Kafka's fears realized in life of Russian activist

With the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Kafkaesque show trials of Stalin were supposed to have been replaced by civil liberties and the rule of law.

But late at night on October 4, 1995, when Aleksander Nikitin responded to knocking outside his St. Petersburg apartment, he opened the door to a world only the likes of Josef K. and Solzhenitsyn knew.

Nikitin narrated last night in Dodds Auditorium his nightmarish five-year ordeal that ended Sept. 13 when the Russian Supreme Court rejected the reopening of the government's treason case against him.

The government alleged the onetime Navy captain published classified state secrets in a report on nuclear contamination. Nikitin claimed he published only public, unclassified information — a position ultimately accepted by Russian courts.

He said that even through hard times, including 10 months in prison, his commitment to human rights pulled him through.

"My motivation was my inner feeling of the rightness of my position," Nikitin said through an interpreter in an exclusive interview with The Daily Princetonian before the speech.

Today was the five-year anniversary of that fateful night when Nikitin was roused from his sleep. Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, searched his apartment and the offices where he was preparing a report on nuclear contamination by the Russian navy, Nikitin explained. Agents later seized thousands of copies of the report and labeled it forbidden literature.

He was arrested in February 1996 and "the lawyer they assigned to me was a former KGB agent," Nikitin said. When he requested that Yuri Schmidt serve as his lawyer, it took two years and a court order before Schmidt could serve as his legal counsel. This proved to be the turning point of the case, according to Irene Goldman, vice chair of the Coalition for Peace Action.

"Very soon we realized Aleksander Nikitin was completely innocent and although the case took place not in the Soviet Union but in post-Soviet Russia, Russia is a very particular country and it's not enough to be innocent, especially if such powerful institutions as the KGB and the state are against you," Schmidt said through an interpreter.

Schmidt added that the case had broad significance beyond the fate of his client.

"At some point in 1997, it became clear that this was a case of human rights defense for all of Russia. It took on a global nature, and Nikitin understood his fate was that of the future of Russia."

Nikitin and his lawyers emphasized that the victory could not have been won without international pressure from citizens, human rights organizations and governments around the world.

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"We were able to focus world attention on the case because our position was correct and impenetrable. It was critical that we were not one versus one against a totalitarian regime," Schmidt said. "We could not have won unless the eyes of the world were focused on the matter."

International pressure balanced those pressures Judge Segei Golets felt from Russian authorities — probably including President Vladimir Putin — to convict Nikitin, said Schmidt.

Putin has painted the environmental movment as a threat to national security in the past.

Nonetheless, the judge found Nikitin's case could not be reopened because the accusations against Nikitin were based on retroactive and secret laws Nikitin could not have known.