is determined to go ahead with the new centre in St. Petersburg even though its Norwegian members have been prohibited from entering Russia since December.

"When we can't go to Russia, when we're back to Soviet conditions, it is very difficult for us to work in this situation," Mr. Nilsen said in a telephone interview from 0slo. "We haven't been able in talk face-to-face with Alexander Nikitin since his release."

The Nikitin case has clearly demonstrated the need for a centre to deal with environment and the law, he said. "Environmental conflicts can often lead to human-rights violations."

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Johnson's Russia List

6 June 1997

djohnson@cdi.org