A new documentary tells the story of the Arctic 30, the Greenpeace activists who were threatened with 15 years in a rat-infested Russian prison – until Sir Paul McCartney made a personal plea to Putin
On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace
Sunday—Tuesday 9.00pm, 9.30pm BBC2
IN SEPTEMBER 2013, Frank Hewetson was one of 28 Greenpeace activists and two journalists on the Arctic Sunrise who were arrested by the Russian coastguard after peacefully protesting against Russia drilling for oil in the Arctic. Following a failed attempt to board Prirazlomnaya, the Arctic oil platform controlled by the Russian state, the so-called Arctic 30, who comprised men and women from 18 countries, were held in a dilapidated detention centre in the port city of Murmansk, in north-western Russia. They were warned they could face a maximum prison term of 15 years for piracy – an unexpectedly stringent response even by the standards of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and one that elicited a worldwide protest.
A new six-part BBC documentary series, On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace uses both existing footage and reconstructed scenes to tell the story and reveal just how brutal the detention centre was. One of the most heartbreaking moments shows Hewetson, a British action co-ordinator for Greenpeace, being given some tokens and told he can make a phone call. His 16-year-old daughter Nell picks up the phone – Hewetson also has a son, Joe, who was 13 at the time, with the casting director Nina Gold – and starts sobbing upon hearing her father’s voice.
“When I watched the documentary recently, that moment really got to me,” says Hewetson. “There’s another part to the story, which isn’t in the documentary: a Russian interpreter was in the room, listening to my phone call with headphones on. It was weird – very John Le Carré. When the tokens ran out mid-conversation, he looked at me and said, ‘You must ring back.’”
And did you? “I couldn’t! I was marched back to my cell and the door was slammed shut. I was in a cell measuring about two metres wide by five metres long with Sasha, who was in for manslaughter, and Vladimir, the head of a taser-mugging gang in Murmansk. They spoke no English and I had virtually no Russian. The radiators didn’t work, the windows were broken, there were rats. For an hour a day we were allowed to exercise in a tiny cell. It’s hard to describe how scary it all was.”
Hewetson, who had been involved with Greenpeace since the late 1980s, is genial but tough. The 57-year-old says jokingly that he considers himself “a good criminal”; he has a great sense of humour, which is probably what has go
