June 2004 Archives
Peanut butter and sushi give way to a campaign of 'precision terror'
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 27, 2004
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Moscow -- I was 11 years old when I saw Americans up close for the first time.
Their women wore long silver earrings and no makeup. Their men took vitamins and didn't tuck in their T-shirts. They had strange ways, such as keeping their shoes on when they entered our downtown Leningrad apartment. I couldn't figure out why; none of us would ever think of tracking inside on the soles of our sneakers the layers of grime, urine and spilled beer that coated our building's dark, damp stairwell. Maybe in America apartment stairwells were clean. In any event, the unfamiliar scent that wafted out of their suitcases told of strange, foreign treats, such as peanut butter and dental floss. For me, this was the smell of America.
My parents did not have to warn me to keep quiet about these visits. Our foreign friends were American psychologists who had come to share the latest ideas and trends about their profession with their Soviet colleagues, such as my dad. In a time before open borders or the Internet, they brought information about the outside world that was otherwise unavailable to us. This was dangerous stuff. Soviet ideologues had for decades banned much of modern psychology, declaring it a bourgeois science. This was 1986, when the Communist government, backed by the feared KGB secret police, still controlled everything that went on in public and much of what went on in people's homes. I was old enough by then to realize that everyone could get in trouble -- serious trouble -- if I mentioned the Americans' visits to my friends, schoolmates or, God forbid, my teachers.
The way the Soviet government saw it, any foreigner was a potential spy, and anyone who spoke to foreigners was an accomplice. The KGB monitored all foreigners and kept a particularly close watch on Soviet citizens who interacted with outsiders.
At the dawn of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, fear of reprisals still permeated our everyday lives. We played host to my dad's American colleagues as covertly as we could. To get them out of the city, where all of their movements were watched, we would spirit them to our favorite pine forests on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. We had to sneak them illegally past the watchful sentries at the many Soviet military bases that dotted the area and made it a strict no-go zone for Westerners. Our friends had to speak very quietly or not at all so that no one would recognize them as foreigners.
Back then, we were so used to living in fear we could not imagine that things would ever change. We never could have pictured the collapse of the all- powerful police state -- and the freedom to travel, read what we want and associate with whomever we want that followed. Now, looking back, I see it is all changing again. Fear has returned to Russia.
Russia's creeping transition from a country ruled by fear to a country ruled by fear has been slow. For several years after Russian President Boris Yeltsin, backed by what seemed like millions of supporters, stood on a tank and stared down the Soviet regime in 1991, it seemed that everything was possible as dramatic changes took place across the nation.
The post-Soviet government looked to the West to help create a new, democratic Russia, and foreigners could now move freely across the country. Talking to Americans, once forbidden, was now a perfectly normal thing to do. In Obninsk, a small western Russian town, which had been built around the Soviet nuclear industry and had been off-limits to anyone who had not had special access, scientists who had once sworn to shun foreigners now gave tours of nuclear reactors to Western journalists.
Suddenly it became possible to talk about the Soviet Union's dirty little secrets -- not just the decades of political repression and misrule that had disfigured society, but also the mismanagement and corruption that continued to undermine the nation. Environmentalists, foreign and Russian, swarmed to the formerly top-secret submarine bases of the Soviet navy's dilapidated Northern Fleet to record the potentially catastrophic handling of nuclear waste.
More than 350,000 human rights and humanitarian groups, many of them financed by Western organizations, replaced Communist Party cells as the basis for the country's nascent civil society. Many Russians embraced all things Western, and peanut butter and dental floss appeared in Russian stores.
But peanut butter and sushi were an inadequate reward for millions of Russians who ended up benefiting little, if at all, from the momentous changes that brought down the communist police state. Ten years after my first glimpse of Americans, the euphoria of freedom had all but worn off, and post-Soviet Russia was beginning to look like a failed state.
In 1996, the army was bogged down in the third year of a war in breakaway Chechnya it would lose, forced in August of that year to pull out by a few thousand lightly armed separatists who exposed the poor fighting capability of the once-feared Red Army. Impoverished soldiers abandoned their posts at military bases and combed through our favorite pine forests near the Gulf of Finland, picking wild mushrooms to supplement their meager diets. A hungry recruit broke into our summer cottage to steal two cans of cured beef. The poverty and deprivation hit even high-security military bases -- unable to pay their electric bills, nuclear weapons facilities had their security features switched off, and bases monitoring the skies for incoming missiles had to shut down their radars.
The military was not the only institution that suffered. In St. Petersburg, my hometown, the forensic morgue could not pay for electricity, and the bodies lay on stretchers in hallways, rotting, while the most vicious mob in the city -- the so-called cemetery mafia, run by a crook named Kostya the Grave -- extorted money from grieving relatives of the deceased.
Gangland-style assassinations were so commonplace that St. Petersburg earned the nickname "Russia's crime capital" and hosted a popular TV series, "Criminal St. Petersburg." A lot of people bought guns. When I asked a downstairs neighbor in my apartment building to turn down the music because it was waking up my infant son, he pulled a pistol on me.
