Soviets Investigating Own Prober : Leading Corruption Hunter Accused of Rights Violations

The Soviet Union’s leading investigator of official corruption has come under investigation himself on charges of violating the civil rights of suspects and obtaining evidence illegally.

Boris K. Pugo, chairman of the Communist Party’s Control Committee, told the party newspaper Pravda on Sunday that a special commission is looking into allegations against Telman K. Gdlyan, whose investigations have led to the downfall and imprisonment of a number of prominent officials, including the son-in-law of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Gdlyan had been reprimanded earlier for violating the country’s criminal procedure code, Pugo said, implying that there was evidence of further violations. In addition, the country’s Supreme Court last week sharply criticized Gdlyan’s investigative methods in overturning a guilty verdict in a highly politicized fraud case.

A major political struggle, pitting reformers against party conservatives and reaching up whole pyramids of power into the ruling Politburo, appear to lie behind the allegations and Gdlyan’s counter-accusations, and the outcome is uncertain.

Pugo was ostensibly responding to a letter addressed to Pravda by a senior Soviet lawyer expressing his alarm at what he said were “many episodes where evidence not based on fact and materials obtained by illegal methods” have been used by Gdlyan in preparation of cases.

Originally Backed Prober

Although he originally supported Gdlyan and his campaign against corruption, the lawyer said, “When you get to know the methods he uses, you come to another view of him.”

But Gdlyan, in an unusual public appeal, described these and other accusations against him as a campaign of “moral terror” and “a dirty political deal” intended to halt his current investigations and protect “Moscow bribe-takers.”

“I appeal to honest people to support our battle against lawlessness in the highest echelons of power,” Gdlyan said.

Gdlyan’s appeal was immediately taken up by several members of the new Congress of People’s Deputies with Anatoly I. Lukyanov, the Soviet vice president and a candidate member of the ruling Politburo, after they sent a telegram to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev asking for his intervention.

Gdlyan, 48, who was himself elected as a deputy in last month’s parliamentary elections, became a national celebrity for his fearless pursuit of a massive corruption case in the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan.

Portrayed as Uncompromising

Portrayed in the Soviet media until now as a tough, uncompromising and incorruptible investigator, he and his team of more than 100 detectives had exposed the links between Communist Party officials and organized crime during the Brezhnev era.

The Uzbek officials were found to have embezzled the equivalent of $6 billion--and probably much more--by falsifying cotton production figures and then diverting the state payments for the non-existent bumper harvests.

The scam was protected by an elaborate conspiracy that involved most of Uzbekistan’s law enforcement officials and a number of senior officials, including Yuri M. Churbanov, Brezhnev’s son-in-law and former first deputy interior minister. Dozens of other officials, both in Uzbekistan and Moscow, have also been jailed in the scandal, and at least two former officials were executed.

In his appeal, Gdlyan said that party officials with assistance from the KGB, the Soviet security police, are fabricating charges against him to stop his investigation from going further now that he is focusing on who else in Moscow was part of the racket.

He attacked as unconstitutional the special party commission set up to investigate him and his investigation. The move constituted an unwarranted intrusion of the party into a criminal case at the request of party officials who are themselves under investigation, he said.

‘Crude Provocations’

Gdlyan charged that there have also been “crude provocations from certain employees of the KGB” during the investigation, but he did not elaborate.

“In relation to the investigative group headed by me, there has been created an atmosphere of moral terror, crude pressure and humiliating, illegal supervisory checks that has led to our demoralization,” Gdlyan declared.

“All this attests to the dirty political deal by certain high officials in the leadership of the law-enforcement bodies of the Soviet Union and in the party apparatus who have an interest in not permitting the corruption case to continue and bring to justice top officials.

“All of the measures taken, unquestionably and objectively, lead to the weakening of the battle against bribe-takers, swindlers and embezzlers in the Soviet Union.”

In the letter to Pravda, Gdlyan was accused of detaining suspects for long periods without charging them, of arresting members of their families to put pressure on them and of ignoring provisions of the Soviet criminal code intended to protect defendants’ rights.

‘Called People Criminals’

“More than once he has called people criminals before a court reached a judgment, ignoring the fact that only a court can find a person guilty,” the letter said.

There have been several wrongful convictions as a result of Gdlyan’s activities, the letter said, but complaints about Gdlyan’s methods were largely ignored by the party and government until now.

Last week, the Soviet Supreme Court accused Gdlyan’s special investigative team of violating the law in its 1983 investigation of four Estonians who were convicted of embezzlement and fraud but who have now been exonerated.

The court said that when I. A. Hint and three colleagues were charged with embezzling more than 1 million rubles--about $1.6 million--from their cooperative firm, both the investigators and the court had ignored special regulations on cooperatives and that, in fact, their actions were permitted and that none had personally benefitted from the funds in question.

Hint died in a prison camp in 1985, and his case remains politically sensitive in Estonia where nationalist sentiment runs high.

The court said it had sent to Alexander Y. Sukharev, prosecutor general of the Soviet Union and Gdlyan’s boss, a “private report . . . on violations of the law” by Gdlyan’s team in the 1983 probe.