Harvard student found guilty of smuggling in Moscow

By Anna Dolgov, Globe Correspondent, 8/23/2003

MOSCOW -- A Moscow court yesterday found Harvard Divinity School student Andrew Okhotin guilty of smuggling $48,000 into Russia -- money he says were donations intended for Russia's Baptist congregations -- and imposed a six-month suspended sentence and ordered the funds to be confiscated.

Okhotin, 28, was arrested with the cash in March after flying to Moscow's main international airport from New York. He says he inadvertently chose the wrong customs corridor, intended for travelers with nothing to declare, and made no attempt to conceal the money.

Judge Igor Yakovlev ordered that the $48,000, along with $10 in personal money that Okhotin had carried with him, be paid into state coffers.

"The money is being taken away from believers; this is simple injustice," his brother David cried out at the judge after the verdict was read.

Yakovlev said in his verdict that the mild sentence was due to excellent character references that religious leaders and university professors in the United States provided on Okhotin's behalf, and to the fact that he was the main breadwinner for his small child. In that, the judge confused Okhotin with his brother. David Okhotin and his wife, who live in Moscow, have a 9-month-old daughter, but Andrew Okhotin has no children.

"This just shows their [lack of] attention to details," Andrew Okhotin said. "If they wrote the verdict with so much diligence that they ascribed a child to me, no wonder they ascribed some other things to me as well."

Okhotin and his lawyer, Vladimir Ryakhovsky, said they would appeal.

Okhotin's Russian visa expires Sept. 1, but he said he hopes to get an extension and would stay in the country as long as it takes to get the verdict overturned.

"What else can I do?" he said. "If you got robbed and that illegality was covered up by law, what would you do?"

Okhotin called the verdict "a gross miscarriage of justice. . . .. It is a very tragic picture of the realities of Russia."

Russian law places no restriction on the amount of cash that can be brought into the country, as long as anything above $10,000 is declared. If Okhotin had chosen the right customs corridor, the red corridor for those with items to declare, officials would have stamped his declaration form and waved him through.

But entering the other, green customs corridor is regarded as tantamount to a statement that the traveler has nothing to declare, customs legal specialist Alexei Ionov has testified. If something subject to declaration is then found, the person may be charged with smuggling contraband.

Okhotin said he had filled out a declaration form properly and presented it at the officials' request. But customs agents said Okhotin had dodged their questions about how much cash he was carrying and failed to immediately present his declaration form.

"The court does not trust the testimony of the defendant and believes that his statements were made with the goal of avoiding punishment for a crime and ensuring the return of the smuggled money," Yakovlev said in his verdict.

A six-month suspended sentence is the lightest allowed by Russian law in contraband cases. This was the sentence demanded by the prosecution, a position that stoked optimism among the defense team, which interpreted it as an acknowledgment that the prosecution did not have much of a case.

Okhotin's mother, Lyudmila, sighed and shook her head when the verdict was read. "I had in no way expected such a decision," she said.

Defense lawyers argued that bringing into the country something that is not banned or restricted by law does not constitute contraband, even if the traveler mistakenly enters the wrong customs corridor. They also said the prosecution has not proved Okhotin's intent to commit a crime, a requirement for a conviction on contraband charges.

Okhotin, a student in Harvard's Master of Theological Studies program, had a letter demonstrating that the money was from donations collected in the United States by the Russian Evangelist Ministry. The group was founded by his father, Vladimir, who immigrated to the United States in 1989 after serving two years in a Soviet prison for "anti-Soviet activities," a charge typically brought against religious believers who refused to work as informers for the secret police. The parents live in San Diego.