Gorbachev Assails Party Trial, Scorns Summons

MOSCOW —  Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Tuesday denounced Russia’s Constitutional Court as a sham and vowed to ignore its summons to testify at a landmark trial weighing the legality of the Communist Party.

“This isn’t a Constitutional Court, it’s a political game,” said Gorbachev, who led the Communist Party from 1985 to 1991. “I refuse to be the hero of this farce.”

At a news conference, Gorbachev also ripped into Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. He sharply criticized Yeltsin’s plan to privatize state industry by issuing every citizen an investment voucher, a process that begins Thursday, and accused Yeltsin of failing to provide leadership.

By allegedly stage-managing a high-profile trial of the Communist Party, Gorbachev charged, Yeltsin’s government “is trying to create a scandal that will take attention away from the real problems facing Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.”

The Constitutional Court, which has been in session sporadically since July, is considering whether Yeltsin acted legally when he banned the party after Communist hard-liners attempted a coup in August, 1991.

But beyond that, the court’s 13 judges have been probing seven decades of Soviet Communist Party history to see if the party had not already forfeited its right to exist because of the blatant and repeated illegality of its acts. The court has questioned dozens of witnesses, ranging from long-winded university professors to a cosmonaut who pointed to Soviet successes in space as proof that the party had led the country well.

Seeking information about recent history, the judges earlier this month summoned Gorbachev to testify, even though Yeltsin’s lawyers had said they would not ask the former Communist Party general secretary to appear in court.

The judges reportedly had hoped Gorbachev would shed light on some of the greatest political and social mysteries of his Kremlin leadership, including his party’s alleged involvement in stirring Soviet ethnic and religious strife to make Moscow’s rule indispensable.

Disgusted over how several top Communists plotted to oust him, Gorbachev resigned his job as general secretary in August, 1991, just a week after the coup collapsed.

Gorbachev’s announcement that he would flout the summons drew a quick reaction.

“I am most of all amazed at the contempt of the Constitutional Court shown by a man who had been pursuing the line of establishing a rule-of-law state,” Valentin Kuptsov, a former Russian Communist leader, told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

Although Valery Zorkin, the court’s chairman, angrily characterized Gorbachev’s refusal to testify as “contempt,” he cannot compel witnesses to appear.

If Gorbachev stays away from the courtroom, he could be fined 100 rubles, Russian observers said--a token sum worth about 40 cents, or enough to buy a gallon of gasoline and a loaf of bread.

In an open letter to Zorkin, Gorbachev insisted he had “great respect for the court” but described the current proceedings as a circus. “One side seeks to destabilize the situation and to quietly rehabilitate those members of the party leadership . . . who supported the August putsch,” Gorbachev wrote. “The other side, which is losing social support for its course and is looking for a scapegoat, has put history in the dock.”

Gorbachev used his Tuesday news conference to intensify his attacks on Yeltsin, seeking to portray his longtime rival as indecisive and out of touch. Yeltsin has called several times for Gorbachev, now a private citizen, to stop meddling in government affairs. But Gorbachev did not hesitate to criticize the Russian leadership.

“We need to change our politics soon, or else I fear our country will lose out,” Gorbachev said. “But the president doesn’t want to make any choices.”