Killing in Siberia Injures Russia's Green Movement

Thus article from the Wall Street Journal describes how the arrest of one of the attackers on the Angarsk ecological camp this summer may have been related to business interests.

Marina Rikhvanova is a mother of Russia's green
movement. Last year, she led thousands of protesters into the streets of this Siberian city against an oil pipeline that would have skirted the
pristine waters of Lake Baikal. Afterwards, President Vladimir Putin scrubbed the plan.

This spring Ms. Rikhvanova put together new rallies against Kremlin plans to turn the Irkutsk region into a center for processing nuclear
fuel. She helped protesters plan a tent bivouac near the fuel plant, and printed leaflets for campers to hand out to locals, warning of the
dangers of radioactive leakage.

One morning in late July she got a phone call telling her the campers had been attacked in their sleep by masked men armed with metal pipes
and wooden clubs. One camper was beaten to death.

What happened afterwards has shaken the environmental community and Ms.
Rikhvanova's role as its leader. Authorities arrested her 19-year-old
son, who confessed to a role in the attack.

Ms. Rikhvanova's defenders say she was set up by Russia's security
services, who they say lured her son, a sometime security guard who had
recently fallen in with nationalist skinheads, into the attack on the
campers. Authorities dismiss that charge as absurd, and say the
46-year-old Ms. Rikhvanova should have spent more time with her family.

In any case, the incident has diminished the stature of one of Russia's
most influential environmental leaders. Until now, Ms. Rikhvanova's
group in Siberia was able to pull together scientists, ecologists and
common folk into a populist groundswell that forced the government to
pay attention. Her agenda of unspoiled air and water was seen as
transcending politics. In the increasingly authoritarian era of
President Putin, she and other environmentalists have comprised one of
the few respected alternative voices to the Kremlin on public policy.

Now, some erstwhile allies are keeping their distance. "The attack and
the arrest afterwards have been a tremendous blow to the environmental
movement, and divided it like never before," said Mikhail Kulekhov, a
local journalist who had worked with Ms. Rikhvanova previously but now
has backed off. "We all now have to think closely about whom we work with."

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's green movement had
a strong footing in Irkutsk because of Lake Baikal, a
25-million-year-old Russian national treasure.

Known to locals as the Sacred Sea, the lake is 400 miles long and more
than a mile deep, and holds nearly a quarter of the world's unfrozen
fresh water and an abundance of unique animal life.

Ms. Rikhvanova studied biology in Irkutsk under the Soviet system, she
said, "because I didn't have to lie in the sciences." She married a
fellow biologist, and wrote a thesis on the effects of effluent being
dumped into the lake by a Soviet-built pulp and paper plant.

The group she co-founded, Baikal Ecological Wave, started as a kind of
tea society, but quickly gathered strength and members. In the early
1990s, Baikal Wave began collecting grants from the likes of the U.S.
Agency for International Development and Germany's Green Party, bought
its own headquarters and started a newsletter.

Soon the group was locking horns with the federal government and
Moscow's newly minted energy barons. Ms. Rikhvanova probed the work of a
nuclear fuel enrichment plant in the nearby city of Angarsk, and lined
up experts to testify against plans of state and newly privatized oil
companies to build pipelines skirting the lake.

In 2002, federal agents raided Baikal Wave's offices, seized its
computers and accused the group of acquiring secret maps of the nuclear
enrichment plant in Angarsk.

But the group's persistence paid off. When the Kremlin tried to push
through a plan to build one pipeline through a seismically active area
within about 900 yards of the lake, Baikal Wave helped organize street
protests. One rally in central Irkutsk in March last year drew 5,000
people in freezing temperatures. Baikal Wave also organized "flash mobs"
that deposited bottles of blackened water in front of administrative
buildings that they labeled "Baikal Water".

The Kremlin made an about-face the next month. At a news conference on
national television, Mr. Putin ordered the pipeline moved 25 miles away
from the lake.

The pipeline victory made Ms. Rikhvanova "a messiah," said Igor
Ogorodnikov, an organizer in a leftist youth group, Autonomous Action.
The American magazine Condé Nast Traveler flew her to New York and feted
her at an annual awards dinner.

Born in 1988, just as his mother's career as an activist began to take
off, her son Pavel had trouble, as did millions of young Russian men,
navigating the penury of post-Soviet Russia.

He wanted to study business at a private institute, but his parents had
little money to help him. Ms. Rikhvanova and her husband made no more
than $1,000 a month between them, and still lived in the same two-room
apartment with Pavel and his sister that they had inherited in Soviet times.

While selling books to pay for business school, Pavel was hit over the
head by a mugger who stole the books and money he was carrying. Then he
got out of the hospital only to be hit in October of 2005 by a car while
crossing the street, shattering his knee.

For most of last year he lay on the family couch recovering from an
operation that put pins in his leg. When he was able to walk again, he
reveled in his freedom by going to soccer matches. "I didn't think there
was anything wrong with it -- I was happy that he was happy," said his
father, Yevgeny Rikhvanov.

But in Russia, racist gangs have often congealed around soccer fan
clubs. Pavel began coming home from games drunk, his father said, and
"speaking in racist ways that I had never heard before."

In April of this year, Pavel told his parents that a new friend, named
Stepan, had found him a job as a security guard working for a local
businessman. His parents were alarmed -- security firms are often
closely tied to law enforcement in Russia. Ms. Rikhvanova thought it
strange that Pavel, sickly and asthmatic from childhood, would be
offered a job usually reserved for burly toughs.

She said she asked her son not to take the job, fearing it would draw
him into trouble. But the salary -- about $400 a month -- seemed
enormous to him.

The family had to worry in part about pressure from the government
because Ms. Rikhvanova had just announced plans to oppose the nuclear
fuel plant in Angarsk, a top-secret complex in Soviet times that lately
had figured in Kremlin plans to make Russia a key player in the world
energy market.

