MOSCOW, November 28 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Greenpeace activist Dimitri Litvinov plays down talk that he is a dissident, but the inspiration of his father, who braved the repressive Soviet regime to stand up for human rights, remains clear in his actions.
Litvinov, 51, who holds dual US and Swedish citizenship, was one of 30 people on a Greenpeace icebreaker detained in Russia in September for mounting a protest to draw attention to oil drilling in the ecologically sensitive Arctic Sea.
Joining the protest was an easy decision, Litvinov told RIA Novosti in an interview this week, and motivated by long-standing concerns over green issues that date back to the birth of his first son 26 years ago.
“I didn’t want him to grow up in a world where you have to go to a zoo to see a tree,” he said in English by telephone from St. Petersburg.
The attention-grabbing gesture has cost participants a heavy price already, and things could get worse still.
Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise icebreaker was seized by border officials after the activists attempted to fix a banner onto the Gazprom-controlled Prirazlomnaya oil rig, where offshore drilling is set to start by the year’s end.
Litvinov denied they wanted to storm or even scale the oil rig, which towered 40 meters high above their inflatables.
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In a blow-by-blow account, Litvinov described how masked men with “big guns” swooped onto their ship from a helicopter, seized the crew at gunpoint and subjected them to a body search – a prospect that drove the women in the international crew into panic.
Litvinov said he tried to run, but was pushed down after a few steps and walked over by an attacker in combat boots.
Litvinov apologized for relating the events in what he admitted was excess detail, but said that venting about “something you see in a James Bond movie” was therapeutic.
Some developments after the initial detention did have a tinge of the comic and absurd, as Litvinov explained.
He said that after the Arctic Sunrise was searched by border guards, all of the alcohol went missing.
“The next day, the guards stank of alcohol,” Litvinov said.
“You realize these big guys with big guns standing there are pissed off at us, don’t like us, and are hungover on our booze. You don’t want to mess with them,” he said.
Greenpeace said the Arctic Sea protest was nonviolent, and has expressed dismay at what it perceives to be the authorities’ overreaction.
All the people on the Arctic Sunrise were accused of piracy, a charge later downgraded to hooliganism, which could still be enough to land them in prison for seven years. The trial is due to begin early next year.
Almost the entire group has now been released on bail, but only after spending two months savoring the dubious appeal of Russia’s notoriously harsh prison system.
“The prison wasn’t paradise, physically,” Litvinov said, laughing.
Litvinov appeared to have quickly picked up knowledge of life behind bars in Russia, including terms for prison food, such as “sechka” porridge and the soup known as “grave.”
Litvinov even dropped a reference to Mikhail Krug, a legend of Russian “chanson” – a sort of ubiquitous prison-themed musical genre considered a cultural anathema to lettered Russians.
But it was not the “shit food” or the limitation of access to showers to 15 minutes a week that troubled the activists, but the feeling of panic over the piracy charges, as well as worries about how relatives were coping, Litvinov said.
Still, there was something good to be found in even Russian custody – the people.
“What really helped keep our sanity and morale was support from other prisoners,” Litvinov said.
Litvinov conceded he was probably better prepared for detention than most other members of the Greenpeace group, given his family background.
His father, Pavel, was one of seven people who kick-started the Soviet dissident movement with their protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Pavel Litvinov – whose father-in-law, Lev Kopelev, served as a prototype for a dissident character in a Solzhenitsyn novel – spent six months in jail and four years in exile as an electrician in Siberian uranium mines until November 1972. His continued outspokenness after his return from exile led to his departure to the United States with his family.
Dimitri Litvinov balked at being called a dissident, saying that his protest was never political.
But he concedes that his activities in Greenpeace are “in the same spirit” as those of his father.
Environmental activists in modern Russia must contend not only with the legal consequences of their protest actions, but also with widespread indifference and suspicion.
The Russian public takes a dim view of Greenpeace and environmental issues in general. Only about 20 percent named the environment as a major concern in a 2012 poll by the independent Levada Center. Forty-two percent of the respondents in a survey by the state-run VTsIOM in October said Greenpeace was a stooge for foreign governments and secret services.
But Litvinov is not giving up campaigning, although he was not prepared to say whether he would be up for another voyage to the Arctic next year.
“But you ask me in two months, I’ll probably say I will go back,” he said.
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