Pravda Discloses KGB Scandal in the Ukraine

In an unusual move, the official Communist Party newspaper Wednesday disclosed a scandal in the Ukraine involving the KGB, the police and the prosecutor’s office.

Pravda said that officials of the KGB--the national security agency--conspired with corrupt police officers and prosecutors in Odessa to send an honest police chief to prison as a way of silencing him.

The Pravda report said the victim, A. V. Malyshev, was in charge of a unit investigating the theft of state property before he was framed and sent to prison for two years on the basis of false evidence.

The security police are almost never mentioned in an unfavorable light in the Soviet press.

Wednesday’s Pravda article was only the second in a year dealing with criminal conduct by KGB officers in the Ukraine.

In the earlier incident, the KGB chief, Viktor M. Chebrikov, personally rebuked his director in the Ukraine, Stepan N. Mukha, for helping to silence a crusading newspaper reporter.

Pressure on Leader

Western analysts, recalling other recent criticism of regional officials in the Ukraine, said it could result in increased pressure for the removal of Ukrainian leader Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, a Politburo member who seems to be at odds with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Shcherbitsky, however, is reported to be strongly entrenched in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and to have become a strong advocate of Gorbachev’s reform policies.

Among the officials against whom disciplinary action has been taken, Pravda said, is A. P. Nochevkin, the party chief in the Odessa region.

The Odessa KGB chief, A.G. Dovzhenko, and another KGB official also were dismissed from their posts.

Dovzhenko, according to Pravda, “crudely violated the established rules on the detention of people under investigation.”

The Odessa prosecutor, V. I. Zimarin, and a senior Moscow police official, A. A. Aslakhanov, were also dismissed, along with a department head in the Moscow prosecutor’s office, G. M. Negoda.