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

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In September 2013 I took a phone call from Mads Christensen, at the end of which he asked me to lead the international media team pushing for the release of the Arctic 30.

‘We need to make them famous,’ he said. Then he hung up.

I lowered the phone and wondered if I’d actually agreed to take the job. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it, so I guessed that meant I was doing it. Suffering as I do from acute imposter syndrome, I thought momentarily about calling him back and politely declining the offer, but I knew half the people in jail and some of them were good friends. I’d climbed power station chimneys with them and broken into polluting factories at their side. I’d sailed to Greenland with Iain Rogers, Colin Russell and Mannes Ubels. I was slated to join the Sunrise on its mission to the Russian Arctic, but my boss wouldn’t let me go and Alex went instead. It could have been me in that Russian prison cell.

The next three months were spent in a maelstrom of black coffee, boiled sweets and fear, as we managed a publicity operation spanning dozens of countries across the world. I neglected the people I loved and gave myself over entirely to the Room of Doom. The only times I left that place for an extended period were a strategy meeting in Copenhagen, a failed attempt to spend a weekend away with my girlfriend, and the moment the Arctic 30 were released.

After the news from Ana Paula’s hearing I sped to St Petersburg and checked into the Peterville hotel. Half an hour after Sini and Camila were freed I stood at the end of a corridor watching them bouncing on their heels and grinning wildly as they opened the door to their room. Behind them Ana Paula and Anne Mie were hugging each other. Since September those faces had stared back at us from posters on the wall of the bunker and from newspaper front pages, and now they were there, in front of me. Perhaps it was a product of the pedestal we all put them on while we were working for their release, but I remember thinking they all looked a lot shorter than I imagined they’d be.

The following evening I sat with Frank in the Peterville café, each of us nursing a beer, and he told me about that night at SIZO-1 when his cellmate yanked the U-bend from the wall and he heard the voice of Roman Dolgov broadcasting through the plumbing system. Then Frank told me more stories – about Popov, his cellmates, the guard who loved Depeche Mode – and as he spoke I jotted down notes on a napkin. I thought those stories might be the basis of an email to my colleagues around the world to whom I was sending updates from St Petersburg. Frank and then Anthony reeled off more tales, I scribbled on more napkins and stuffed them into my pockets, but eventually I stopped writing and just sat back and listened. And at some point that night I thought somebody should write a book about it all.

Back then I was still utterly consumed with the campaign to get them home and, more immediately, the job of managing the huge media interest in the men and women pouring out of jail. Dozens of journalists were travelling to St Petersburg or had already arrived. A Swiss TV crew refused to leave the hotel bar until they’d interviewed Kruso. A British newspaper reporter was stalking the corridors looking for Alex, determined to negotiate an exclusive deal.

Five weeks after they were freed, I came home with the British activists, and soon after they stepped onto the concourse at St Pancras station I slipped away, took a train home to my family for a belated Christmas and collapsed exhausted onto my bed. For two days I didn’t leave the house. But when I did surface, I pulled those napkins from various pockets and read through them again, and I thought, yes, somebody should definitely write a book about it all.

I left it a month, then started interviewing the activists, in person and on Skype. And I spoke to many of my colleagues from the hubs in Copenhagen, London, Amsterdam and Moscow. I was fortunate that a team of volunteers transcribed those interviews – more than forty hours in total (you can listen to some of them at www.donttrustdontfeardontbeg.com). I then retreated to a house in the countryside for a fortnight, carrying a three-inch pile of printed interviews and a pack of luminous magic marker pens.

My plan was to highlight the quotes that might conceivably be moulded into a narrative, but by the time I reached the end of the pile, most of the sheets were almost entirely covered in bright green, pink and yellow ink. So many stories, so many characters. It felt like there were a dozen books in there, and I was yet to find a single one of them.

