Brezhnev Son-in-Law to Go on Trial in Corruption Case

The son-in-law of Leonid I. Brezhnev, the late Soviet president, will go on trial here shortly on charges of corruption, the deputy state prosecutor said Thursday.

Yuri M. Churbanov, who rose under Brezhnev’s patronage to be the country’s first deputy minister of internal affairs, is accused of taking bribes of more than $1.1 million, and he could be sentenced to death if convicted.

Alexander F. Katusev, the deputy prosecutor general, told the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya that the case against Churbanov, who was arrested in January, 1987, has been sent to the Supreme Court for an early trial.

2 Committed Suicide

Churbanov, who was one of the country’s top police officials, will be tried with eight former officials--the minister of interior, his two deputies and five senior police officers--from the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. Two other suspects, also senior Uzbek officials, committed suicide during the investigation.

After a five-year investigation by more than 100 police officials from around the country, Churbanov was interrogated for an additional six months and pressed to make a confession, but he apparently has refused.

Details of the bribery charges against Churbanov and the others have not been disclosed, but Soviet sources said the trial will probably be held in open court despite a rumored threat from Churbanov to disclose what he knows about the misdeeds of members of the present leadership.

The prosecution of Churbanov, the third husband of Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, appears intended to demonstrate the government’s determination to clean up the country’s extensive corruption.

Era of Depravity

At the same time, the Churbanov trial will dramatize what is now widely seen as the depravity of the Brezhnev era, and thus discredit the policies of those times and those who continue to support them today.

“As of now, we have seized upon a very important link in the criminal chain--but only one,” Katusev said. “Much work is still ahead. The state prosecutor’s office will continue its investigation.”

Churbanov was the first deputy to Brezhnev’s long-serving interior minister and one of his closest friends, Gen. Nikolai A. Shchelokov, who shot himself in 1984 amid an investigation into allegations that he had used state funds to enrich himself and his family.

So strong was the political machine that Brezhnev built in his 18 years in power that even after his death in November, 1982, investigators said, it took more than a year just to get permission to arrest Churbanov.

Secretary Jailed

Other Brezhnev associates are also falling under suspicion of corruption. Brezhnev’s private secretary, Gennady D. Brovin, was jailed in January for a nine-year term for taking about $30,000 in bribes while in office.

Addressing the special Communist Party conference here on Tuesday, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary, called for further measures to reform the Interior Ministry and the police to correct the “major mistakes and unfortunately the abuses (of power) that have been committed.”

Churbanov is also involved, according to investigators, in a massive, $6.8-billion fraud in which officials embezzled state funds by falsifying cotton production figures in Uzbekistan during the Brezhnev era.

That case, still under investigation, is expected to lead to the prosecution of more government and Communist Party officials, not only from Uzbekistan but from Moscow and many other parts of the country.

Officials Investigated

On Thursday, Georgy P. Razumovsky, the party Central Committee’s secretary for organizational work, told delegates to the conference here that the conference credentials committee was investigating allegations that members of the Uzbek delegation had been implicated in the scandal. The party’s Control Commission and the state prosecutor have also been asked to investigate.

Although a top investigator had asserted that some members of the Uzbek delegation were suspected of bribery, Razumovsky said a review turned up no charges against any of them, but that the allegations, published in a national magazine last Sunday, would be pursued. The editor of the magazine, Vitali Korotich, said later that he had given the names of four Uzbek delegates to the credentials committee.

More than 100 Uzbek officials have already been charged--two have been executed--in the corruption scandal in Uzbekistan, which began in 1983, just before the death of Sharaf Rashidov, the Uzbek party chief and a close associate of Brezhnev, who had died the year before.