The Whistle-Blowers.

Aleksandr Nikitin was an average Russian naval officer until his retirement in 1992. Four years later, however, he coauthored a report, published by the Oslo-based environmental group the Bellona Foundation, claiming that Russia's nuclear submarines were in a dangerous state of disrepair, a revelation that landed him first in jail, then under house arrest. The charge of espionage--having disclosed defense secrets to a foreign power--made him the first political prisoner since the official collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Nikitin claims, however, that the information he gave to the Bellona Foundation was already in the public domain; all he did was help compile it.

"To solve the problem, you have to talk about the problem," says Nikitin. "One of the most important points was to start discussing the situation. If we hadn't started revealing such information, it's quite possible that no one would have heard anything about the Kursk when that happened. Back [during the time of] the Soviet Union, when submarines sank no one heard anything about it."

After numerous trial appearances, Nikitin was acquitted of the charges in December 1999 by the City Court of St. Petersburg. Russian prosecutors appealed the acquittal, but the Russian Supreme Court Presidium upheld it, making Nikitin the first person in history to be acquitted on espionage charges in Russia, according to Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at the Bellona Foundation. Nikitin is now head of Bellona's office in St. Petersburg.

In July 1999, after 20 months in prison, Grigory Pasko was cleared of high treason charges for revealing the Russian Navy's practice of dumping liquid radioactive nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan. Pasko, who in addition to being a naval captain was an investigative journalist for Battle Watch, the official Pacific Fleet newspaper, filmed the dumping in 1993 and gave the tape to the Japanese television station NHK. Pasko was sentenced by a military court in Vladivostok to three years in prison on a lesser charge--abuse of his official position--but was freed presumably in response to public pressure by international journalist organizations and Amnesty International, which declared him a prisoner of conscience. He is now attempting to clear his name, according to a series of articles from July 1999 to the present in the Vladivostok News. The Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, is now having him retried for treason. That trial began on 22 March 2001.