Millions of workers, meanwhile, went months without paychecks. Those of us who had jobs with a regular paycheck felt lucky -- until the summer of 1998, when Russia defaulted on its international debt and the ruble crashed. Overnight, my salary of $400 a month, paid in rubles and enough to make ends meet, turned into $10. A month later, like millions of Russians working for fledgling private companies, I was laid off.
Russia's economy eventually recovered, somewhat. But after the crisis of 1998, the country lost faith once and for all in the idea that Westernizing reformers should oversee Russia's post-Soviet transformation. Russians blamed democrats and the West for the country's ills and cried out for security.
Millions embraced the ascent to power of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy who promised to root out crime and end the separatist rebellion in Chechnya. A decade of grinding poverty had made people forget that nearly all of them had relatives who had suffered at the hands of the Soviet secret police, and Putin's affiliation with the Soviet punitive system that had executed tens of millions concerned few Russians.
Instead, the KGB, in the minds of many Russians, had become synonymous with intelligence, loyalty, patriotism and order.
But when the secret services take over, they do so on their own terms. After his election as president in 2000, Putin and the former KGB officers who make up the bulk of his administration have taken the Russians' attitude as a blank check for retribution against anyone who digs up things they want to keep secret, from nuclear waste to mass graves of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's victims. In his most recent speech to the nation, Putin publicly admonished his critics, telling Russians that human rights groups worked for "shady" foreign interests.
In 1999, liberals wrote a letter Putin, who had become Yeltsin's prime minister at the time, asking him to use his authority to get the charges dropped against Alexander Nikitin, a Russian navy captain who had taken advantage of the new freedoms after the fall of communism to expose the dangers to the environment posed by the "floating Chernobyls," hundreds of aging and poorly maintained nuclear submarines of the Russian navy's Northern Fleet. In 1995, the former KGB had jailed Nikitin on charges of espionage and treason for co-authoring a report on the fleet with Norwegian environmentalists.
Not only did Putin ignore the plea of Nikitin's supporters; he told a major Russian newspaper that any environmentalist or journalist could be a foreign spy. I soon learned that Putin's Cold War-like statement concerned me, too.
I was covering Nikitin's trial in 1999, and after one session in court I asked the prosecutor to comment on the progress of the case.
"If I were you I would be very careful," responded the prosecutor, Alexander Gutsan. "Particularly since you have a little boy."
I walked out of the courtroom shivering at the notion that the prosecutor had just threatened my 2-year-old son. That episode spelled out for me that as far as the state was concerned, we reporters were not impartial observers, just doing our job by writing about the case. From their point of view, if we asked questions, we were accomplices to the accused.
A St. Petersburg court acquitted Nikitin in 1999, but the secret police, now called the FSB, has moved on to other targets, using prosecution of scientists and journalists as warnings to others that there is no room for whistle-blowers and others who stir up trouble in Putin's Russia.
In April, a Moscow court found physicist Igor Sutyagin guilty of spying for the United States and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor. The FSB said Sutyagin, the author of numerous analytical works about Soviet weapons, passed on to the CIA information about Russian nuclear submarine weaponry and missile warning systems. But international human rights groups say Sutyagin is one of a number of innocent victims in a chain of trumped-up cases relying on charges based on laws so secret the defense is not allowed to see them and intended to bring back the paranoid secrecy of the Cold War era.
When all falls quiet in the tiny apartment in Obninsk where Sutyagin once lived and worked, his wife, Irina Manannikova, listens to the loud clock in her cramped kitchen tick away the time her husband spends in jail. His bookshelf is still stacked with books in English and Russian he used to research his reports, sources he bought openly in Moscow bookstores in the early 1990s. By the time he was arrested, the FSB charged that these books, like the newspapers and other nonclassified research materials cluttering his desk, contained secret information.
FSB investigators made no secret of the fact that the rules for what they considered classified materials had changed, radically. "I asked them, 'What's the difference between having three newspapers on his desk and 10?' " Manannikova recalled. "They told me, 'It's forbidden to have more than three.' "
Last week, Russia's Supreme Court reversed a lower court's acquittal of Valentin Danilov, a physicist the FSB accused of selling research data to China, analytical material his colleagues say was gathered exclusively from public sources. A jury had acquitted Danilov in December, but the high court reinstated the criminal case against him.
"This is not the Great Terror of the 1930s," said Moscow historian Igor Dolutsky, referring to the Stalinist purges, during which up to 20 million people perished. "This is precision terror: Everybody doesn't go to prison, but the few who do are enough to scare everybody else."
Last year, the Russian government banned Dolutsky's high school history textbook after Putin announced that high school history lessons should be less negative and create a sense of pride in Russia's youth. Among the sections Putin's government found offensive in Dolutsky's text: all references to the purges by Soviet secret police.
Some who research the purges have understood the message. Leonid Novak, a historian who researches Stalinist mass graves, recently hesitated as I interviewed him about the country's reluctance to address Russia's gruesome past.
"You're going to quote me and then the FSB will ban me from their archives," he said.
