U.S. SCHOLAR IS SENTENCED TO PRISON IN RUSSIA ON DRUG CHARGES

MOSCOW, April 27 -- A court in Voronezh, in southwest Russia, convicted a
visiting American Fulbright scholar on drug charges today and sentenced him
to 37 months in a penal colony.

The verdict puts an official stamp on a seemingly minor marijuana
infraction that swerved briefly and in bizarre fashion into suggestions of
espionage. But it does not end the case, which now appears headed for an
appeal.

The American scholar, John Edward Tobin, a postgraduate student at Voronezh
State University, was found guilty of possessing and distributing about two
ounces of marijuana. Such offenses can carry sentences of up to four years
in prison, but the judge reduced Mr. Tobin's sentence in part, she said,
because fellow students attested to his good character.

Mr. Tobin's lawyer persuaded the court to drop a third charge of
maintaining a drug den, which carries a sentence of 15 years in jail. The
lawyer, Maxim Bayev, said Mr. Tobin would appeal to the high court in
Voronezh province on the grounds that the 37-month sentence was too harsh
for the crime. "Of course we are unhappy with the outcome," Mr. Bayev told
reporters.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Tobin had bought marijuana and smoked it with
others and that they would seek to prosecute a second person, whom they did
not name, who is in the United States. Mr. Tobin has argued that the drugs
were planted on him.

Although Mr. Tobin's arrest on Feb. 1 went almost unnoticed for weeks, it
developed into a showcase for the tensions that underlie Russian ties with
the West. Mr. Tobin, 24, was at work on a thesis examining Russia's
changing political attitudes when police officers arrested him and, the
police said, found a half-ounce of marijuana in his clothes. A search of
his apartment, the police said, turned up another ounce and a half of
marijuana.

But the case was picked up by Russian newspapers and national television
only in late February, after local officials of Russia's
counterintelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, held a news
conference to charge that Mr. Tobin was in training to become a spy.

As evidence, the officials cited his background: before becoming a
Fulbright scholar, Mr. Tobin studied Russian and received training in
interrogation at a Defense Department intelligence institute in Fort
Huachuca, Ariz. It was later disclosed that Mr. Tobin was in an Army
Reserve military intelligence battalion in Waterbury, Conn., near his home
in Ridgefield.

The State Department denied the accusation, and a day later, security
officials in Moscow said Mr. Tobin had broken no espionage laws, although
they stuck by their assessment that Mr. Tobin was an agent in training.

Suspicions about Western intentions appear to have snowballed here in
recent years, and Mr. Tobin's case has unfolded amid a series of incidents
involving supposed espionage efforts that underscored those concerns.
Several months before Mr. Tobin's arrest, a Moscow court convicted a
retired American naval intelligence officer, Edmund Pope, on espionage
charges after he purchased Russian military technology from Russian
researchers.

Shortly after Mr. Tobin's arrest, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
seized a career F.B.I. official in Washington, Robert Philip Hanssen, and
charged him with working for the Soviet Union and Russia since the mid-1980s.

Students supporting Mr. Tobin crowded into the courtroom today. Moscow
television showed film of children demonstrating outside, chanting, "No to
American drugs." The American Embassy in Moscow, which sent observers to
the trial, had no comment on the verdict.

Justice Ministry officials said that if Mr. Tobin's appeals failed, they
would imprison him at a colony for foreign offenders in Mordovia, a
province-like republic about 200 miles south of Moscow that has been a
center for prisons since the Stalin era.