<Russia: The Pendulum of Democrary...> New's Today: Nikitin Trial --good article re: Putin's likely problems with the most basic freedoms:
Published Friday, January 7, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News
Trial of Russian activist hints at Putin's hard edge
New leader favors secret police and 'strong state' over freedoms
BY LORI MONTGOMERY
Mercury News Moscow Bureau
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Last week, before Boris Yeltsin's shock resignation propelled him to the presidency, Vladimir Putin visited the branch of the Federal Security Service here in his hometown.
The office, known as the KGB when Putin worked there, was facing a stunning humiliation: A St. Petersburg judge was about to acquit Alexander Nikitin, a retired navy captain charged with leaking state secrets about nuclear pollution. The Dec. 29 verdict -- hailed as a victory for the rule of law in Russia -- was an unprecedented slap at the security service, now called the FSB.
The Nikitin case -- a sensation in St. Petersburg, the crucible of Russian liberalism -- opens a window on the enigmatic Putin, a 47-year-old St. Petersburg native, onetime city official, KGB spy and former FSB chief. Respected here as a pragmatist and a fervent anti-communist, the acting president is also condemned as an enemy of free speech, free information and individual liberty who is unlikely to rein in a resurgent FSB.
At the time of Putin's visit, the verdict was still three days away. But details of the roughshod investigation and harassment of Nikitin were well-known. So when Putin declared himself ''highly satisfied'' with the FSB, human rights advocates were outraged.
''It was perfectly clear that the FSB had spent taxpayer money to investigate an innocent man,'' said Boris Pustintsev, president of Citizens' Watch, a local FSB watchdog. ''The prestige of Russia had been violated. And he called it satisfactory work.''
Another side
Putin holds ''liberal, market-oriented priorities . . . but there is another side, and that's his attitude toward human rights and the power of the state,'' said St. Petersburg sociologist Leonid Kesselman. ''This is the side that draws concern from liberal Russians -- and I think it makes the West concerned, too.''
As FSB director, Putin purged the most hidebound hard-liners, but allowed the agency to harass and prosecute environmentalists -- whom Putin last summer called fronts for Western spy agencies who ''will always be the focus of our attentions.''
As prime minister, Putin backed Yeltsin's messy brand of democracy, but also pressed a brutal offensive against Chechen rebels, supporting legislation that last month gave the FSB new powers to seal off territory, confine Russian citizens and restrict travel.
Last week, as Putin published a mission statement calling for ''the creation of a civil society that will be a counterweight'' to executive authority, he also declared Russia unaccustomed to the ''liberal traditions of England and the U.S.,'' and called for a ''strong state . . . to guarantee order.''
This week, in preparation for a March 26 special election to succeed Yeltsin, Putin worked to replace his icy spy face with a kindly, family-man persona, gushing in an interview on Russian television about his late father and the difficulty Yeltsin must have faced in deciding to leave office.
Secret service influence
But in St. Petersburg -- where Nikitin and others say Putin publicly advocated Nikitin's conviction -- few were impressed.
''I don't have any joy that Putin is going to be our president,'' said Nikitin, 47, who was jailed for 11 months and harassed for three years after he wrote a report on Russian nuclear submarine accidents for a Norwegian environmental group.
''It's unclear what he has inside and how things are going to develop,'' Nikitin said. ''But Putin was brought up by the secret service. And it is the most reactionary structure remaining in Russia.''
''Putin is a dangerous man -- a very dangerous man,'' said Pustintsev. ''You can never distance yourself from a KGB past. His ascendance to power means there won't be any radical change in the state security system.''
Human rights activists say Putin's handling of the Nikitin case and the prosecutions on his FSB watch of other environmentalists suggest a disturbing lack of democratic principles.
Pustintsev and other observers believe that the FSB has grown bolder in recent years. The KGB was dismantled after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But after the FSB was created in 1995, the domestic spy agency reassembled much of its old authority, including control over intelligence-gathering operations. One of its first targets was Nikitin.
Imprisoned in February 1996, Nikitin was called Russia's first ''post-Soviet prisoner of conscience.'' Based on secret Defense Ministry decrees -- some of them adopted after his arrest -- the FSB accused him of espionage and high treason. The reason: 10 pages Nikitin wrote in a 1995 report by the Bellona Foundation in Norway, a neighbor long concerned about Russia's handling of nuclear waste. Nikitin has always said the information came from public sources, but the FSB claimed he had stolen state secrets.
Nikitin spent 11 years as an engineer on nuclear submarines and as nuclear inspector for the Defense Ministry. He retired in 1993, disillusioned by shoddy maintenance, haphazard dumping and storage of nuclear materials, and shocking accidents. He wrote about the accidents for Bellona.
In a nation where environmental catastrophe is often linked to the military, more ecological spies soon emerged.
Grigory Pasko, a military journalist in Vladivostok, was charged in 1997 with treason after he gave Japanese television a videotape showing Russian naval vessels dumping radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. Convicted this year on a lesser charge, Pasko has appealed.
Last summer, the FSB raided the Vladivostok apartment and laboratory of Vladimir Soifer, a scientist who studies radioactivity in the Pacific.
And Justine Hamilton, an American student-exchange coordinator, left Russia after the FSB accused her of collecting ''secret environmental maps'' for the CIA.
The persecution of environmentalists is blatantly illegal, said Yuri Schmidt, Nikitin's defense attorney. Russia's Constitution, adopted in 1993, guarantees ''the right to a decent environment (and) reliable information about the environment.'' It also makes ''the concealment by officials of facts and circumstances creating a threat to people's lives and health'' punishable under federal law.
Federal laws on state secrets specifically exclude information about the environment from the body of data that can be classified as secret.
When a St. Petersburg Times reporter called attention to the relevant legal provisions last summer, FSB official Alexander Timashov responded: ''I don't care.'' Putin, too, seemed unimpressed.
''Sadly, foreign secret services . . . very actively use all sorts of ecological . . . organizations'' as fronts for spying, Putin told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
After an extensive investigation, Judge Sergei Golets exonerated Nikitin last week, accusing the FSB of committing ''a direct violation of the constitution'' by bringing charges based on secret Defense Ministry decrees. In open court, he encouraged Nikitin to sue the FSB for illegal imprisonment.
''This verdict will have a significant impact on the KGB,'' Golets said in an interview. ''The court drew attention to the fact that the KGB must now abide by the law and pay attention not only to their own interests, but to the evidence. Because the court is guided by reasons of law, not reasons of KGB 'necessity.' ''
The day after the verdict was read, prosecutors filed an appeal with the Russian Supreme Court. Golets, Nikitin and his attorney all believe the verdict will stand.
Golets expects a Supreme Court affirmation of his ruling to stand, too, ''although we have a new president and although Putin was head of the FSB . . .
''The verdict is open. And lawyers throughout the world will be able to see whether Russia is a state based on law, or whether law is just a smoke screen to hide any arbitrariness.''
mercurycenter.com
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