Western journalists, too, have felt the pressure. Charles Digges, a veteran reporter in Russia who is now based in Norway, said he felt like he was being watched during his latest reporting trip to Russia.
"It was a little scary," Digges said. "I felt that the people I was talking to -- that somebody was making notes on it all. People would come up and stare, the same person with different nametags every day. It was very, very weird."
In the small living room of his Moscow apartment, Dolutsky explained why fear has returned.
"The fear is back because the system is back. The system is built on fear, " Dolutsky said. "The totalitarian state is being resurrected."
As I listened to him I suddenly caught myself thinking: "It's amazing that he isn't afraid to say things like this."
It was a chilling thought. I had not thought like that, I realized, since the Soviet Union -- around the time I first saw Americans up close.
19.06.2004 - By ANDREW OSBORN
The day the Soviet flag rattled down the Kremlin flagpole for the last time was supposed to be the day when Russians won what they had been deprived of for more than 70 years: freedom.
But, 13 years later, freedom, if human rights activists are to be believed, is once again under attack and Russia's government is once again embracing authoritarianism.
This week has seen two court cases, one involving artistic and religious freedom, and the other an onslaught on the freedom to take part in politics and criticise the Kremlin.
Modern art often shocks, but its creators are not usually thrown into jail, particularly in self-proclaimed democracies. But in Vladimir Putin's Russia, wannabe artists must tread carefully.
This week two museum workers and an artist went on trial in Moscow for inciting religious hatred. The main defendant in the case could face up to five years in prison if found guilty, be fined up to 500,000 roubles ($27,100) and be banned from holding a position of responsibility for a further five years.
His crime: staging an exhibition of modern art which focused on Jesus Christ and the increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church.
The exhibition, Ostorojno religiya! (Beware religion!), shocked and angered the church's followers (who technically account for almost two-thirds of Russia's 144 million population) when it opened in January last year. It was provocative and uncompromising.
One piece, a poster by a Russian-born American artist called Alexander Kosolapov, had an image of Jesus in a doctored Coca-Cola advertisement poster with the legend "This is my blood". Another, by an artist called Alina Gurevich, featured a church made from vodka bottles in an overt dig at the tax exemption the church used to benefit from when it came to selling alcohol.
A piece by an artist called Alisa Zrazhevskaya gave a controversial twist to the traditional Russian religious symbol of an icon. In fairground style, the artist removed the saint's head, hands and Bible and invited the public to put their own head and hands through the holes. Inscribed on the installation was the word "vipers".
The exhibition included the work of 40 artists and was held in Moscow's Andrei Sakharov museum, an institution that was founded to champion human rights and promote democracy as espoused by its namesake, the late Soviet dissident and Nobel peace prize-winner.
Supposed to stimulate debate about religion and fanaticism, it quickly whipped up a storm of protest. Six Orthodox followers used paint and their fists to damage many of the installations. Two of the men later stood trial for vandalism, but were acquitted and hailed as heroes by the Church.
Then the tables were turned. The lower house of parliament passed a resolution urging the authorities to investigate whether the exhibition itself had incited religious hatred and to "take the necessary measures".
A special commission found that was the effect of the art. The Russian prosecutor's office swiftly drew up charges. Three people were charged - Yuri Samodurov, head of the museum, a museum employee called Ludmila Vasilovskaya, and one of the offending artists, a painter called Anna Mikhailchuk.
MPs have said that artists need to learn that there are limits to freedom of expression and Church leaders have denounced the exhibition as "an insult". Human rights groups have claimed, however, that the case is a throwback to Soviet times, when the state banned certain forms of art and bulldozed exhibitions it didn't like.
"This court case, this absurd and highly shameful court case launched against the organisers of the exhibition, is a demand for a return to censorship," said Ludmila Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
"This trial, for the first time since the Soviet era, is a trial of ideology," said Lev Ponomarov, head of the All Russian Movement for Human Rights.
"The state is on the side of the Orthodox radicals, who are hooligans. It is very important that we win this case," Samodurov said. He is pleading innocent, along with his co-accused, and has made it clear that he finds the charges preposterous.
"If what the Church believes to be blasphemy is seen as a crime in a secular state, it means that this is a political trial. I realised it [religion] was a contentious topic, but I thought we could discuss it openly." The exhibition, he added, was not anti-religion.
Banned under Communism, the Orthodox Church has enjoyed a quiet renaissance since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 under its septuagenarian leader, Patriarch Alexy II.
It enjoys the backing of Putin and his wife, Ludmila, and many of its ultra-conservative views about rival religions and moral values are supported by nationalist politicians.
For many, however, the trial is merely the latest example of the government manipulating the Russian legal system to curtail people's freedom.
On Tuesday the trial of Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, got under way in Moscow. It was immediately adjourned to allow a member of the defence team to recover from surgery. But defence lawyers describe proceedings as a show trial and say their client will be convicted. Human rights activists say that freedom will once again be under attack.
In this case, it is the freedom to dabble in politics, something Khodorkovsky decided to do with the US$15 billion ($24 billion) he is estimated to have amassed through often dubious means in the post-Soviet meltdown.
