Volume 9 Number 4

Fall 2000

Feature: Explaining the Nikitin Acquittal

Introduction
     Karen Johnson

For five years, Alexander Nikitin lived in a state of uncertainty. Would he be convicted of espionage and divulging state secrets for contributing to a Norwegian environmental report on nuclear safety in the North Sea? Or would he be the first person in Russia since 1917 to beat charges of treason? First accused in 1995, Nikitin was acquitted by a Saint Petersburg City Court in December 1999, but his case was only laid to rest in September 2000 by a terse refusal of the presidium of the Supreme Court to disturb the acquittal.

During those five wrenching years—in which interim appeals were filed to the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court—the Nikitin case was constantly in the public eye. Why did the case prove so fascinating? First of all, it signaled the reemergence (or, perhaps, merely exposed the continued survival) of Cold War habits: the FSB (Russia’s secret service) tracked Nikitin as he assembled information on nuclear accidents and waste handling, and the procuracy filed charges against him on the basis of secret documents. This pattern has become increasingly familiar in Putin’s Russia, where "state-building" seems identified with increasing the opacity, public unaccountability, and arbitrariness of state agencies. Second, the human drama of an individual fighting, with nonviolent means, a powerful and secrecy-obsessed state apparatus for the sake of the public welfare, as he sees it, rekindles memories of dissident activism.

The case also exposes the incoherence of Russian law and legal institutions, including the unsettled state of criminal procedure, the overly broad definition of "state secrets," and the changing role of the procuracy. Flawed as it is, the 1993 Constitution conflicts sharply with many vestiges of Soviet law and legal practice (see the article by Ivan Pavlov below). Nikitin’s legal team, it should be added, conducted a type of defense familiar to Western activists. Besides defending their client, they deliberately set out to make new law (see Elena Barikhnovskaya’s article) and employed tactics and strategies designed to attract the spotlight of publicity and shape public opinion (as explained in the piece by Mikhail Matinov and Yuri Schmidt).

In the following pages, we offer an inside look at the case. The three articles referred to above are by the Russian lawyers on Nikitin’s legal-defense team. We have also commissioned an exclusive interview with the acquitting judge, Sergei Golets, who describes the case as the most difficult of his career—and the first time he ever applied constitutional and international norms. The final article is a reflection by Peter H. Solomon and Todd S. Foglesong, two Western scholars of the Soviet and Russian court systems, on the shifting role of the procuracy in political cases.

As Solomon and Foglesong point out, it is too early to tell if the case is a passing exception or a portent, the sign of a new willingness of judges to break with habit and to stand their ground in the face of political pressure. Many experienced observers believe that, if the Kremlin had really wanted the case to come out differently, it would have. But convicting Nikitin would have been embarrassing, given the sloppiness of the prosecution’s case, and some gaps in the law (since remedied), not to mention Russia’s desire to remain on good terms with Norway. The broader implications of the Nikitin case, therefore, remain uncertain. Certainly, the November 2000 decision of the military panel of the Supreme Court to overturn the acquittal of military journalist Grigory Pasko—who had been charged with treason for reporting on radioactive-waste dumping in the Far East—is not encouraging.

But whatever the larger picture, for Alexander Nikitin, and his legal team, the case represents an indisputable victory.

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