Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

TWENTY-FOUR

The Investigative Committee is trying to split the Arctic 30.

If they can get some of the activists to give evidence saying who took an active role in the protest at the rig, they can focus the charges on just a few of them. It’s a strategy that could see some of them go free but ensure the rest are jailed for many years. And if the IC can get the thirty to turn on each other they’ll secure a propaganda triumph for the Kremlin, especially if one of the turncoats is from the famous Litvinov dynasty.

Three days after being freed from the punishment cell, Dima is shaken awake by a guard.

‘You, get up, you have a meeting.’

‘I do?’

‘Your lawyer’s here.’

Dima jumps to the ground, then he’s marched down the hall with the guard following just behind him. ‘Right left right left right left…’ They turn a corner and there, coming towards him, are the two guys from the FSB. The competent authorities. The fist clenches in Dima’s stomach. Gerbil breaks into a grin.

‘Hey, that’s Litvinov isn’t it?’

‘It is, it is,’ says his friend with the helmet haircut. ‘It’s our old friend Litvinov.’

‘Ah, but where’s he going? That’s the question.’

‘He’s going to see his lawyer.’

‘Oh is he?’

‘He is, he is. He’s got a meeting.’

‘Oooh, a meeting. Sounds important.’

‘But I think we should have a little chat with him first, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes. I think we should. I think the lawyer’s going to have to wait a while.’

The guard tugs the back of Dima’s shirt, pulling him to a halt. Helmet-hair opens a door and holds out an arm. Dima looks at each of the men in turn then nods and steps through the open door. He’s in a small meeting room with a row of chairs facing a single seat across a table, on which sits a bowl of biscuits. It’s like the scene of a job interview with five people on the panel. The competent authorities follow him in and shut the door.

Helmet-hair sits down and invites Dima to take the seat opposite him. Gerbil doesn’t take a seat, instead he lowers his tiny, bony little arse onto the edge of the table then shuffles along, making himself more comfortable before leaning down and exploding in Dima’s face.

‘You fucking bitch! You know how many years you’re going to be here? You think you’re going to get out after two months? Oh my God, you’re going to be here for years! You understand that, right? Did you like the punishment cell? Oh, you didn’t? What, you thought because you’re a Litvinov that we can’t just make you disappear? Well you know what, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in that cell, my friend. What have you got to say to that?’

Dima flinches in the face of Gerbil’s onslaught, the knot in his stomach is as tight as it’s ever been, it’s generating a powerful anxious energy that’s running down his legs and up his spine, sucking the breath from his lungs and making his hands shake.

Helmet-hair picks a biscuit from the bowl and slides it between his thick lips, his eyes resting grimly on Dima’s face. Silence. Crumbs are dropping from his mouth and falling into the creases in his shirt. He swallows and reaches for another biscuit, bites a chunk out of it and with his mouth full he says, ‘You’re in our hands now, arsehole. Oh, you thought you had to commit a crime to go to the kartser? Buddy, you’ll be going to that place any time we want you there. So look, bitch, now’s when you start telling us what happened at that platform. No protocol, just you, us and the truth. And you’d better start telling us fucking soon.’

Dima coughs into his hand and takes a breath. ‘I’m under strictest orders from my lawyer and—’

Gerbil screws up his face and slaps the air in front of him. ‘I’m just so disgusted by this man, I’ve got no time for this bullshit. He had his chance but he just sealed his fate.’ He stands up and opens the door. The guard is still standing outside. ‘Get him out of here.’

Helmet-hair pushes the rest of the biscuit between his lips, slaps his hands together, stands up and walks out. Dima gulps. He stares at the empty chairs in front of him then looks up at the guard, who gives a long low whistle.

‘Boy, they don’t like you, do they?’

Dima is taken back to his cell. He lies on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, going over what just happened. He’s still shaken. The fist is like a rock in his belly. They’re out to get me, he thinks. There’s no doubt about it, not now. This is what they did to Dad.

Nearly half a century has passed since Pavel Litvinov sat down in Red Square in the certain knowledge that he would be punished with the full force of the Soviet state. But right now Dima’s thinking of an episode that happened a year before that. The time when his father wrote a letter to the editor of Izvestia, the leading Soviet state-controlled newspaper.

In the letter Pavel gave his verbatim account of the interrogation, explaining how the KGB agent Gostev warned him not to report details of a recent dissident trial; how the officer accused the dissident of ‘hooliganism’ despite the fact that the man had merely read out a poem in Mayakovsky Square; how Pavel would himself face trial unless he stopped his political activism.