The former head of Yukos, Russia's largest domestic oil producer, stands accused of tax evasion and embezzlement of US$1 billion ($1.6 billion). The prosecution has hinted he may even be implicated in a murder conspiracy.
The Kremlin insists there is nothing political about the case but human rights groups have thrown themselves behind his cause, even though few ordinary Russians (who fared badly in the 1990s when he was making his fortune) sympathise.
"For our country this case is symbolic," Alexeyeva said.
She argued that Putin was using the courts and his unassailable position to roll back hard-won freedoms and that Khodorkovsky's prosecution was part of a much bigger pattern.
A new law to radically restrict public meetings and political protests is a case in point, she adds, as is a draft plan on restricting and controlling use of the internet.
"This tendency is not new. It appeared during the shooting on the Russian parliament and the disbanding of the Supreme Soviet. But during the Yeltsin years it was not systematic, since with Yeltsin nothing was systematic. With Putin, however, everything is a system and everything is moving towards eliminating our civil rights and liberties," she said.
Human rights activists say the warning signs are everywhere. They cite the sacking of a prominent television presenter who was felt to be overly critical of the Kremlin; the draconian sentencing this year of a researcher, Igor Sutyagin, to 15 years in jail for spying; and a decision this month by the Supreme Court to overturn the acquittal of another alleged spy.
"The Khodorkovsky case should be considered against the larger background of Russian reality which is constantly changing. And the direction of that change is making us worry about where Russia is going," said Anna Neistat, director of the Russian branch of Human Rights Watch.
The billionaire's case is unlikely to be straightforward; the indictment against him runs to 800 pages. The stakes for Khodorkovsky, 40, could not be higher. If found guilty, he could face 10 years in a labour camp. He is also expected to be forced to surrender shares in Yukos, opening the door to some form of state intervention in the oil firm.
Nor are Khodorkovsky's sins unique; all the barons who flourished in Russia in the 1990s used the same tricks and still do. Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at the United Financial Group, says two other oil companies - Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich's Sibneft, and TNK, a joint venture with BP - use the same tax avoidance techniques as Yukos.
"This [prosecution] seems to be very selective. None of the other people who used the same tax minimisation schemes have been targeted," he said.
Khodorkovsky's real sin was betrayal. When Putin came to power in 2000 he allegedly struck a deal with the country's super-rich: you stay out of politics and I'll keep my nose out of your businesses. But Khodorkovsky paid no heed. Instead he poured money into opposition parties, and a newspaper hinted he had presidential ambitions and might sell off part of his oil empire to ExxonMobil, a move that would hand control of Russia's natural resources to a foreign firm.
The other oligarchs, who made their fortunes by exploiting their contacts and the country's natural resources in a legally grey fashion, will be watching his trial closely as the sands of Russian history shift yet again.
Nuclear Physicist Faces Retrial for High Treason
Created: 16.06.2004 15:53 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:53 MSK
Alexei Tarasov
The Moscow News
Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the not-guilty verdict handed down by a jury in the case of Valentin Danilov, a Krasnoyarsk-based nuclear physicist, late last year. The specialist in plasma physics, who was instrumental in greatly extending the service life of domestic orbital spacecrafts, is once again being charged with spying for China, as well as with financial fraud. He is once again facing 20 years in a high-security prison, which to a 55-year old scientist is tantamount to a life sentence: More than four years of jitters, 580 days of custody, and 39 court hearings have left him with a multitude of health problems.
And now it is starting all over again. Once again, Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg, who strongly defended his colleague, is saying that the case against Danilov is in fact aimed against Russia. Only now, six months after the acquittal, Danilov’s chances for success look increasingly slim. What has happened during this time? A sentence has been passed on Igor Sutyagin. In Valentin Danilov’s own admission, he was discouraged by both the alacrity with which the jury dealt with the Sutyagin case and their verdict: No leniency.
“All the indications are that the outcome of my case is a foregone conclusion because it is not criminal but purely political. At any rate, this ruling by the Supreme Court, unjust and unjustified, did not come as a surprise to me,” Danilov said. “The head of the Federal Security Service regional directorate press service and a whole TV camera crew were flying on the same plane with me to Moscow for the trial. The state security people already knew the result. They might at least have observed the proprieties — you know, by pretending that they did not. They seem to have recovered from the shock after their resounding defeat in court, last December, when they thought that it was all in the bag and that the jury would vote in their favor 12:0 (then eight jurors out of 12 found Danilov not guilty on all counts. — A.T.).”
Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
The legal grounds for challenging a jury verdict, as opposed to a verdict passed by professional judges, are very limited. Nonetheless, the Krasnoyarsk Krai Prosecutor’s Office decided to go ahead, and scored an interim victory. The Supreme Court partially upheld the Prosecutor’s Office’s argument, sending the case back to Krasnoyarsk for a new hearing by a different court. According to Yelena Yevmenova, Danilov’s defense counsel, the decision as to which particular judge is to handle it will be made in about a month. The physicist himself believes that the new trial will be swift because his case seems to have been “expedited”: The Supreme Court handed down the ruling far too quickly.
