by Ben Stewart
Denis is back behind a camera, capturing new chapters in his country’s long and storied history. After the amnesty he visited his newly freed friends from Pussy Riot, then he headed to Kiev to cover a revolution that would soon spark conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Everywhere he goes he’s recognised and saluted, but he finds the attention embarrassing. ‘You know Solzhenitsyn, he spent ten or fifteen years in jail, so it’s a shame when people say, “Respect to you, you’re a prisoner.” It’s bullshit. It was only two months in prison. Compare that to the people before.’ And the amnesty? Does he still regret accepting it? ‘Actually now I think it was a nice decision, because there is war with Ukraine so nobody cares about Greenpeace any more. We could easily have got three years in prison and nobody would care.’
Popov got promoted, Kieron got married, Dima quit smoking and Pete went home to Maggy. From now on Pete Willcox is going to be more careful about which direct action protests he signs up for. ‘I got a little too close there in Russia.’ But he’s here in Rotterdam, on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior. ‘I’m still campaigning to change our thirst for fossil fuels. Turning over the world to the oil and coal companies is not an option.’
Dima’s great-grandfather helped build and sustain an empire, his father and grandfather were leading lights in a movement that brought it down, but because of a protest that lasted a few minutes it’s likely Dima will never again see the country of his birth. And now, despite everything he went through out there, Gazprom is bringing that Arctic oil into Europe.
‘I went to the Arctic to actually do something,’ he says, ‘so there’s nothing to regret. Scientists say we can only stay safe if we keep atmospheric carbon dioxide levels below about 350 parts per million. Three hundred and fifty, that’s the limit. We can’t stay above that for long without fucking it all up. If it hits 400 then our kids are gonna be in very big trouble indeed. When my great-grandfather was jailed, CO2 stood at 290. When my grandfather was jailed it was 310. When my father was jailed it was at 320. Three months before we took action at the Prirazlomnaya, NASA announced that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had just hit 400. It’s happening. This is not a rehearsal. This requires resistance.’
Pavel Litvinov sees similarities and differences between his iconic protest in 1968 and the stand taken by his son half a century later. He faced certain trial and jail or exile, whereas his son didn’t think he would face the full wrath of the Kremlin. ‘The protests are different, of course,’ says Pavel, ‘but in a way the challenge that Dima and I both had in front of us was similar. We both wanted to speak up for somebody who was attacked by a large totalitarian government. In my case we spoke in defence of a small country, Czechoslovakia, which was suddenly oppressed by its big neighbour. And in the case of Dima he was speaking for the Arctic, which also didn’t have its own defence, and to some degree the defence of the Arctic is a metaphor for the defence of humans and human rights. It is our life, because if the Arctic cannot survive then neither can we. It is our canary in the coal mine. If life is unbearable there then it will become unbearable to us. So there was a similarity. You try to raise a voice because you have nothing but your voice. A voice to speak up for something which cannot speak up for itself.’
In Murmansk SIZO-1 the prisoners are still fighting the regime, but they’re not winning. ‘I got a letter just two weeks ago from my cellmate,’ says Denis. ‘The situation there is terrible now, it’s much worse than in our time. Those conditions were good, created specially for us. We had two or three cellmates in one room and we were allowed this doroga. We had TV sets and some people from a local NGO came to check on us. But when we left the prison nobody came to them and the authorities took away their TV sets. Now there are body searches and night searches almost every day and the meals have become water.’
Martin Sixsmith – the ex-BBC man – is on his way to lunch with the former director of MI5, when he makes time for a cup of Darjeeling tea with some of the campaigners. Together they conduct a post-mortem on why Putin freed the Arctic 30.
‘One word,’ says Sixsmith. ‘“Sochi”. Putin was clearing the decks before the Olympics. It wasn’t a surprise that Pussy Riot got out, and I wasn’t at all surprised that the Arctic 30 got out. Khodorkovsky, that was the big surprise. It’s the old thing about speaking quietly while carrying a big stick. Greenpeace had that stick. The Olympics.
