Not to state's taste

There are days when renowned Russian ecological crusader Marina Rikhvanova feels like an endangered species.

She has grown used to a certain amount of ambient harassment — the intelligence agents rifling through her files, the bank accounts being abruptly blocked, the phone, which she believes is bugged. It comes with the territory.

As Russian president-turned-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has rolled back democracy and downsized civil rights, activists of all stripes have struggled to operate.

But with the Kremlin and big business so intertwined that they have become virtually indistinguishable, the Russian elite appears to reserve a special brand of venom for those who tend to clash most directly with business: environmental advocates.

“We are preventing them from doing quietly what they want to do quietly,'' says Rikhvanova, 47, seated in the office of her Baikal Ecological Wave organisation in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

Rikhvanova's first major confrontation with Putin erupted in 2005 when a pipeline to transport oil from the Siberian fields to the Pacific coast was slated to skim within a kilometre of Lake Baikal.

Scientists, including Rikhvanova, warned that the area was prone to earthquakes and that an oil spill could prove catastrophic for the lake.

Transneft, the state pipeline company, did not respond to the warnings and the government's own environmental experts backed the pipeline company.

Only after Rikhvanova's organisation and other environmental groups drummed up street protests in Siberia and Moscow did the government blink: Putin produced a red pen during a televised meeting, gestured at a map and ordered the pipeline rerouted. But for Rikhvanova, it was a wan victory.

“It demonstrated the uselessness of the legislation and legal system in Russia, the management of ecological issues, that the whole thing was corrupt,'' she says.

Hurdle after hurdle

Her next battle was already on the horizon. In January 2006, Putin announced Russian plans to create an international uranium enrichment centre, a factory that would provide enriched uranium to any country within international law.

Soon state nuclear giant Rosatom had unveiled plans to open the centre on the grounds of a former chemical plant in Angarsk, a few hours from Lake Baikal.

The project has steamed ahead, despite protests from Rikhvanova and other local ecologists.

Rosatom spokesman Fyodor Dragunov insists that the plant management has dealt openly with the community, inviting women's groups and youth organisations to take guided tours of the plant; meeting the public and releasing safety information.

“Experts and specialists have concluded that the plant does not pose any danger,'' he says.

“You need to exclude these fanatics who are not satisfied with conclusions and results. It is practically useless to explain anything to them.''

Rikhvanova and other environmentalists accuse Rosatom of hiding behind a screen of carefully packaged excursions and scientists paid to downplay the plant's risks.

“Rosatom kept deceiving everybody,'' Rikhvanova says.
Alarmed that the uranium enrichment centre would be operating soon, Rikhvanova helped set up a protest camp of dozens of radical anti-nuclear protesters in Angarsk.

Before dawn one day in July 2007, young men armed with rods and knives attacked the camp and beat the protesters.

The government described the attackers as ultranationalist skinheads. They also announced that Rikhvanova's son, Pavel, then 19, was among them.

The organisers of the attack remain at large and unidentified, the family says. Pavel was arrested and spent a year in a cell that held 12 people and four cots.

They had to sleep and even sit down, in shifts. He told his parents they were regularly beaten.

He was held for the maximum time allowed, then released pending trial.

Among government and industry supporters, the idea that Rikhvanova was set up is dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

In these circles, animosity towards Rikhvanova lurks close to the surface. Rosatom spokesman Dragunov describes her as “pretty fanatical''.

Then there is Vadim Titov, a young, lanky sociologist who is a member of the Rosatom-organised Public Council on Issues of the Safe Use of Atomic Energy in the Irkutsk region.

Ecological groups, he argues, are funded by the West and their protests are designed to undermine the stability of the Russian state. “They are misleading the public,'' he says.

“Often ecological organisations are just pretexts to get funding for people who are not really concerned with ecology.''

He describes the attacks on the antinuclear camps as regrettable but adds that the protesters “excessively demonstrated and obviously aroused irritation''.

And Rikhvanova's contention that the attack was meant to warn activists away from the uranium enrichment centre? “This theory,'' he says crisply, “doesn't have any right to exist!''