The first time Valery Golubkin’s family saw him in court was the day he was convicted of treason and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Golubkin’s wife, Svetlana Golubkina, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Valery Nikolayevich! We Are With You. Truth Is On Our Side.”
“We are going to fight for him. This is 1937 all over again in Russia,” she told journalists after the sentencing, referring to the manufactured treason cases that played a key role in dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Terror. “My husband will not give up and will not [falsely] confess. And we won’t give up either.”
Golubkina said publicity is the family’s only hope of securing her husband’s freedom “before he dies.”
“Only by speaking out!” she said.
Golubkin is one of more 30 academics who have faced treason charges in Russia since the former KGB operative Vladimir Putin came to power more than 20 years ago. Moreover, the number of treason cases opened in Russia generally has skyrocketed this year. At least 21 cases have been filed in 2023, more than five times the number filed in the same period the previous year.
Most prominently, opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April, the lion’s share of the sentence -- 18 years -- resulting from a charge of “state treason.” However, in many cases, the suspects are arrested, tried, sentenced, and imprisoned in near-total secrecy.
'He Won't Last'
After a closed-door trial, the Moscow City Court ruled on June 26 that the 71-year-old professor of aerohydrodynamics had shared secret information about hypersonic aircraft with colleagues from European Union countries as part of a collaborative project to develop a faster-than-sound civilian passenger jet that began in 2014.
Golubkin denies the allegations, saying he had no access to secret materials; that he was not involved in gathering the information that was shared during the project; and that all the materials shared had been vetted by Russian security agencies and cleared.
His supervisor at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Anatoly Gubanov, has also been arrested in connection with the case.
The 12-year sentence was the minimum that Judge Vitaly Belitsky could impose, after the government increased the maximum punishment for treason to 25 years in April, Maria Eismont, Golubkin’s lawyer, said.
The more than two years that Golubkin spent in pretrial detention will be subtracted from his sentence, the court ruled.
“But, in reality, he won’t last 12 years in a strict-regime prison,” Golubkin’s daughter, Lyudmila, told RFE/RL. “He is 71 years old, with cancer in remission. He spent more than two years in pretrial custody, where problems with his eyes got so much worse that now he needs an operation. No one there treated him.”
'Bars For Their Epaulettes'
The HEXAFLY-INT project in question was started in 2014. It is described in detail on the TsAGI website, where it was the subject of more than a dozen press releases. It is an international effort to “flight test an experimental vehicle about Mach 7 to verify its potential for a high aerodynamic efficiency during a free flight while guaranteeing a large internal volume,” according to an EU website.
The bloc provided 5 million euros ($5.5 million) of the project’s nearly 12-million euro ($13 million) budget. It was coordinated by the European Space Agency. It wound up activity in September 2019.
“The project investigated the creation of a civilian aircraft based on hydrogen fuel,” Lyudmila Golubkina said, adding that such a plane in theory could fly between Tokyo and Brussels in about two hours.
Russia’s participation in the effort was approved by numerous government agencies, including the Industry and Trade Ministry.
Golubkin, a respected professor and researcher with more than 130 academic publications and numerous state honors, was arrested in April 2021 and charged with treason.
“My father did not collect the information for [TsAGI’s] reports,” Golubkina continued. “He just helped compile it. He joined work on the project in 2018 when his boss, Gubanov, asked him to help edit and format the reports about the work TsAGI researchers were required to carry out under the contract.”
Golubkin never had security clearance to handle classified documents.
“From pretrial detention, he wrote: ‘There was nothing criminal in any of my actions since the data from the project and its results were openly available from the beginning and intended for the common use of all the partners in the project,’” Golubkina said.
The scientist’s TsAGI colleagues told RFE/RL they believe Golubkin did nothing wrong.
“It’s all lies,” one colleague, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions for speaking out, said about the case against Golubkin. “For one thing, he was pressured into participating in the project. The authorities checked what kind of plane was involved and whether we should participate. In the end, they gave the green light.”
The colleague added that all the reports -- “literally, every page” -- were checked by Russian security agencies and “no state secrets were found.”
“That is why they were allowed to be sent,” he added.
The precise nature of the accusations against Golubkin remain unknown because the court proceedings were held behind closed doors and the files were sealed.
He also speculated that the case against Golubov could be a product of TsAGI’s competition with Russia’s space agency, Roskosmos.
“The institute and Roskosmos are direct competitors -- and the case was opened in 2021 when the head of Roskosmos was Dmitry Rogozin,” the colleague said, referring to a director whose term was dogged by corruption allegations and who was dismissed by Putin last July. “Who benefited from tying up a competitor for big state contracts and budgetary funding?”
Svetlana Golubkina said her husband’s computer, with all his research on hypersonic flight, was confiscated when his home was initially searched in 2020.
Another colleague, who also asked that their name be withheld, said the case was brought solely because state investigators “didn’t have enough bars for their epaulettes.”
“They admit themselves that their bosses demand cases based on specific articles [of the Criminal Code],” the second colleague said. “Otherwise, there will be no bonuses or promotions. And where do you get these cases? You have to just make them up.”
The precise nature of the accusations against Golubkin remain unknown because the court proceedings were held behind closed doors and the files were sealed. Golubkin’s lawyers are barred from discussing the case in detail, but Eismont said that in the closed files there is no mention “of secret materials, to which Golubkin did not have access in any event.”
The head investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge in Golubkin’s case are no strangers to high-profile, politically tinged convictions.
Investigator Anton Chaban put together the treason cases against several prominent academics, including rocket scientist Viktor Kudryavtsev and Roman Kovalyov.
Prosecutor Gulchekhra Ibragimova was involved in the 2010 prosecution of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was already in prison at the time after being sentenced to nine years on tax charges in 2005. Khodorkovsky’s prosecution was widely perceived as retaliation for his political activity.
Judge Belitsky was one of the judges in Kara-Murza’s trial.
