Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30 Read online

  Ben Stewart is a former Guardian Student Journalist of the Year. He was one of the six protesters cleared of criminal damage in a groundbreaking trial after climbing the chimney at Kingsnorth power station. In its ‘Year in Ideas’ issue the New York Times magazine described the verdict as one of the defining moments of 2008. In 2010 he led the first Greenpeace expedition to challenge Arctic oil drilling off the coast of Greenland. In 2013 he was a leading figure in the campaign to free the Arctic 30. He lives in London.

  DON’T TRUST

  DON’T FEAR

  DON’T BEG

  © 2015 by Ben Stewart

  Foreword © 2015 by Paul McCartney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Map © Guardian Graphic

  Images from the Gulag Chronicle © Anthony Perrett, with thanks to Mannes Ubels Drawings of Murmansk SIZO-1 prison cell © Phil Ball Message sent by Dima Litvinov on ‘the road’ © Dima Litvinov

  PLATE SECTION PICTURE CREDITS

  Page 1: all photos © Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace. Page 2: top and bottom © Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace. Page 3: top © Greenpeace; middle © Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace; bottom © Greenpeace. Page 4: top and middle © Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace; bottom, copyright reserved. Page 5: top and bottom © Greenpeace. Page 6: top © Uffe Weng / Greenpeace; bottom © Patrik Rastenberger / Greenpeace. Page 7: top © Igor Podgorny / Greenpeace; middle © Greenpeace; bottom © Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace. Page 8 top and bottom © Dmitri Sharomov / Greenpeace.

  ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ Words and Music by Vince Clarke © 1981, reproduced by permission of Musical Moments Ltd/SM Publishing UK Limited, London W1F 9LD.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  First published in Great Britain by Guardian Books and Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 2015 Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-110-9 (e-book)

  CIP data is available

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  Printed in the United States of America

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  ‘Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.’

  Kurt Vonnegut

  The author’s royalties from sales of this book are being donated to groups that fight for environmental protection and the rights of political prisoners: SaveTheArctic.org; 350.org; PlatformLondon.org; Agora-Sofia (www.openform.ru) and Human Corpus (www.corpus.media.org).

  For the families of the Arctic 30, and for my own

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  Hi, Paul McCartney here.

  1968. That was quite a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders. It was Christmas Eve. Anders, his navigator Jim Lovell and their mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft, their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. ‘Oh my God,’ Anders cried. ‘Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’

  ‘You got a colour film?’ he asked the others. ‘Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you …’ For a minute or so, three human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of film into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that it’s credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement – with changing the very way we think about ourselves. That was nearly half a century ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white blanket. Much of it has now gone, and it seems possible that for future generations the North Pole will be open water. Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken we’ve been so busy warming our world that it now looks different from space. By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere that today’s astronauts are looking at a different planet. And here’s something that just baffles me. As the ice retreats, the oil giants are moving in. Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they are eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world. They’re exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. That’s why, in summer 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries sailed for a Russian Arctic oil platform, determined to focus global attention on the new Arctic oil rush. They saw how fossil fuels have come to dominate our lives on Earth, how the energy giants bestride our planet unchecked. They knew that at some time and in some place somebody had to say, ‘No more.’ For those activists that time was now and that place was the Arctic. Their ship was seized, they were thrown in jail and faced fifteen years in prison. Millions of people from across the world raised their voices in support of the stand they took, including many from the great nation of Russia. The tale you are about to read is extraordinary. It is one of fear, hope, despair and humanity. But we still don’t know how it ends. That is up to all of us. Including you
. Please encourage your friends to help bring a hopeful conclusion to this moving story.

  Paul McCartney, December 2014

  INTRODUCTION

  Frank Hewetson is lying on the upper bunk of a prison cell in the Russian Arctic, waiting impatiently for the effects of a Valium tablet to kick in. He’s wearing woollen tights, two pairs of socks, three T-shirts, a pullover, a skull-gripping hat and earplugs. The hot incandescent bulb dangling from a wire above his head has just been switched off by the guards, and Murmansk SIZO-1 isolation jail is stirring.

  He can hear boots stomping on the floor above his head, prisoners thumping the walls in cells down the corridor, the distant sound of screaming. Across the prison, windows are swinging open and ropes are being fed through bars, then lowered down the outside walls or swung from cell to cell.