Only by concentrating on four or five of the thirty – and a smaller number of the campaigners – did something digestible begin to emerge. The result is a book that fails to tell a host of remarkable stories. An entire second volume could be written about the experiences of Faiza, Kieron, Roman, Colin, Andrey, Denis, Anthony and the others.

I had a few stories myself, and in the first draft I sought to tell them. The text was littered with ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘us’. But when I read back through the chapters, those parts – the ones told in the first person – struck a bum note, like a chord played on a badly tuned piano. This isn’t my story; it’s the story of the activists who were jailed in Russia for scaling an Arctic oil platform. Trying to relate my own experiences amid those tales from SIZO-1 felt like jumping out of the crowd at a football match and running onto the pitch dressed in a replica kit.

So I exorcised myself from this book. Nevertheless, some of the events relayed here are ones I witnessed or participated in.

That three-inch pile of paper contained some gaps of recollection and detail. Dima’s memory for conversations, especially between him and Popov, was extraordinary, but not everyone remembered so easily. Therefore I occasionally reconstructed details and dialogue before checking my efforts with the activists to ensure accuracy.

The English of some of the Russian prisoners was so limited that the articulation of a single sentence would take an age, and they often used sign language as much as the spoken word. I have tried to reflect that in the nature of their dialogue, whereas the words spoken in Russian – for example by Vitaly to Dima – are more immediate and expressive because they were said in the mother tongue.

Vitaly, I should say, is not his real name. I have changed the names and some identifying characteristics of the Russian prisoners because I was not in a position to ask their permission to recount their stories. I feared – perhaps unrealistically, but who can say? – that those still behind bars might face retribution for some of the things I report them saying and doing, not least the support they offered their Greenpeace cellmates. I would not like to make the job of Popov any easier.

I have also altered identifying characteristics of some of the other Russians featured in this story, again to minimise the possibility of retribution being wrought. The scene in which Phil smuggles the footage out of prison was shifted from the place it actually happened, to protect ‘Mona’ from serious criminal charges (it’s best she doesn’t find herself in the women’s section of SIZO-1).

I wanted to give a more realistic portrayal of the incarcerated women than the one offered by some media outlets during their time in jail. In many newspapers there was an assumption that the women would be coping less well with their ordeal than the men. Alex became keenly aware of the discrepancy when she googled her name at the Peterville hotel. Many of the photographs were of her crying in the cage at her first appeal in Murmansk. That moment appeared to define her, and it is something for which Greenpeace – myself included – bear some responsibility. In some countries the organisation made Alex the face of the campaign and used the image of her at the appeal hearing on advertisements and leaflets. When, after her release, she saw how her tears had been used, she tried but failed to hide her disappointment. I tried but failed to hide my culpability. I had authorised those adverts.

‘These stereotypes piss me off,’ she told me. ‘I don’t like the way everyone portrays the women compared to the men. When I needed to cry, I cried. When I needed to scream, I screamed. Being true to yourself and your emotions isn’t a weakness, it’s not something I’m ashamed of. But the way the articles are written, people were more worried about me because I cried, or they were more worried about the women because we’re women.’

In reality the women were as strong – if not stronger – than the men. Often the younger activists coped better than the older ones, in part no doubt because they were less likely to have long-term partners or children back home. In St Petersburg after their release the women were a source of constant, unbridled, positive energy. I remember one night standing in the Helsinki bar, drinking shots of vodka with Kieron, watching Alex, Camila, Sini and Faiza dragging everyone – Russian strangers included – off their chairs and onto the dancefloor. A Michael Jackson track had just come on, one that used to be played on Bridge TV back at SIZO-1, and they were recreating the dance moves they made in their cells. And I remember saying to Kieron, ‘When I grow up I want to be Sini Saarela.’

Sometime later I asked Kieron how he managed to survive each night back in that isolation jail in the Russian Arctic.