The court found substantial violations of procedural rules that apparently affected the jury verdict: Importantly, violations of the Code of Criminal Procedure were made by both the defense and the prosecution, as well as by the presiding judge — like a number of “technical inaccuracies” pointed to by a Supreme Court judge.
Yevmenova noted that enclosed with the prosecutor’s office’s appeal were statements by three jurors alleging pressure on the part of the defense (apparently one of the jurors even got into a road accident because of that). The defense counsel claims that these statements have similar wording, coming to the conclusion that the prosecutor’s office presumably questioned the jurors, thus disclosing the secrecy of the jury conference: Otherwise how would the prosecutor’s office have known who voted and how? The lawyer also said that on Monday, when she returned to Krasnoyarsk, she would file a lawsuit over protection of her business reputation since the Supreme Court threw out the prosecutor’s office claim that Yevmenova had exerted undue pressure on the jury.
In Defense of the Physicist
It will be recalled that the Federal Security Service (FSB) accused Danilov of selling classified information to China. The scientist signed a contract to produce a simulator modeling the integrated impact of the space environment on satellites, and to develop related software. This is a dual-use facility. Furthermore, the information that was passed to the Chinese side purportedly contained data on yet another piece of equipment — a lab simulator of casualty/damage producing elements of nuclear weapon systems. This device has an exclusively military purpose.
According to counterintelligence agencies, the scientist and his Chinese partners were detained just as they were concluding the contract on the transfer of this second simulator. Later the charge of high treason was expanded to include “financial fraud”: Allegedly, Danilov misappropriated 466,000 rubles that the Chinese paid as an advance for what was essentially team work.
Danilov’s own comments on his never-ending case, as well as comments by his numerous defenders from various international research centers, boil down to a well known formula: “It’s like a guinea-pig — it’s neither a guinea nor a pig.” That is to say, to them, there is simply no case in the legal sense of the word because there is no evidence that state secrets were actually sold (a fact that the jury agreed with). What Danilov passed to the Chinese were exclusively non-secret materials, available in the public domain, that were declassified way back in 1992. All of his cooperation was sanctioned by the authorities. But then, Danilov believes, intelligence and security services took then-Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov’s statement on tightening control over space technology leaks at face value.
Letters in the physicist’s defense were signed by many scientists and politicians. Russian men of letters also appealed to the prosecutor’s office: “A treaty has been signed with China, covering, among other things, joint space research programs. Now as a result of the ’Danilov case,’ our state for the umpteenth time is sustaining losses running into tens of thousands of dollars while possibly losing out on the vast Chinese market in this sphere of science.” People who came out in defense of the physicist said that the Chinese, rebuffed by the FSB, had to use European Space Agency know-how and so the money earmarked for Russia went to Europe. In Danilov’s estimate, the FSB Investigations Department caused science at least $5 million worth of damages. This is the cost of training Chinese specialists and the contribution that China pledged to joint fundamental research programs.
A Bitter Victory
This is not the first time that Danilov and his supporters have had to start everything from scratch. For various reasons, consideration of his case was repeatedly suspended or stopped and then it had to begin all over again. An assistant judge was removed from the bench, for example, after criticizing the behavior of an FSB officer.
In short, thus far the state has not had much luck with either people’s assessors or with jurors in the Danilov case.
Danilov himself has always taken it in stride: “Physics always has models. Events always happen in a series. Say there is a random, separate event that has its own probability rate. Rare events also come in series. You won the lottery but then a brick fell on your head. So I am terribly afraid of all wins.” Danilov said this when he was already released from custody pending trial but had yet to win in court.
Russian security trials
In your court
Jun 10th 2004 | MOSCOW
From The Economist print edition
A Supreme Court decision raises concerns about security trials in Russia
IS IT spying if what you tell foreigners is common knowledge? Valentin Danilov, a physicist in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, passed information about the effects of solar activity on satellites to a Chinese firm for which he was doing contract work. At his trial for espionage, several scientists signed a statement swearing that the material he supplied had not been secret since 1992. At the end of last year, a jury duly acquitted him. But this week Russia's Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a technicality, sending the case back for retrial. Whether the court was yielding to pressure or, as it says, upholding prosecutors complaints about procedural violations, is unknown. But Valentin Gefter, director of the Human Rights Institute in Moscow, says that “the likeliest result is not a happy one [for Mr Danilov], because they'll now go back to Krasnoyarsk and try to pressure the jury harder.”
Mr Danilov's was the first espionage case to be tried under Russia's relatively new jury system. In judge-only trials the conviction rate is over 99%; in jury cases it has been 80-85%. Shortly before Mr Danilov was declared not guilty, another scientist, Igor Sutyagin, began a jury trial on charges of treason; his defence was that the material he supplied to a British firm was based on press clippings.
Mr Danilov's acquittal raised hopes that Mr Sutyagin would get a fair hearing. But it also made the FSB, Russia's security agency, realise that juries are harder to sway than judges. In February, a bill was presented to parliament to make espionage and treason cases ineligible for jury trial. Mr Sutyagin's original judge and jury were replaced and, in April, after a trial that his lawyers said was full of irregularities, he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in jail. The judge, in her instructions to the jury, skirted questions on whether his material had been secret and told them just to make up their minds whether he had passed information to foreign contacts—which he did not deny.
