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				Putin Clamps Down On Free Speech

FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW, THE TIMES, FEB. 19, 2000

ONE of them narrowly escaped being sent to an asylum. Another is missing and feared dead in Chechnya. A third is confined to a closed "nuclear" city in Siberia, facing a trial no journalists have been allowed to attend. A fourth asked the Government for an alternative to military service and got two years in jail.

Across Russia, 15 years after Mikhail Gorbachev triggered the Soviet collapse by granting sweeping new press and civic freedoms, those who seized them and transformed the country now fear a systematic crackdown by a vast secret police force with a new mission - to rebuild the power of the Russian state under acting President Putin.

Russia's new dissidents range from muckrakers and environmentalists to the scriptwriters for Mr Putin's puppet on Kukly, the local equivalent of Spitting Image. A group of St Petersburg academics has demanded that the programme face criminal charges for defaming the Kremlin's new protégé "with a special rage and frenzy".

Mr Putin himself, a former head of the KGB's successor agency, the FSB, has pledged to protect the press freedoms that now seem likely to be remembered as one of President Yeltsin's finest legacies. But his assurance counted for little when FSB officers knocked on Aleksandr Khinshtein's door in Moscow last month and tried to take him to a psychiatric hospital hours from the capital for "tests". Mr Khinshtein, 23, a reporter on a popular Russian tabloid, is known for fearless if unreliable exposés on Kremlin power-brokers, especially Boris Berezovsky, the oil and media tycoon and Yeltsin confidant,

He had the wit to show the FSB a doctor's note and claim he was too ill to leave his flat, but the implied threat to brand him insane recalled some of the worst excesses of the Soviet KGB. He ran for cover to a series of addresses which he did not disclose even to friends, and eventually agreed to psychiatric testing in the hospital of his choice. The charge against him - hiding a mental illness when applying for a driving licence - has since been dropped.

Those who dare to question the Kremlin's policy on Chechnya may be risking life as well as liberty. Andrei Babitsky, a Russian reporter for the American-run Radio Liberty, has not been heard from since being detained by Russian troops over a month ago in Grozny, where he angered Moscow with his allegedly pro-Chechen coverage.

The FSB claims, bizarrely, to have exchanged Mr Babitsky for Russian prisoners, but the swap appears to have been faked. His wife is distraught. "If someone I trusted told me he was alive, I would believe it," she said this week. "But I don't trust anyone any more." Others have seen grounds for hope in the judiciary, if not the FSB.

Last year two former naval officers who published information on contamination by Russia's rusting nuclear fleets, Aleksandr Nikitin and Grigori Pasko, won court victories after being jailed on the flimsiest of charges. But they are seen as the lucky ones, protected in the end by Mr Yeltsin's consistent stand for freedom of expression.

The Glasnost Defence Fund, set up to foster an open society in Russia, lists 88 instances of intimidation of journalists and writers by the authorities last December alone. The press is barred from the libel trial of Nikolai Schoor, an environmentalist and publisher in the closed city of Snezhinsk. Most of the cases are traced to a new zeal for official control of information since Mr Putin became Prime Minister last August.

Mr Putin has set up an Orwellian-sounding Information Ministry with broad powers to regulate the media. He has also appointed a chief spokesman on Chechnya, whose first move was to ask Russian reporters to join the national struggle against terrorism even at the cost of objectivity.NTV, the largest private television channel, has accused the army of understating its losses. The results include being kept off front-line helicopter trips and a thinly-veiled threat from Gazprom, the state gas monopoly and a key shareholder, to invest elsewhere.

Perhaps the bravest stand against the war is by Dmitri Neverovsky. Now 26, he has insisted since 1997 on his constitutional right to a civilian alternative to national service. Last November a judge threw out his claim to be a conscientious objector and sentenced him to two years in jail.

> Aleksandr Khinshtein, 23, a Moskovsky Komsomolets reporter known for aggressive stories on Kremlin corruption, resisted FSB demands for psychiatric tests in a hospital. His case was dropped.

> Andrei Babitsky, 35, last phoned Moscow from Chechnya on January 15. A reporter for Radio Liberty whose dispatches angered the Kremlin, he has since been held by Russian troops and allegedly swapped for Russian prisoners. His wife fears he may be dead.

> Aleksandr Nikitin, 47, a former Russian Navy captain acquitted of espionage and treason in December after a four-year struggle with the FSB including 11 months in jail.

> Grigori Pasko, a former naval officer arrested in Vladivostok in 1997 after allegedly filming a Russian tanker dumping nuclear waste at sea and passing the film to Japanese television. Spent 20 months in jail without charge.

> Nikolai Schoor, an environmentalist and newspaper publisher in Snezhinsk, faces trial on libel charges stemming from reports on local bureaucrats. The trial is closed to the press.

> Dmitry Neverovsky, 26, was sentenced to two years in jail for demanding a civilian alternative to military service, as guaranteed in the Russian Constitution. He claims to have been targeted by authorities since dropping out of college in 1995 to protest the first Chechen war.

> Yelena Bonner, 77, widow of human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, considers the FSB (successor to the KGB) "untransformable" and has called for international peacekeeping forces in Chechnya.