‘You guys said your plan was to give him “a wide turning circle”. That was sensible. It gave him room to back down. Right now our governments are hammering away at Putin, accusing him of everything without understanding his dilemma, giving him no margin to make concessions and be sensible. It was absolutely clear that Greenpeace had to give him that opportunity to back down without losing face. He didn’t want to keep the thirty in jail for ever, they would have been a thorn in his side. So he wanted to let them go, but he wanted to do it on his terms. It was the right thing to not hammer away at him, shouting and screaming. That way he could present the release as an act of magnanimity rather than him being bullied into it.
‘If you look at it objectively, I think Putin played it just right. He showed himself to be tough then he let the thirty go. He showed himself to be magnanimous, having made his point, so everybody was happy. Yes, Greenpeace was petrified their people would never get out, but they were happy eventually. But most importantly his voters were extremely happy because they saw him standing up for them. Putin’s image is this non-drinker, a judo fanatic, ex-KGB, takes no nonsense, dresses smart and stands up to the West. Stands up to people like the activists on that ship. So it was really important for his image to do what he did. When Putin does his analysis he’ll probably think he came out on the plus side.
‘Was it naïve of Greenpeace to think they could go in there, poke the bear and walk away? I assume the campaign leaders took all that into account when they went out there. They knew they’d be arrested, and in terms of publicity, having the guys arrested and jailed was a PR bonanza. It was unfortunate for the ones in jail, but good for the campaign.’
By the time they were freed, 2.7 million people had called for the release of the Arctic 30. Millions more are demanding a sanctuary at the top of the world where oil drilling and industrial fishing are banned. Something similar already exists in Antarctica after a campaign that took nearly twenty years to win. The push for an Arctic sanctuary may take longer, but the movement is mobilising. The fossil fuel companies have colonised almost every corner of the Earth, but if that movement can draw a line in the ice, if it can make its stand in the Arctic and win, then it can roll south and challenge the rule of oil across the globe.
Two weeks before the action at the Prirazlomnaya, one of the seven Arctic states, Finland – Sini’s home country – became the first nation to join the call for an Arctic sanctuary. Six months later the European Parliament echoed that call.
Sometimes someone just has to jump first.
‘As long as they continue with their dangerous plans then we’re going to be there,’ says Sini. ‘The Arctic oil industry has decided to keep going, so we have to keep going too. It’s not like we want to, but standing against them gives me a belief that we can actually win.’
Right now Sini’s boat is drifting on the wake, floating away from the jetty as the Mikhail Ulyanov comes in. It’s nearly docked now. She can see the faces of the Russian crew leaning over the railings and staring down at her. If she’s going to jump, it has to be now.
She throws herself forward, for a split second she’s hanging in the air then she crashes into the water. The cold is paralysing, she sinks below the surface but her life jacket lifts her, she gasps for air, shakes her head then kicks her legs. Back on the RHIB, Phil rolls his eyes. Everything inside him is saying, oh shit, now you have to jump as well. He hates swimming and he’s got all this kit strapped to him. ‘But I can see the ship, that big bastard ship, it’s so close and if we can get to the jetty we stand a real chance of stopping it. And Sini was already swimming for
it.’ He coughs into his hand and steps up onto the side of the RHIB. ‘And I just did it. I threw myself in.’
The police take a moment to notice what’s happening, but the cops on the jetty don’t move and the boats in the water are too far away to reach them. Sini turns her head and looks back and sees Phil swimming behind her. And the other climbers are launching themselves into the sea as well. A moment later they’re all in the water, kicking hard, six of them, all weighed down with kit but getting closer. Then Sini reaches out and grabs the bottom rung of the ladder and hauls herself up.
Faiza is watching from the deck of the Argus, but the huge hull of the Mikhail Ulyanov is blocking her view and she can’t see what’s happening. Then her phone rings. It’s the team on the jetty. They tell her they’re hanging from the ladder, stopping that tanker from unloading its cargo of Arctic oil.
‘For me it was very logical,’ Sini remembers. ‘The issue hadn’t changed, it was the same fucking dirty oil, why wouldn’t I protest against it? They’d started drilling and this was the first oil coming from that platform. My motivations hadn’t changed in jail, if anything they’d become stronger. So in the end, whether or not I’d jump, I guess it wasn’t really a question.’
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 charg
es (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.’