One problem is the incompetence of prosecutors. Mr Sutyagin's case first went before a judge in 2000, who ruled that the FSB's case was too badly formulated to stand trial, but allowed the agency another go. Judges in other cases, trapped between commitment to the law and fear of the security services, have done the same. After one case in the late 1990s, the Supreme Court restricted judges' ability to send cases back and ordered the abolition of the notorious “Decree 55” defining state secrets, whose content was itself secret.
But another problem is that the law remains vague. Even after Decree 55 was abolished, says a report by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, it was invoked in the trial of a journalist, Grigory Pasko. And unluckily for Mr Sutyagin, “treason” could in theory be defined as providing any information that a foreign power used against Russia, even if it were not secret. What is worse, court judgments in Russia do not set binding precedents.
Still, the Supreme Court carries weight. Mr Sutyagin is appealing against his conviction on procedural grounds. If he wins, says Mr Gefter, that could be a warning to the Krasnoyarsk court to play fair with Mr Danilov when he comes before it again.
Amnesty International, which earlier declared Igor Sutyagin a political prisoner, joined other academic and human rights organizations in supporting this campaign.
Russian Court Orders Retrial of Physicist Acquitted of Spying
By STEVEN LEE MYERS (The New York Times, June 9, 2004)
MOSCOW, June 9 — Russia's Supreme Court today overturned the acquittal of a physicist who had been charged with espionage, ordering a new trial in a case that has been seen as part of a crackdown on researchers and scientists working with foreigners.
The ruling reversed a jury's decision last December to clear the physicist, Valentin V. Danilov, who had been charged with selling information on space and satellite technology to a company in China that he and other scientists argued was not classified.
The court, after a hearing that lasted an hour, accepted prosecutors' arguments that Mr. Danilov's defense lawyers tainted a 12-member jury in the Krasnoyarsk region by, among other things, discussing material that had not been accepted as evidence in court. The government's prosecutor praised the decision, saying there had been "significant procedural violations" during the trial.
Mr. Danilov, a researcher at Krasnoyarsk State University in Siberia, described the ruling as a political one, made under the pressure of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor of the K.G.B., which brought the charges against him.
"This proves the difference between the court by jury and the old standard system," Mr. Danilov, 55, said in a telephone interview in Moscow, where he attended today's hearing. "The jury court is less controlled. It's harder to manipulate it. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is not free from such influence."
Jury trials are still a relative novelty in Russia, and Mr. Danilov's acquittal was widely viewed as a sign that the country's judicial system was gradually freeing itself from the powerful influence of prosecutors and security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.
Russia's criminal code, however, allows prosecutors to appeal acquittals in some cases, and Mr. Danilov's lawyer, Yelena V. Yevlinova, said in an interview that the Supreme Court had overturned roughly half of those it reviewed, though Mr. Danilov's is by far the most prominent.
She expressed confidence that he would again be acquitted by a new jury, though Mr. Danilov said he had less faith now that Russia's system could withstand external political pressure in high-profile cases like his.
In April, a jury convicted Igor V. Sutyagin, an arms control expert accused of working with a company in Britain in a similar case that has drawn criticism from academics and human-rights organizations. Mr. Sutyagin was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
"This is a huge defeat for Russia's civic society," Lev A. Ponomarev, head of the For Human Rights organization, said of Mr. Danilov's case in an interview on the radio station Ekho Moskvy. "We had got used to juries being more humane and fair. This is, of course, also a blow against the very institution of jury courts."
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A09
MOSCOW, June 9 -- The Russian Supreme Court overturned Wednesday the acquittal of a Russian space scientist charged with spying, dealing a setback to human rights advocates who believed they had won a rare victory in an espionage case.
Valentin Danilov, a physics professor in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, was found not guilty by a jury last December after waiting nearly three years for trial on charges he turned over classified space technology to the Chinese.
The trial marked the first time a jury in Russia had been allowed to hear an espionage case, but prosecutors challenged the outcome on procedural grounds, alleging the defense had improperly pressured the jury. In its ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed and ordered a retrial.
Danilov is one of several scientists who turned to foreign companies for work after the collapse of the Soviet Union and found themselves accused of spying by the Federal Security Service, known by its Russian initials FSB. It is the domestic successor to the Soviet KGB.
In April, a jury found arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin guilty of espionage after the FSB accused him of selling sensitive military information to a British company allegedly fronting for U.S. intelligence.
In both cases, the accused scientists claimed they had relied on widely available, nonsecret material for their work. Human rights groups say researchers are being targeted by the FSB for having foreign contacts, a revival of KGB tactics.
"Of course, I'm very unhappy about it and consider it unfair and groundless," Danilov said in a telephone interview. "In this case, we can talk about the Supreme Court not being independent and fair."
