Rights Denied, Coup Leaders’ Lawyers Say

Lawyers representing the men accused of attempting to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met the press Tuesday and, months before they will face the judge, launched a public defense of their clients.

Lawyers for five of the 14 former top Soviet officials accused of treason charged that their telephones had been tapped, their attempts to gather evidence thwarted and their clients’ basic human rights denied.

Yuri Ivanov, the lawyer for former KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, accused the media of fomenting “hysteria” against his client.”

“You do not even realize how deeply the dignity of our defendants is being violated,” Ivanov said. “What we have now is not an investigation but a whipping of the defendants without sufficient guaranteed right for defense.”

Alexander Gofshtein, the lawyer for Anatoly I. Lukyanov, formerly the chairman (Speaker) of the Soviet legislature, scolded the hundreds of reporters, photographers and television crew members who had crammed into a small hall for the press conference. “Our defendants are already being called criminals,” he complained.

Because the Soviet court system does not use juries, the lawyers for the accused coup leaders are free of the need to pick the best jurors to hear their clients’ cases--a task often faced by American lawyers.

The defense attorneys, however, are more upset about another routine part of the American legal system that the Soviet legal system lacks--the pretrial process of discovery.

“We say we must be allowed to acquaint ourselves with the material on the case, but the investigators say no,” Gofshtein said. “We believe the law is on our side. But if the investigators decide not to let us see the evidence, then we can’t see it.”

Alexei Gologanov, attorney for former Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, said he and the other lawyers suspect that their telephone conversations have been tapped by prosecutors.

He also said Pavlov had told him that letters and notes from his conversations with his attorney were taken from his prison cell several times last week.

The five lawyers agreed that they and their clients want the trials to be open. If the defense attorneys’ first press conference is any indication, the trials, which are not expected to begin for a least two or three months, should be full of theatrics.

Ivanov relayed his outrage over an article in the liberal weekly magazine Ogonyok in which Russian Prime Minister Ivan S. Silayev spoke in favor of capital punishment for ex-KGB chief Kryuchkov.

“The writer should have indicated that this does not reflect the opinion of the magazine,” Ivanov said. “Otherwise, such a publication by the flagship of Soviet journalism could be misinterpreted.”

Gofshtein’s eyebrows rose and fell and he gestured broadly as he lectured the audience on the necessity of sticking to the law and keeping politics out of the justice system.

Gofshtein reported that Lukyanov, like several of the other defendants, had been transferred from jail to the hospital because of severely worsening health.

Also on Tuesday, the provisional commission for the parliamentary investigation into the causes of the Aug. 18-21 coup d’etat announced that it would “identify state structures and officials who supported the putsch leaders or in some other way helped the coup.”