  Frank pulls a blanket up around his neck and holds himself against the cold biting air. He is forty-eight years old, he has a wife and two children back in London and he’s charged by the Russian state with piracy – a crime that carries a minimum sentence of ten years in a country where 99 per cent of all trials end in a verdict of guilty.1

  He opens his eyes into narrow slits and looks down. One of his cellmates, Boris, is bent at the waist and pressing his ear against the plughole of the sink, an expression of strained concentration on his face. Boris is a short man with olive skin, muscles like marble, a permanent wrap of stubble on his face and a forehead so narrow that his hairline nearly merges with his eyebrows.

  He’s charged with double manslaughter.

  Frank’s other cellmate, Yuri (multiple counts of assault by Taser), is feeding a rope out of the window and whistling to himself. He’s younger than Boris, not much meat on him, sallow skin and greasy black hair. Minutes from now this rope network, known as the doroga – ‘the road’ – will connect almost every cell along the outside walls of the jail, allowing the prisoners to communicate with each other and share contraband. It is a physical internet through which power is projected and justice dispensed by the mafia bosses who control much of this place.

  With relief, Frank senses his mind becoming foggy. The air no longer stings his cheeks and he can’t feel the wire mesh digging into his back through the thin mattress. Thank Christ for those drugs. Every night when the prison awakes the pills allow him to slip into something approaching sleep. He secured the Valium prescription five weeks ago after experiencing what the authorities thought was a cardiac arrest but which was, in reality, a panic attack brought on by the prospect of spending ten to fifteen years in a Russian jail. He was sped to hospital and bundled into a wheelchair then pushed through the corridors at breakneck speed by an armed guard. Patients and doctors dove into doorways to avoid being run down as Frank careered towards an emergency consultation, wires trailing from electrodes stuck to his bare chest, the guard singing lines to himself from the back catalogue of Depeche Mode.

  Boris stands up straight and looks at Frank quizzically. ‘Frank,’ he hisses. ‘Come come come. Frank!’

  Frank closes his eyes, pretending to sleep, but a moment later he can feel Boris’s breath on his face. It smells of potatoes and fish-head soup.

  ‘Fraaaank. Come come.’

  ‘Boris, piss off and leave me alone, all right.’

  ‘Come, Frank. Come.’

  He’s pointing towards the sink. Something in his voice is utterly, irresistibly insistent.

  ‘Frank!’

  ‘Jesus, Boris. What?’

  ‘Come!’

  Frank rubs his eyes, pulls out the earplugs, swings his legs over the edge of the bunk and grudgingly jumps to the ground. Boris slaps him on the back then leads him over to the sink. Yuri ties off the rope, crosses the cell, kneels down under the sink and starts unscrewing the U-bend. Boris kneels down next to him and together the two Russians strain hard, pulling the pipe away from the wall until – with a scraping metallic pop – it comes clear.

  ‘Frank, sit.’

  Frank scratches his head. The air is filled with thumping and banging as the rope network comes alive. Soon the prisoners will be using it to share illicit letters, sugar, mobile telephones, an underground satirical newspaper and perfumed cigarettes given as gifts by prisoners to lovers they have never met and never will.

  His cellmates are staring up at him with imploring eyes. Boris is clutching the liberated U-bend like it’s a glass of beer. Slowly, hesitantly, Frank lowers himself to the ground then Boris pushes Frank’s head down, at the same time twisting the U-bend until it’s pressed against Frank’s ear. Frank’s eyes swivel in their sockets; he stares at Boris and he’s about to say something when he hears a faint tinny voice.

  ‘Allo? Dis is prisoner boss Andrey Artamov in cell four-one-zero. Is dat the Arctic firty?’

  Frank gulps. ‘Er …’ He hesitates then puts his mouth to the end of the tube. ‘Yes, hello?’

  ‘Is dat the Arctic firty?’

  ‘Er … yes. Well, one of them.’

  ‘I have friend of you here.’

  ‘Right. Okay.’

  Silence, then, ‘Hello, Frank?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Frank, this is Roman Dolgov, your Greenpeace compatriot from the cell above you.’

  ‘Er … hello, Roman. You seem to be somewhere in my U-bend system. How did you fit down there?’

