By Geoffrey York

The Globe & Mail (Canada)

April 21, 1998

MOSCOW -- International writers groups are rallying to the defence of a young Moscow poet who has endured a three-year legal nightmare of jails, courts and psychiatric institutions for allegedly selling $40 worth of drugs.

The poet, 25-year-old Alina Vitukhnovskaya, is confined to a metal cage in a Moscow courtroom as her trial continues this week. Police guards with truncheons are watching her every move, and she is escorted back to a women*s prison every night.

Since her arrest by the former KGB in October 1994 for allegedly selling a tiny quantity of LSD, she has spent 18 months in jail and three months in psychiatric institutions. More than three and a half years after her arrest, her trial resumed again last week.

Ms. Vitukhnovskaya, who has published five books of poetry, was researching newspaper articles on drug use by the children of Moscow's political and business elite at the time of her arrest.

Her supporters believe that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the domestic successor agency to the Soviet KGB, has targeted her for persecution because she refused to become an informant and would not reveal her sources.

After her arrest, Ms. Vitukhnovskaya spent a year in Moscow's notorious Butyrka prison, a pre-trial detention centre that has been widely condemned for overcrowding and disease.

She was eventually released, but the charges were not dropped. When she appeared voluntarily at a court proceeding last October to plead innocent, she was unexpectedly taken back into police custody.

In another bizarre twist in January, she was sent to a psychiatric institute for tests of her sanity. She was released in March when the tests found her normal. It was the second time she had been subjected to psychiatric tests.

"Every day there's a new surprise," said Alexander Tkachenko, general secretary of the Russian branch of PEN, the international writers group. "We don't know what surprise will be next. They stopped the case, then they sent her to a psychiatric institute. It's incredible."

If the FSB had not applied pressure on the courts, she would have been acquitted years ago, Mr. Tkachenko said in an interview. "The case was fabricated. It's very dangerous for freedom of speech."

Letters of support for Ms. Vitukhnovskaya have been written by PEN branches in Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and other countries. Several of Russia's most respected writers have also voiced their support for her.

"We are frightened by the events happening with Alina Vitukhnovskaya," the Russian writers said in a recent letter to President Boris Yeltsin. "Terrible force is being used against her. This force is still beyond the law and is uncontrolled by public opinion."

The FSB had asked for delays in the trial on the grounds that it needed to gather more evidence. But when the trial resumed last week, a senior FSB witness said he had forgotten many details of the case. "So many years have passed," Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitri Voronkov told the trial. "It's hard to remember."

The arrest of Ms. Vitukhnovskaya in 1994 was clearly a major FSB operation. About a dozen FSB officers in three cars were involved in the arrest, her father said.

But in his testimony last week, Lt.-Col. Voronkov refused to reveal how many FSB officers were involved in the arrest. He said it was "a state secret."

His testimony was riddled with contradictions. He denied that he had interrogated Ms. Vitukhnovskaya, but he was shown an interrogation report with his signature. He said he had forgotten it.

The trial also heard testimony from Alexander Kostenko, who was recruited from the street in 1994 to serve as an official witness when the police searched the apartment of two men who allegedly bought drugs from Ms. Vitukhnovskaya. Now in custody at Butyrka prison on an unrelated burglary charge and suffering from tuberculosis, Mr. Kostenko criticized the charges against the poet. "It's arbitrariness," he told the court. "Alina is not guilty."

In earlier stages of the trial, the two men who allegedly purchased drugs from Ms. Vitukhnovskaya recanted their previous statements and said the FSB had forced them to implicate her. They also said they had never met her before, except for one meeting that had been arranged by an unidentified telephone caller.

Under rules established in the Soviet era, the trial is being supervised by a judge and two civilian assistants. One of the assistants, an elderly war veteran, appeared to fall asleep at several points in the proceedings last week.

Ms. Vitukhnovskaya appeared in good spirits when the trial resumed, but by the second day she was pale and exhausted. She told the court she was not brought back to her prison cell until 2:30 a.m. and was roused again at 4:30 a.m. for the journey back to the courtroom. Depriving her of food and sleep was cruel and inhumane, and it amounted to torture, her lawyers told the court.

The judge, Dmitri Luchkin, adjourned the case for a day because he said he was afraid that Ms. Vitukhnovskaya would faint from exhaustion.

Her father, Alexander Vitukhnovsky, said the case shows that the FSB is still behaving like the KGB in the Soviet era. "Nothing has changed," he said in an interview. "Their methods are the same. Nobody can control them."

In several other recent cases, the FSB has arrested and jailed Russians for what appeared to be political reasons. An environmentalist and former naval officer, Alexander Nikitin, was arrested and imprisoned for 10 months on treason charges after he helped research a report on the mishandling of nuclear waste in the Russian military.

Another naval officer, Captain Grigory Pasko, was arrested last November and charged with spying for Japan. His lawyers say that Capt. Pasko, who edits a newspaper for Russia*s Pacific naval fleet, was arrested in revenge for his revelations about the fleet's environmental wrongdoing. In one incident, he filmed a Russian tanker dumping nuclear waste at sea.

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Johnson's Russia List

#2160

22 April 1998

davidjohnson@erols.com