At a meeting of the G-8 in St. Petersburg in 2006, Mr. Putin announced
Russia would create an international center for processing nuclear fuel,
so that countries such as Iran could develop civilian nuclear power
without having the technology to make nuclear weapons.

Ms. Rikhvanova said an official advising the local government told her
that she risked her reputation by opposing the plant. Some of Ms.
Rikhvanova's former allies shied away from opposing expansion plans that
were backed by the Kremlin and would have been a big source of new jobs
in the region.

One group that was willing to help fight the plant was Autonomous
Action, a loose coalition of mostly youths who call themselves
anarchists and radical ecologists.

Mr. Kulekhov, the journalist, calls its members troublemakers because
many dub themselves "antifa" -- radical antifascists who have a history
of clashing with racist skinheads at soccer matches.

Ms. Rikhvanova defends her work with Autonomous Action, which she said
was vital to demonstrations against the pipeline last year. Each year
the group has set up a tent camp somewhere in Russia that has doubled as
a sort of discussion forum on ecological issues. When members said they
wanted to set up the camp this year near the Angarsk nuclear facility,
Ms. Rikhvanova agreed to help.

They chose a campsite at the edge of Angarsk, in a public forest of
mixed pines and birch trees about three miles from the nuclear plant.
Tensions simmered from the start: Police officers confiscated some
notebooks and music discs from early arrivals. Police also blamed them
for spraying antinuclear graffiti on the buildings of the city
administration, and the pro-Putin political party, United Russia.

After visiting the camp, a local journalist wrote a scathing article
suggesting the campers were living off foreign grant money, and hinted
they could be "ecological spies" trying to collect information about
secret nuclear installations in the area.

The campers held pickets in town, and handed out thousands of leaflets
that Ms. Rikhvanova helped them print warning of the dangers of the
plant. She arranged for a physicist to visit the camp and explain the
technical side of nuclear enrichment.

On July 20 some officers walked into the camp and told the activists to
hand over any cans of spray paint that might have linked them to the
graffiti. Police also demanded to see the passports of people staying in
the camp. Several campers who refused to surrender their passports were
taken to the police station. Ms. Rikhvanova said she went to the police
station to help them, and headed home after they were released.

That evening campers gathered around the fire. They were tired from a
day of picketing, but worried about a report from a local youth who said
he received a text message on his mobile phone, inviting him to take
part in an attack on the camp that night, Mr. Ogorodnikov said.

The group decided that three volunteers should stay awake and stand
guard. One was Ilya Borodayenko, 26, a lanky typesetter who had arrived
that afternoon by train from the far east port city of Nakhodka. Mr.
Borodayenko was an experienced fighter.

Alexei Sutyuga also volunteered to stay up that night, and sat by the
fire with the others, drinking tea and talking to keep one another awake.

At about 5 a.m., he said, young men with scarves covering their faces
ran into the firelight. Mr. Sutyuga said he rose to meet them but
someone hit him over the head from behind with a bottle. He said several
men beat Mr. Borodayenko with metal bars and he staggered away towards
the woods.

Mr. Ogorodnikov said he woke up to screams, and opened the flap of his
tent to see more than a dozen young men rampaging through the camp. They
slashed open tents with knives and beat those inside.

The attackers poured out the campers' drinking water on the ground and
made a bonfire with their banners, leaflets and camping gear.

They left after about 10 minutes, he said. Campers found Mr. Borodayenko
near the edge of the woods, unconscious and bleeding. Ambulances began
to arrive 30 minutes later, and took him and eight others to the
hospital with broken bones and bruises. He died of a cracked skull
shortly after dawn.

Ms. Rikhvanova learned of the attack hours later. Her son, who came home
from Angarsk later in the day, seemed preoccupied, she said. He was
arrested later that week while at work.

Police arrested 17 other men, but identified only one of them, Ms.
Rikhvanova's son, by name. Ms. Rikhvanova says her son was assigned with
the task of tearing down the anarchist flag that was flying over the
encampment.

Police said the attack stemmed from hurt feelings over a fight at a
soccer game two weeks before. Mr. Sutyuga dismisses the claim, and said
no one from the camp had been involved in any fights -- most had just
arrived in Angarsk from different regions of Russia.

Allies have closed ranks around Ms. Rikhvanova, but they say the attack
and Pavel's arrest have badly dented the image of Irkutsk's
environmental movement.

"In Russia, there is a feeling that in an ordinary family, children
support their parents," said Maksim Vorontsov, a member of the National
Bolshevik Party, which has worked closely with Ms. Rikhvanova. "Now
people are wondering why children might be attacking their parents. They
are saying [ecologists] must be abnormal."

Ms. Rikhvanova set out her own views on the attack in a letter she wrote
to erstwhile allies in the ecology movement. She said she later learned
that the security company that hired her son, called Continent, was
owned by a top official in the Union of Right Forces, a political party
that was once headed by the man who now runs Russia's atomic-energy agency.

Today she says she suspects that Stepan and possibly her son's employer
had some kind of link with the security services, and that her son was
lured into the attack to help ruin Baikal Wave.

Igor Kokourov, the cigarette magnate who owns Continent, calls the
accusation nonsense, saying he never met Pavel. "I have too many workers
here to act like a parent," he says, adding that minding Pavel is "her
job, not mine."

Ms. Rikhvanova said she communicates with her son today mainly by
letters passed through his lawyer as he awaits trial in a local prison.
"I am sorry for what has happened -- I should never have gone there," he
wrote to her on a sheet of graph paper last month. "But I swear I never
hurt anyone."

He still has not explained to her how he got involved in the attack, she
said.

Alan Cullison
The Wall Street Journal