Arctic 30: Peter Willcox & Dimitri Litvinov

Arctic 30: Peter Willcox & Dimitri Litvinov tell their stories of their families tradition being persecuted for protesting injustice: for Dima it was in Russia and the USSR while for Peter it was in USA in 50s. GONZÁLEZ: Dimitri, I wanted to ask you—at the time you were jailed, your father wrote an op-ed piece in The Washington Post urging your release. And the piece was titled "My Son, Facing Russian Prison for a Peaceful Protest." In it, he wrote that "Dima has the sad distinction of possibly becoming the third generation of political prisoners in our family." Can you tell us something about the history of your family and these run-ins with authorities because of its political involvement?

DIMITRI LITVINOV: Sure. I think, actually, Dad got it a little bit wrong. I think, actually, it’s the fourth generation, if we’re going to really count. My great-grandfather was one of the leading communists before the revolution, and so he opposed the tsar’s regime and ended up being prosecuted for that. He subsequently became one of the closest collaborators of Stalin and Lenin, was actually a foreign minister under Stalin. My grandfather was accused for a political crime and spent years and years in prison during Stalin’s time. His fate was described in a number of books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And then my father went on a protest demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet tanks in 1968, together with six other people. The seven people got fairly hard sentences. My father spent five years in Siberia. The whole family went there. I went to school there. My sister was born there. In fact, the first time that I was ever arrested for a Greenpeace action in Russia, my grandfather gave an interview where he was asked, "What do you think about your grandson going—getting arrested, and by the KGB at that point?" And he said, "Well, it’s the third generation going to prison for a good thing."

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Willcox, can you share your history? You go way back to the first Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior. Talk about what happened there.

PETER WILLCOX: Well, like Dima, I’m sort of a third-generation activist. My grandparents and mother were all before the House Un-American Activities Committee. My grandfather lost his company because of his leading a peace delegation to China in 1952. And I started with Greenpeace—I started working on boats for the environment in 1973. I joined Greenpeace in ’81 and, yes, was on the first Rainbow Warrior when it was blown up by the French in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985.

AMY GOODMAN: Just tell us briefly, for people who don’t know that history—talk about what French intelligence did.

PETER WILLCOX: Well, the French intelligence service was ordered by Mitterand to stop Greenpeace from going to French Polynesia and protesting the nuclear testing issues there. We had just come from the U.S. Marshall Islands, where, thanks to the U.S. testing program, we had had to move a group of about 350 islanders from their purposely contaminated island to a slightly safer one. We went to New Zealand to prepare to go to French Polynesia, and the French decided to anticipate us. The first bomb blew a six-by-seven-foot hole in side of the hull. The second bomb that went off about 45 seconds later trapped our photographer, Fernando Pereira, in his cabin and killed him. He was the only crew member with two children, and his murder certainly ripped a hole in their lives that really has never been repaired.