He said it was "nonsense" that the defense team had pressured jurors and pointed out that the Supreme Court was only supposed to overturn jury verdicts in case of serious procedural violations, "but here there were no such serious violations." His attorney, Yelena Yevmenova, added, "This decision was expected, unfortunately."
Vladimir Vasiltsov, an attorney representing Sutyagin in the appeal of his 15-year jail sentence, said that "this decision with Danilov makes us even less optimistic, not that we had much optimism left before."
In televised remarks, Prosecutor Yevgeny Naidyonov praised the Supreme Court decision as "legitimate and justified."
Danilov was arrested in February 2001 and accused of agreeing to sell secret satellite technology to a Chinese state-run company in his capacity as head of a thermal physics center at Krasnoyarsk Technical University. His defense argued that the information Danilov provided to the Chinese firm had been published in scientific journals in Soviet times or declassified as far back as 1992.
Embassy Row
By James Morrison
Published June 7, 2004
The Washington Times
Russia's 'spy mania'
Congressional human rights advocates are warning of a growing threat to civil liberties in Russia and urging President Bush to raise the issues at this week's Group of Eight summit.
Russian President Vladimir Putin "is increasingly relying on the security-intelligence apparatus to run Russia, with ominous consequences for human rights, civil liberties and democratic progress," leaders of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe wrote to Mr. Bush.
They said Russian human rights activists refer to Mr. Putin's "spy mania."
The letter was signed by Rep. Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican and commission chairman, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Colorado Republican and co-chairman, and Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the commission's senior Democrat.
They asked Mr. Bush to raise their concerns when he meets with Mr. Putin and other world leaders at the summit in Sea Island, Ga., which begins tomorrow.
They said many academics and environmentalists have been charged with collaborating with Western intelligence agencies "on the basis of questionable evidence and procedures."
One such case involved Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at Moscow's U.S. and Canada Institute, who was jailed for 15 years on espionage charges for passing publicly available scientific research to foreign colleagues.
Religious liberty is also at risk, they said, citing a Moscow court's ruling that bans Jehovah's Witnesses from spreading word about their sect.
"This should set off alarm bells for members of other religious minorities in Moscow and beyond," the legislators said.
They also denounced the Russian government's policies in the rebellious Chechnya region "where the most egregious violations of international humanitarian law anywhere in the [European] region are occurring."
MOSCOW (AP) -- Five prominent human rights groups have called for a retrial for Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher who was convicted of espionage, and said the prisoner, meanwhile, should be freed.
Sutyagin was arrested in 1999 on charges he sold information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that Russian investigators claimed was a CIA cover. In April, a jury sentenced Sutyagin to 15 years in prison.
The five groups -- Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the Public Committee for the Protection of Scientists and the Moscow Helsinki Group -- said Sutyagin had not gotten a fair trial.
Jun 3, 2004 Washington
Congressional members of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) sent a letter to President Bush May 28 urging him to discuss several "particularly disturbing developments" in the Russian Federation when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the upcoming G8 summit in Sea Island, Georgia.
"Mr. Putin is increasingly relying on the security-intelligence apparatus to run Russia, with ominous consequences for human rights, civil liberties and democratic progress," the letter said.
It also cited the sentencing of Igor Sutyagin, a researcher from the U.S. and Canada Institute, to 15 years in hard labor for "espionage," repression of Jehovah's Witnesses' activities, government pressure on electronic media outlets, human rights abuses in Chechnya, and other examples.
"President Putin is well positioned to reverse these troubling trends," the CSCE letter said.
The CSCE, also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, is an independent federal agency that by law monitors and encourages progress in implementing provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.
Human Rights Watch press-release
Russia: Fair Retrial Needed in 'Spy' Case
Treason Conviction of Russian Scientist Appears to Be PoliticallyMotivated
(New York, June 2, 2004)-Igor Sutiagin, the Russian arms researcher convicted in April on what appear to be politically motivated treason charges, should be given a prompt retrial that meets international standards of fairness, five international and Russian human groups said today.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the Public Committee for the Protection of Scientists also called on the Russian government to release Sutiagin from prison pending retrial.
"Sutiagin did not get a fair trial," said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "The Russian government appears to be using his case to intimidate academics, journalists and others who do research on sensitive issues."
In April the Moscow City Court handed Sutiagin a 15-year sentence, the longest prison term for high treason since Soviet times. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, had accused Sutiagin of collecting materials on a variety of issues relating to Russia's weapons systems and other military issues, and passing them on to U.S. military intelligence officers. Sutiagin acknowledged that he gathered information on these topics, from open sources, for a U.K.-based consultancy firm on the basis of a legal freelance contract to supplement his meager academic salary.
The Sutiagin case is part of a broader pattern of dubious espionage charges brought against Russian citizens who were working with foreign contacts on sensitive issues that until recently had been under thorough KGB control. These issues include nuclear-waste dumping, environmental degradation, national defense preparedness and military technology.
In a joint statement issued today, the five human rights groups detailed concerns about the trial and investigation. The groups have documented due process violations in the handling of Sutiagin's case. In crucial instances, the FSB, (the successor to the KGB) sent the wrong documents to experts who were supposed to review Sutiagin's work to determine whether it was based on open sources. The presiding judge in the case and the composition of the jury were changed without explanation. The presiding judge excluded key questions of fact from the jury's deliberations.