‘Pavel Mikhailovich, we don’t intend to have a discussion with you,’ Gostev had said. ‘We are simply warning you. Just imagine if the whole world were to learn that the grandson of the great diplomat Litvinov is engaged in conduct of this sort. Why, it would be a blot on his memory.’

‘Well I don’t think he would be against me,’ said Pavel. ‘May I go?’[106]

Izvestia refused to publish the letter, but it did appear in the International Herald Tribune. A year later Pavel was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to exile. And now, half a century on, 4,000 miles from Dima’s cell in Murmansk, the retired physics teacher is schooling himself in the system that once targeted him, the same system (for he believes nothing much has changed) that has captured his son.

‘It is the Soviet legal machine, so to speak,’ says Pavel. ‘So I started reading the Russian criminal code – for many years I didn’t do it – and the constitution and how it’s formulated and how to fight it, and I talked to lawyers and so on. It was important, because in spite of Russia being a totalitarian state they still have to make something by law, and we had to answer every legal step. Some people didn’t understand it, but I knew. Because they once did it to me.’

Izvestia, the newspaper he wrote to in 1967 seeking justice, is still in print and is playing a leading role in the propaganda war against his son – even speculating that Greenpeace volunteers may have been responsible for beating up a Russian diplomat in the Netherlands. But Izvestia is no longer owned by the Communist Party. Now it’s owned by Gazprom.[107]

Dima is standing in the doorway of his cell watching the guards lifting mattresses and looking under them, flicking through the pages of his books and peering inside jars. Then from behind him he hears a familiar voice.

‘Ah yes, Litvinov. Dimitri, how are you doing, my friend?’

Dima spins around. It’s Popov. He’s standing on his toes and looking into Dima’s cell.

‘They found anything?’

‘Nope.’

Popov nods, then almost absently he says, ‘So, you’ll be leaving us soon.’ He drops onto his heels and flashes a golden toothy smile.

Dima’s heart jumps. ‘We’re getting out?’

Popov sniffs. ‘No, no. They’re moving you.’

‘Moving us? Where?’

‘St Petersburg.’

‘St Petersburg?’

‘Yup.’

‘When?’

‘Couple of days maybe. For all I know tomorrow.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Dimitri, please.’ Popov holds out his hands in a plea of false modesty. ‘They tell me nothing. You probably know more than I do.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Silly me.’ The governor looks down at his shoes and chews his lip. ‘No, it’s all a mystery to me. If I was to guess I’d say you’re going to be the subject of a bit of special treatment. But then, I know nothing.’

The fist in Dima’s stomach clenches. ‘What does that mean, special treatment?’

‘It means just that. Special treatment.’

‘And… what, it’s just me moving? The others, are they coming too? To St Petersburg?’

‘I would imagine so, yes.’

‘But you don’t know for sure?’

Popov shrugs, pats Dima on the shoulder and waltzes off down the hallway, running a finger along the wall as he goes.

As soon as the lights are killed and the doroga is up and running, Dima gets the news out. Phil’s cellmate pulls in the sock and hands him a note. (See opposite.)

The road buzzes with the news, it’s shouted over the walls at the gulyat, it’s all anyone talks about.

‘It’s today.’

‘I heard it was next week.’

‘No, it’s definitely tomorrow.’

‘Well, you should know this,’ Roman shouts to Dima over the wall. ‘The Stolypin, it is hell.’ He uses the Russian slang word for a prison transport train, named after the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, who commissioned railway carriages to transport revolutionaries to Siberia. ‘They are very fucking horrible. They are bad. They are very bad. It can take a month. You stay in transit prisons on the way. Tough places. We will be in a car cell with many people. Not nice people. There’s no water, it’s very hot, there’s no food. We’ll need to bring plastic bottles with us to piss. It is going to be horrible. I’ve heard about these transports.’

And Dima shouts back, ‘Come on, man. Don’t worry, we’re not even sure we’re going by Stolypin. Maybe we’ll go by bus or by plane.’

‘No, it is going to be very bad. I am not happy about this. It is bad. And in St Petersburg they have Kresty’ – the notorious prison, famous for housing political detainees as far back as Trotsky – ‘It is a tough prison. It has bad cells, poor conditions, a very strict regime. My cellmates, they say it is dark.’

Daniel Simons is terrified.

If he screws this up then he’ll be responsible for the Arctic 30 staying in jail for years. He thinks this is the only good shot Greenpeace has at getting everyone out. There is nothing he has dreaded more than appearing as a witness before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Twenty-one eminent judges from around the world are sitting in a semi-circle in a vast Hamburg courtroom. All but one of them are elderly men. They look like a council of Jedi Knights in a Star Wars movie. And Simons is standing before them.

