SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY:
Duo Dodges Bullets in Russian Roulette
Richard Stone
One is in the twilight of his career, a physicist virtually unknown beyond Russia's borders. The other is an oceanographer in his prime, a rising star outside his native Ukraine. What these two have in common is a tribulation that once spelled death for a scientific career, if not for the accused himself: Each was charged with a serious crime by his country's security apparatus. Now the two share happier circumstances. Last month, both won victories suggesting that the judicial systems in the young democracies of Russia and Ukraine are not inclined to rubberstamp trumped-up accusations against scientists.
In one case, 70-year-old Vladimir Soyfer of the Pacific Oceanological Institute in Vladivostok had been accused by the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the successor to the KGB, of mishandling classified data. He won an initial court battle on 11 February, when a judge in Russia's Far East ruled that the FSB obtained the evidence on which the charges were based through an illegal search. The FSB has appealed the ruling, but if allowed to stand, it would cripple the FSB's case, observers say.
The second researcher, Sergey Piontkovski, 46, of the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas in Sevastopol, Ukraine, got even better news. He was preparing to stand trial on charges of financial improprieties relating to his Western grant when, on 25 February, the local prosecutor dropped the charges soon after meeting with a delegation from the European agency whose grant was at the center of the controversy.
These victories, along with the recent acquittal of a Russian environmental activist, are huge morale boosters for former Soviet scientists, who have forcefully and publicly defended their colleagues. "It is a very important sign for me. I used to believe that the court is always on the KGB's side," says Valentina Markusova of the All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow.
Before it dissolved in 1991, the Soviet Union was notorious for making its citizens pay for opposing its policies or getting too cozy with Western colleagues, and scientists were no exception. The constant was a presumption of guilt, until glasnost in the late 1980s laid the groundwork for the almost libertarian freedoms briefly enjoyed by Russians after the Soviet Union's dissolution. The pendulum soon swung back, however. In 1994, for example, Russia's security service charged a former chemical weapons researcher, Vil Mirzayanov, with revealing state secrets about a new class of nerve gas (Science, 25 February 1994, p. 1083). The arrest sparked an international outcry, and charges against Mirzayanov were subsequently dropped. Nevertheless, arrests of scientists and environmentalists have continued.
Among those seized was activist Aleksandr Nikitin. He was charged with espionage and divulging state secrets after co-authoring a report for Bellona, a Norwegian environmental group, on nuclear contamination from Russia's Northern Fleet.
Last December, a judge in St. Petersburg acquitted Nikitin, a former nuclear safety inspector and retired Navy captain, and last month, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science) gave him, in absentia, its 1999 award for scientific freedom and responsibility. But Nikitin is not yet out of the woods. His case is on appeal, and he has not received his passport for foreign travel.
Only weeks ago, prospects were looking much bleaker for others who had been accused. Take Soyfer, whose nightmare began on 26 June 1999, when FSB agents raided his office, then descended on his home a week later. During the second raid they seized papers related to Soyfer's research on Chazhma Bay off Vladivostok, which was contaminated with radioactive materials after an accident involving a Soviet nuclear submarine in 1985. The work--sponsored by the Ministry of Atomic Energy and done in collaboration with the Radiochemical Safety Bureau of the Russian Navy, whose Pacific Fleet is based nearby--went well for 2 years, Soyfer says. But then, he claims, the safety bureau's new director took a disliking to him and called in FSB agents in Vladivostok to help oust him from the project. After seizing the research materials, the FSB charged Soyfer in early July with revealing secret information that "compromised the state and military security of the Russian Federation." Soyfer denied the charge, and colleagues rallied to his side.
Later that month, 11 top scientists and a deputy of the Duma, Russia's parliament, signed a letter to acting President Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, pointing out that the government had decreed earlier that ecological data could not be classified as state secrets. "We urgently request that you take measures to end the illegal persecution of V. N. Soyfer and other scientists," they wrote. Even more valuable to Soyfer's defense, an expert panel of the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Moscow reviewed the disputed data and stated in a 7 February letter that none were secret. "The FSB does not have grounds for its attack," says Soyfer, who's waiting for the FSB to formally exonerate him in the wake of the court's ruling that the search was illegal.
Whereas Soyfer's cause was buoyed by his Russian colleagues, Piontkovski drew most of his support from scientists outside Ukraine. His saga began on 16 October, when agents from the Ukrainian Security Bureau (SBU) seized documents and cash from the homes and offices of Piontkovski and two colleagues (Science, 29 October 1999, p. 879). The focus of the search was Western grants that involved analyzing and digitizing data on bioluminescence collected over the past 30 years, first by Soviet and then by Ukrainian and Russian ocean expeditions.
After accusing the researchers of illegally passing data to the West, the SBU worked up charges against Piontkovski of illegal currency transfers: receiving and distributing funds under a grant from INTAS, a European agency that supports East-West scientific cooperation. Despite numerous appeals, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences leadership failed to achieve any breakthroughs, but once the case was handed to the prosecutor, INTAS sprang to action.
INTAS chief David Gould and a legal adviser flew to Ukraine on 9 February, meeting with officials in Kiev and then with the prosecutor in Sevastopol. INTAS was ready to pull the plug on 55 new grants to Ukrainian teams if other scientists faced the threat of prosecution simply for cashing INTAS checks, Gould says. The prosecutor dropped the charges less than 2 weeks later. As Science went to press, Piontkovski was in Kiev, seeking a visa for an extended stay in the United Kingdom or the United States.
Now, observers are anxiously following the cases of three other former Soviet scientists whose fates remain up in the air. The FSB is still investigating Vladimir Tchurov, a colleague of Soyfer's at the Pacific Oceanological Institute, who is accused of selling sensitive acoustic technology to China, and last November it arrested Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, on espionage charges.
Meanwhile, in Belarus--where democracy is struggling to take hold--Yuri Bandashevsky, an outspoken critic of the government's response to lingering health effects of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, has been imprisoned since last July on charges of taking bribes. (His case has not been tried.) After the trio of recent judicial triumphs, the hope is that good news will again come in threes.
Volume 287, Number 5459 Issue of 10 Mar 2000, pp. 1729 - 1731
�2000 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Richard Stone
Deputy News Editor
Science
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