  ‘Ha ha, yes, this is funny, Frank. What you say is funny.’

  ‘Roman, is this … are we talking on … is this a telephone?’

  ‘This is prison telephone. I have to tell you, Frank, we have a problem.’

  Roman is a 44-year-old campaigner from the Moscow office of Greenpeace, arrested with Frank and twenty-eight others when their ship was stormed by Russian commandos seven weeks ago. They’d held a protest at an Arctic oil platform operated by President Putin’s state-run oil company, Gazprom, and now they’re facing the full fury of the Kremlin.

  ‘Roman, what’s going on?’

  ‘I speak with respected prisoners, Frank. They tell me you must talk to cell three-one-six. The cell opposite yours.’

  ‘Okay. Why?’

  ‘They say you must get the names of the Russians in that cell. They do not give their names, they do not go to gulyat’ – the hour of exercise the prisoners are granted each day – ‘and they have broken the doroga. They do not co-operate. The rope network on one wall is broken. Big problem.’

  ‘Er … okay, Roman. So … so … I’m sorry, say again, what do they want me to do?’

  ‘Francesco is also in their cell. You must ask him, what are the names of the Russians?’

  Frank thinks for a moment. He rubs the fuzz on his head. His blond hair was closely cropped on the ship but now it’s growing out. He hands the U-bend to Boris, stands up and opens a hatch in the door.

  ‘Frankie!’ he shouts.

  In a door across the hallway a hatch opens and the face of 38-year-old Frenchman Francesco Pisanu – another of the Greenpeace detainees – appears.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Francesco, what are the names of the Russians they’ve just put in your cell?’

  ‘One moment.’

  His face disappears. A minute later he returns.

  ‘They will not tell me.’

  ‘Francesco, you must find out the names of the Russians.’

  ‘They will not tell me. They are scared to tell me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They say they are scared.’

  Frank kneels down, takes the U-bend and speaks into it. ‘Roman, they won’t say.’

  ‘They will not say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  At the other end of the pipe a conversation is conducted in Russian, before Roman returns.

  ‘Okay, Frank. Good night.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Good night, Frank.’

  ‘Er … okay. Night, Roman.’

  Frank leans back, still holding the pipe, tapping the end with a finger and biting his lip. Boris shrugs. Yuri grunts a
nd pushes himself to his feet. Frank stares at the pipe for a moment before handing it back to Boris, then he stands up, sniffs, clambers back onto his bunk, pulls the blanket right up to his neck and lies there, staring at the ceiling.

  An illegal telephone network fashioned from the prison plumbing system? Mafia bosses issuing orders through a U-bend? And this isn’t even the strangest thing that’s happened in the last two months.

  ‘Christ,’ Frank whispers to himself, shaking his head. ‘How the fuck did I end up here?’

  ONE

  He lifts the binoculars, narrows his eyes and twists the dial to focus. His vision is flooded with blurry scarlet red. Frank turns the dial again and the view sharpens. He can see large white Russian letters, a helicopter deck protruding far over the water, the drilling tower standing out crisply against a blue sky.

  He must have stared at that oil platform fifty times in the last twelve hours. It looks like a football stadium floating defiantly in the ocean, 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A half-million-tonne square block of metal and concrete with sheer red sides.2 It’s called the Prirazlomnaya.

  Frank is standing at the bow of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise. Three miles of ocean separate him from the platform. He turns his head and the view through the binoculars fills with sweeping open water then the dark blue hull of another ship. It’s a Russian coastguard vessel – the Ladoga – and it’s slowly circling the platform, protecting it from protesters. Specifically from Frank Hewetson and his friends.

  He sucks his teeth and lowers the binoculars. It won’t be long now. Soon he’ll know if his plan is good enough. Earlier today he launched a flotilla of RHIBs – inflatable speedboats – from the Arctic Sunrise. It was a dummy run to test the Russians’ reaction time. The coastguard took five minutes, maybe six, to launch their own boats. Frank watched them from the deck of the Sunrise. They were slower than his team. Slower than the Greenpeace crew.

  We’re ready, he thinks. It’s going to happen. First light tomorrow.

  There are two RHIBs on the Russian ship. Tomorrow morning he’ll launch five from the Sunrise. He’s got them beaten for numbers, but he’ll need to surprise them too.