He and his boss Jasper Teulings have pushed for weeks for a hearing at ITLOS – the international court empowered to demand the release of the Sunrise and its crew. Now that hearing is starting and Simons is giving evidence. For the Greenpeace lawyers it looks like an open and shut case – the raid on the Sunrise would only have been legal if the Arctic 30 were genuine pirates, and by now not even the Kremlin’s spokesmen are claiming that.

The Russian government is boycotting the hearing, a move taken by observers to be an admission of the weakness of their case. Nevertheless one of the judges, Vladimir Golitsyn, is from Russia, and Simons feels he seems to be speaking for the Kremlin as he fires off a volley of hostile questions.[108] Simons reels off answers with a confidence that belies the heavy responsibility he’s feeling.

When the submissions are completed the court announces that it will rule in a fortnight. Daniel Simons breathes a sigh of great relief. He leaves the courtroom and fetches his computer. He and Teulings have one more thing to do today.

They’re still in the court building. They go to the Dutch delegation and tell them they have something that might be of interest. Simons opens his laptop and presses play. On the screen masked armed commandos abseil onto the deck of the Arctic Sunrise. Activists thrust their arms in the air and offer no resistance. Frank is chased up steps and pulled to the ground.

It’s the film from Phil, recorded on the camera card and smuggled out through a matchbox.

The Dutch delegation stares open-mouthed at the screen. They’re impressed by the intensity of it. The activists look nothing like pirates. Immediately the delegation submits the footage to the international court. Greenpeace submits it to BuzzFeed, and within an hour it’s running on TV stations across the globe.

Simons and Teulings are certain the ITLOS panel will see the footage. Nobody’s immune to the impact of those images, they think. Not even these unimpeachable judges. It could play a crucial role. That night they toast Phil Ball.

The next morning, 1,700 miles away, Phil is at gulyat, walking in circles in a box, when he hears Frank’s voice.

‘Phil! Hey, Phil, you there?’

‘Yeah, I’m here. Still fucking here.’

‘You see the TV last night?’

‘No, what?’

‘That footage you shot. It was all over Russian TV.’

‘What footage?’

‘Of the raid on the ship.’

Phil stops walking. ‘Seriously?’

‘All over the news.’

Elation surges through his body. He feels it washing over him, endorphins exploding in his brain. He jumps up and slaps the wall. ‘Yeeees!’

‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘My cellmate doesn’t let me watch the news. He’s into these crappy soap operas. Jesus, I missed the world premiere of my own fucking film.’

‘It was amazing. Soldiers coming down the rope, guns, me getting roughed up. I’m on TV getting pushed over. Seriously, they look like thugs.’

‘Amazing.’

‘Phil, how did you do it? Last I heard, you’d shoved it in the extractor fan in the galley.’

Phil looks up. Through the wire mesh he can see the guard patrolling on the bridge above. Around him he can hear shouted conversations in Russian.

‘Come on, Phil. How did you do it?’

‘You know what, Frank. When we get out of this place you can buy me a beer and I’ll tell you.’

Then, before the day is out, Putin’s own Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, led by Mikhail Fedotov, announces it has written to the head of the Investigative Committee offering to act as guarantors for the Arctic 30 if they are released on bail. It’s the same offer that Kumi Naidoo made, but this time it’s coming from someone inside the Kremlin.

The Kremlin appears contemptuous of the ITLOS legal case. Even if it rules against Russia there’s no guarantee the order to release them won’t just be ignored. And anyway, the Arctic 30 are far more concerned by the imminent move to St Petersburg. They’ve been told by their lawyers that they’ll be split up. Most of the men will be held in Kresty, some of them will go to another prison and the women will be held at the all-female St Petersburg SIZO-5. And still nobody can tell them when the move will happen, how they’ll be transported and, most importantly, why. Even the guards ask the activists the same questions. Of course everybody has a theory, especially their Russian cellmates.

‘They’re getting ready to release you, but they want to sweeten you up first, get you out of this shithole, make sure none of you get beaten up, no black eyes for the cameras.’

‘I guess they’re getting ready to really screw you, send you down for years, put you in a real prison.’

‘It’s because the trial is going to start. They’re going to have a trial and they want it in a big city, big lights, big show.’

The activists join in the speculation – nothing can stop them doing that – but they also know not to believe anything until it happens.

Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg.

The women are worried that contact with the others will be restricted in St Petersburg. At SIZO-1 during the daily walks they’re able to communicate with their friends. It’s the best part of the day, shouting over the walls in those dark and cramped boxes and being able to hear the voices of the others coming back. But what if they can’t talk to each other in St Petersburg? What if they’re alone?