Russia's Supreme Court ruled Friday that the 12 men accused of plotting to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1991 hard-line Communist coup attempt must stand trial despite having been granted amnesty by parliament last month.
The court's ruling means that the men, once among the most powerful of the Soviet Union, must appear in court again to answer charges of treason for their actions against Gorbachev in August 1991.Their previous trial, much delayed by repeated illnesses of the defendants and their lawyers and improper conduct by the former state prosecutor, was canceled just days ago by the military panel hearing the case. The military judges said parliament's amnesty legislation made the trial null and void.
The amnesty has been extremely controversial here because it resulted not only in bringing the 1991 coup trial to a halt but also released the men who led last October's hard-line parliamentary uprising against Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
The state prosecutor's office had bitterly protested the decision by the military panel to end the 1991 coup trial and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Friday the high court ruled that, under Russia's criminal code, any trial that has begun must be concluded. As a result, the court said, the men must be brought back to trial, though apparently there will be a new panel of judges.
The decision leaves open the possibility that the accused coup leaders could be found guilty in a new trial but set free under the provisions of the parliamentary amnesty, which specifically covered those involved in the 1991 coup.
"I am not alarmed," said Anatoly Lukyanov, former chairman of the Soviet parliament and one of the defendants in the case. "We are not guilty. We have never betrayed our motherland." Lukyanov is now a member of the new Russian parliament, elected in December. The other defendants include the former heads of the KGB and the Defense Ministry and Gorbachev's vice president and prime minister.
Meanwhile, the Russian prosecutor general's office dropped all charges against scientist Vil Mirzayanov, who had been accused of betraying state secrets by revealing in a 1992 newspaper article that Russia was developing a new generation of deadly chemical weapons.
The case against Mirzayanov had provoked a storm of protest, in Russia and abroad since the scientist, a former researcher at a top-secret laboratory, was being tried under Soviet-era laws that Yeltsin's aides agreed violated the new Russian constitution.