Echoes of an awful past resound in trial for treason

At the height of the Stalin terror the average "trial" lasted less than 15 minutes

At the height of the Stalin terror the average "trial" lasted less than 15 minutes. The most dreaded sentence was that of "10 years in distant camps with the right to correspondence denied".

This was a euphemism for death. Those dreadful years have been brilliantly recorded for posterity by such political prisoners, or Zeks as they were called, as Lev Razgon and Yevgenia Ginzburg.

Theirs have been regarded as the voices of an era long since made redundant by the new democratic Russia. Or are they? Echoes of that awful past are today resounding in the city courthouse of St Petersburg where an environmentalist and former Russian naval officer, Mr Alexander Nikitin, is charged with high treason for divulging information on the ecological dangers posed by the Russian navy's methods of disposing of its nuclear waste.

The result has been that Mr Nikitin has been named as Amnesty International's first prisoner of conscience in Russia since the Soviet Union was dismantled in December 1991. Human rights groups, including the Helsinki Human Rights Group and the Council of Europe, have expressed concern about what they consider an abuse of Mr Nikitin's human rights.

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The Helskinki Group said the trial indicated "how fragile" progress towards full human rights has been.

Until the court sat on Tuesday, neither Mr Nikitin nor his lawyers knew which law he was alleged to have breached. The case had been brought under what had been termed as a number of "secret laws" under which the defendant could face a 20-year prison sentence if found guilty.

In a decision of major importance in what is proving to be a landmark case for human rights in Russia the chief judge, Mr Sergei Golets, has ruled that the accused should be allowed to know under which law he has been charged.

The "Nikitin affair" has been going on since February 1996 when the man who now stands in the dock was arrested by agents of the FSB, Russia's internal security service.

The FSB is one of a number of organisations into which the old KGB was broken up during the presidency of Mr Yeltsin. Others include the SVR, the foreign espionage service, and FAPSI, an organisation devoted to electronic espionage.

The new agencies are staffed in the main by men and women who were KGB operatives. The "Chekists" as they still call themselves after the original communist security service, the Cheka, have been used to running a "state within the state" for a very long time and this trial is as crucial to them as it is to Mr Nikitin.

Should Mr Nikitin be found guilty the FSB will have strengthened its hand immeasurably.

After Mr Nikitin retired from the navy he became involved with the Norwegian ecological agency, Bellona. In 1996 he wrote a report for the agency on the state of nuclear pollution in the northern Kola peninsula, where most of Russia's nuclear submarines are stationed.

This report, according to the FSB, disclosed state secrets and left Mr Nikitin open to charges of high treason. But almost everyone in Russia knows of the parlous state of Russia's nuclear submarines and other parts of the navy. There have been reports of nuclear reactors dumped in the sea, of submarines left lying to rot. This correspondent has crawled through conventional subs of the Black Sea fleet and watched the cockroaches scamper through their narrow confines.

Whatever Mr Nikitin wrote in his report, it was no secret. Hardly anything is in Russia these days and a secretive organisation such as the FSB is, not surprisingly, opposed to such a situation.