"These violations are just the latest in a series of violations of Sutagin's rights, and they indicate a political motivation for his prosecution," said Denber.
Human Rights Watch's November 2003 briefing paper "Russia's 'Spy Mania': A Study of the Case of Igor Sutiagin," details some of the key due process violations in the prosecution of Sutiagin: vaguely formulated charges, a failure to identify secret sources from which Sutiagin received his materials, and the use of secret decrees. The briefing paper places the Sutiagin case in the broader context of so-called "spy mania" in Russia, a series of dubious espionage charges that has had a chilling effect on Russian journalists, scientists and ecologists.
"The Sutiagin case has emerged at a time when the Russian government is increasingly restricting civil and political rights and is increasingly hostile to human rights organizations trying to protect those rights, said Denber. "The international community needs to challenge these incursions and press Russia to reverse this backtracking."
Human Rights Watch and the other signatories of the joint statement urged the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to appoint Special Rapporteur for the case of Igor Sutiagin. The five human rights groups also urged the international community to raise his case at the highest level with the Russian government.
To read the joint statement, please see:
http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/russia/2004/igor_statement.htm
To read Human Rights Watch's briefing paper, please see:
http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/russia/index.htm
For more information, please contact:
In Moscow, Alexander Petrov: +7-095-737-8955
In New York, Diederik Lohman: +1-212-216-1282
In London, Urmi Shah: +44-20-7713-2788
In Brussels, Vanessa Saenen: +32-2-732-2009
234 Ford House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-6460
Rep. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Co-Chairman
For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Ben Anderson
202.225.1901
June 1, 2004
Helsinki Commission Leaders Urge President Bush to Raise Russian Rights Concerns
Putin Visit Opportunity to Press for Progress
(Washington) - The United States Helsinki Commission today released the text of a letter signed by Commission leaders addressed to President George W. Bush in conjunction with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s U.S. visit to attend the G8 Summit, set to open a week from today, in Sea Island, Georgia.
As noted at a May 20th Helsinki Commission hearing, President Putin is increasingly relying on the security-intelligence apparatus to run Russia, with ominous consequences for human rights, civil liberties and democratic progress. The leaders cited specific concerns over the targeting of a number of Russian academics and environmentalists; a ban on religious activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Russian capital; and egregious violations of international humanitarian law in Chechnya.
Begin text.
May 28, 2004
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
We write urging you to raise human rights concerns in the Russian Federation when you meet with President Putin at the Sea Island G-8 Summit. As noted at a recent Helsinki Commission hearing, Mr. Putin is increasingly relying on the security-intelligence apparatus to run Russia, with ominous consequences for human rights, civil liberties and democratic progress.
One of the telling results has been what human rights activists are calling “spy mania,” whereby a number of academics and environmentalists have been accused of collaborating with Western intelligence agencies on the basis of questionable evidence and procedures. A case in point involves Igor Sutyagin, a researcher from the U.S. and Canada Institute, recently sentenced by a Moscow court to 15 years in hard labor for “espionage.” His “crime” was to pass scientific analyses based upon open source material to associates abroad. While his is not an isolated case, Sutyagin has received the harshest sentence to date. We urge you to raise this case as well as the broader trend.
In another troubling trend, a recent Moscow municipal court ruling effectively bans the religious activities of the local community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Russian capital. This case should set off alarm bells for members of other religious minorities in Moscow and beyond. There has also been heightened rhetoric by Russian officials with frequent references to so-called “traditional religions,” which raises serious concerns over the status of individuals belonging to “minority” religious communities in Russia (many of whom have existed in Russia for over a century).
Government pressure on electronic media outlets, denunciations by government officials of human rights and pro-democracy NGOs, and manipulations of elections give further rise for concern. President Putin is well positioned to reverse these troubling trends away from protection of human rights, civil liberties and democratic progress and toward governance based upon the misguided notion of so-called “managed democracy.”
Finally, we reiterate longstanding concerns regarding developments in Chechnya where the most egregious violations of international humanitarian law anywhere in the OSCE region are occurring. President Putin’s efforts to manipulate political developments in Chechnya have failed to move the region toward normalization, as evidenced by the recent assassination of his handpicked leader for the region. Besides alleviating the grave humanitarian situation in Chechnya, President Putin should move to allow the Chechen people to have a voice and choice in their future, while preserving the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.
Mr. President, we urge you to set aside a portion of your time with President Putin to discuss these particularly disturbing developments in the Russian Federation.
Sincerely,
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, M.C.
Chairman
BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL, U.S.S.
Co-Chairman
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, M.C.
Ranking Member
cc: Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor
End Text.
The United States Helsinki Commission, an independent federal agency, by law monitors and encourages progress in implementing provisions of the Helsinki Accords. The Commission, created in 1976, is composed of nine Senators, nine Representatives and one official each from the Departments of State, Defense, and Commerce.