‘You don’t really,’ he said. ‘You just tell yourself that the fifteen years might happen. You tell yourself to get used to that sick feeling because eventually that might be reality. I wrote a letter to Nancy’ – his girlfriend, later his wife – ‘and I said to her, look, if this goes really bad there’s no way I expect you to wait for me. My big fear was missing out on having a family because being forty-four in fifteen years I would’ve lost the person I wanted to marry, lost my career, the people I love, and every semblance of joy and success I’ve had would be totally obliterated by this fifteen years of darkness. I actually remember thinking I won’t make it fifteen years. I honestly didn’t think I’d get that far. Would I top myself? Yeah, I think I probably would. But you have to keep hoping.’

As hard as it is to imagine, many of the prisoners’ families had it just as bad, and I regret not being able to tell more of this story from their perspective. I interviewed some of them but the narrative became increasingly cluttered, so instead I sought to have Pavel Litvinov represent them in this account. Despite his remarkable history, he was, in late 2013, just one more terrified parent. In the absence of more of their experiences, this book is dedicated to the families of the Arctic 30.

It was an incredible honour for me to interview Pavel. I knew of his iconic protest in Red Square, having long ago read Lenin’s Tomb – David Remnick’s remarkable book about the fall of the Soviet Union, in which he features prominently. But despite being moved by his courage and inspired by his activism, I didn’t realise until September 2013 that he is Dima’s father. Only when he brought his considerable energy to the campaign to free his son did I become aware that this was the same Pavel Litvinov.

I sought to raise an important question in the book, but it’s not one I tried myself to answer. Was Greenpeace naïve to scale the side of a Russian Arctic oil platform and expect to sail away unmolested by Putin’s judicial machine? I have heard a dozen different answers. One senior colleague told me he thought everything had gone exactly according to plan, that creative disruption brings about change, that if we’re serious about challenging the fossil fuel behemoths then people are going to have to go to jail. Equally I have heard many people at Greenpeace claim that nobody could have predicted what would happen. After all, a year earlier the crew of the Arctic Sunrise had launched an almost identical protest and the FSB had done nothing. And others – including some of the thirty – say yes, it was naïve of Greenpeace to have sailed for the Prirazlomnaya and not thought jail for its activists was the likely outcome.

In a sense the question is subjective. There is perhaps no right or wrong answer. A more relevant question might be, ‘Was it worth it?’ And that is for nobody to answer but the thirty themselves. In interviews in St Petersburg most of them said yes, it was. But some would disagree, not least because of the impact on their families, and who could blame them?

Another question often asked is, ‘Did it change anything?’ I would say it did. Securing action on climate change is hard. We are all implicated in the fossil fuel economy, and most political and corporate leaders are yet to determine that it’s in their interests to truly roll back dependence on oil, coal and gas. We are caught in the same paradox as Dima was in his cell at SIZO-1 when he started smoking then realised he’d gain nothing by giving up. It only took one prisoner to light up to make it pointless for the others to quit, because they all shared the same air. And it’s a bit like that with climate change. Those with the power to effect change – prime ministers, presidents and CEOs – think there’s nothing in it for them to act alone, that it’s only worthwhile quitting fossil fuels when everybody else does, because we all share the same atmosphere.

The campaign to save the Arctic is not yet won. In fact it’s barely begun, and we don’t have much time left. But direct action – the manifestation of resistance, the ignition of controversy from apathy – speeds up the national and global conversation, it short-circuits ponderous political cultures and forces uncomfortable issues onto the agenda. It is asymmetric campaigning, a leveller, a way for the weak to take on and beat the strong, to make governments and corporations act against their immediate interests. To break that paradox.

The night he left Russia for home, I sat with Dima in the hotel bar as he wrote his statement for the press. With my laptop balanced on his knees he bashed away at the keyboard, then he passed me the computer and said, ‘Release that.’ He got up and walked towards the door, his pink bag slung over his shoulder, his wife’s hand in his, and I looked down at what he’d written.