By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — As Russian nuclear safety campaigner Aleksandr Nikitin nears the first anniversary of his arrest for espionage, he is able to walk the streets of St Petersburg, more or less a free man.
But although Nikitin was released on his own recognisance on December 14, the charges against him remain. The Russian government is embarrassed by the case, and the public prosecutor's office is clearly unenthusiastic about pursuing it. But the Federal Security Service (FSB), the state body that launched the prosecution and made the arrest, is sticking grimly to its guns.
Nikitin's detention in St Petersburg on February 6 last year followed several months of harassment by the FSB — the former KGB — of members and collaborators of the Norwegian environmental organisation Bellona.
A former naval captain, Nikitin had worked as a consultant for Bellona, studying the danger of radioactive contamination posed by the operations of the Russian navy's Northern Fleet. He is among the authors of a report, the final version of which was released in April 1996, that details the catastrophic state of the fleet's nuclear waste storage facilities.
The FSB claims that Nikitin used secret materials in preparing the report; Bellona insists that all the facts cited were obtained from non-classified sources.
For nearly eight months, until September 30, the FSB held Nikitin without bringing definitive charges against him. During this time he was adopted by Amnesty International as its first prisoner of conscience in post-Soviet Russia. Nikitin was eventually accused formally of treason, espionage and forgery.
The charges were followed by a flurry of restrictions on environmental activists. Four Norwegian Bellona members were banned indefinitely from entering St Petersburg, and two Norwegian radio journalists were denied visas to travel to Murmansk, the main city on the Kola Peninsula, where the Northern Fleet is based. A shipment of 1500 copies of the controversial report was seized by customs officials.
In Norway these moves were met with outrage, quickly echoed by the European Parliament and officials of the European Union. In mid-October European Union special envoy Elisabeth Schroedter visited St Petersburg to talk with both the prosecution and defence.
Describing the case as "politically motivated", Schroedter said the European Parliament was "unanimously convinced of Nikitin's innocence", and suggested that the case could have "a very negative effect on Russia's standing in the Council of Europe".
Meanwhile, Nikitin's supporters were showing in detail how the information in the Bellona report was all drawn from the public record.
The FSB switched to placing stress on another claim: that as well as violating published laws, Nikitin had breached two secret Defence Ministry decrees listing material that could not be disclosed. So secret were these lists that, in defiance of a Constitutional Court decision, details of them were not released even to Nikitin's defence lawyers.
By invoking these decrees, the FSB created a tangle of absurdities. The decrees were adopted in 1993; Nikitin left the navy in 1992, and could not have known of their existence. In any case, the Russian constitution states that an individual cannot be held criminally responsible for violating laws or decrees that have not been published.
By the final months of 1996, many figures in the Russian government were unnerved by the injustice, or at least the political cost, of the Nikitin prosecution. These people clearly included leading officials of the general prosecutor's office.
According to press reports, the decision to release Nikitin was taken personally by general prosecutor Yury Skuratov; after FSB jailers delayed carrying out the order, Skuratov was forced to send a teletype demanding that his instructions be fulfilled.
Deputy general prosecutor Mikhail Katyshev, entrusted with reviewing the FSB's case against Nikitin, told the English-language Moscow Times on December 15 that in his view the case contained "no hint of espionage".
"It is time for the prosecutor's office to admit that mistakes could have been made", Katyshev stated.
Katyshev said he would issue a decision on whether the case should go to court, but did not say when. Nikitin and his supporters are being forced to wait, and to reflect on the still extensive power of the FSB to pull officials of the judicial system into line.
The FSB will quite probably succeed in having the case brought to trial. But obtaining a conviction and making it stick will present a much greater challenge.
The Russian media have given the case only limited coverage, and the response within the country has been muted. But Nikitin's plight has aroused a degree of indignation in the west that the FSB failed to anticipate. As Nikitin himself told a press conference in late December, "They didn't realise that there would be so many people who would speak up for me, or that there would be so many protests all over the world".
If Nikitin is returned to jail, the cost to Russia's rulers in lost international prestige and influence, and quite probably aid as well, will be appreciable.
With only a weak case to argue, the FSB faces the unaccustomed task of defending its actions before a critical world audience, without the automatic support of the higher Russian state authorities.
The FSB's predicament was summed up recently by a St Petersburg newspaper commentator. The security force, the commentator noted, was "like a python that has swallowed a brick, and is unable either to digest it or to spit it out".
Meanwhile, late in November a decree issued in the name of President Boris Yeltsin turned the city of Severomorsk, the home of the Northern Fleet, into a closed district from which foreigners are barred.