Gorbachev Faces Criminal Trial--Briefly

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was accused of treason by a Soviet state prosecutor on Tuesday in connection with the secession of the three Baltic states. But the case against him was quickly quashed by the chief prosecutor.

Viktor I. Ilyukhin, the government prosecutor with responsibility for state security matters, had formally opened a criminal case against Gorbachev, setting in motion a legal process that could have led to the president’s impeachment, if he were convicted.

In his writ against Gorbachev, Ilyukhin concluded that the president had violated his constitutional oath to defend the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to protect the rights of Soviet citizens by granting independence to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

But Nikolai Trubin, the chief prosecutor, late Tuesday declared Ilyukhin’s writ “a legally invalid manifestation of political extremism,” and he repealed the order opening the case, according to the Tass news agency.

The unprecedented case, disclosed by a leading television commentator on Tuesday and featured on the front page of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda today, was already, in the paper’s quick summation, a “sensation.”

Intended as a retaliatory blow by Soviet conservatives against Gorbachev, the case put into legal form their deep resentment over changes that have occurred under his leadership, particularly those since the collapse of the August coup.

Ilyukhin had specified that the case should be opened under the charge of “betrayal of the motherland” under the article in the Russian Federation’s criminal code that spells out the elements of treason.

In St. Petersburg, conservative television commentator Alexander Nezorov, hinting at the charges, said Tuesday evening that “one more sordid page that has been glossed over is now being opened.”

A spokesman for Gorbachev said late Tuesday that the president had been informed of the writ against him but had no immediate reaction to the accusation. “Some people probably regret that the August coup (against Gorbachev) failed, and now they are trying to reach the president this way,” Igor Malashenko, the president’s assistant press secretary, added in his own comment on the case. “I am afraid that it could be a symptom of more serious troubles to come.”

The decision by the country’s new State Council, which Gorbachev chairs, to declare illegal the Soviet Union’s absorption of the Baltic states in 1940 and, thus, to recognize their independence was “in stark violation of current law,” Pravda said in summarizing Ilyukhin’s writ.

The formal opening of a criminal case under Soviet law generally requires a full-scale investigation and later a decision on whether to proceed with prosecution, and Trubin’s order closing the case quickly will probably bring protests from conservatives of a cover-up.

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.