From: davidhe@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Baltics: coup dry run
Date: 31 Jul 92 01:29:26 GMT
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

From:	IN%"BALT-L@UBVM"  "Baltic Republics Discussion List" 29-JUL-1992 14:48:18.24
Subj:	BALT:2612  Baltics were 'trial run' for Moscow coup

Broadcast to list 29 July 1992

( A wire service report raises questions about the activities of the Communists
this time last year...
Edis

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Original Sender: Valdis Krebs  180-3066@mcimail.com


WITNESS DEFENDING COMMUNIST PARTY BAN: COMMUNISTS WANTED GORBACHEV OUT

MOSCOW (JULY 24) UPI - A witness defending President Boris Yeltsin's decrees
banning the Communist Party told Russia's supreme court Friday that forces
within the party used the violent suppression of the Baltic independence
movements early last year as practice for the coming coup in Moscow.

Otto Latsis, a former member of the party's ruling Central Committee and the
first witness to testify in defense of the Yeltsin decrees, also said
reactionaries intended to topple Soviet President Gorbachev from his top party
post in an internal party coup before last year's putsch.

Latsis denied testimony by Communists that the party had turned into a normal,
parliamentary party by the time it was suppressed following the August coup
attempt, and he argued that Yeltsin's ban was legal.

The former party functionary said hard-liners were planning on removing
Gorbachev from power to turn the clock back to a pre-glasnost, pre-perestroika
Soviet Union.

''A kind of plan was being carried out to prepare for a party coup (at the
Central Committee plenum in July 1991) which would have... removed Gorbachev
from the post of party General Secretary and... undermined his position as
Soviet President,'' Latsis testified.

But before the aborted August state coup and before the failed July party coup
 he said events in the Baltics served as practice for hard- liners preparing
for similar events on a national scale.

Latsis claimed Communist leaders were responsible for creating ''committees of
salvation'' in Lithuania and Latvia which moved to take over power when Soviet
forces were ordered into the Baltic republics to crush independence movements.

These committees were the prototype for the ''Committee on the State of
Emergency'' created by the eight coup leaders in Moscow, Latsis said.

''The coup did not start Aug. 19,'' Latsis testified, referring to the earlier
events.

Soviet troops violently suppressed Baltic independence by moving in on a rally
in Vilnius, Lithuania in January 1991, killing 14 and injuring 100.

Following the August coup attempt, Yeltsin outlawed the Communist Party and
ordered its assets seized - prompting Communists to lodge a legal challenge
with the Constitutional Court. Democratic members of Parliament initiated
their own court case, claiming the party itself was unconstitutional. The
court combined the cases in what is being seen as a trial of the party as well
as a test of the president's powers.

Yeltsin's lawyers are trying to prove the party was involved in the coup
attempt, and that despite its denials, it had not reformed and was still a
''state structure,'' dipping into the national budget and interefering in
government.

The next presidential witness to take the stand before the 13-judge court was
Vyacheslav Leontiev, head of the former Pravda publishing house, who said the
party had absolute power over all publications in the Soviet Union.

''The Central Committee...was practically in control over the entire press of
the country, acting as the highest state organ,'' Leontiev said.

He claimed that all publications and publishing houses ''were created and
organized on the initiative of the Central Committee.''

''Glavlit (the state censorship agency) was always subject to party organs,''
testified Vladimir Solodin, who worked in Glavlit for over 30 years.

He said the party censored press reports detailing the full extent of the 1986
Chernobyl disaster, which happened after Gorbachev came to power promising
glasnost - greater openness, honesty and truth.

The real truth about Chernobyl was only made known within the Soviet Union in
an article published by a leading Soviet academic in 1989.

Judges said they may subpoena Gorbachev and other former party leaders because
the regional party leaders and mid-level bureaucrats put forward by the
Communist side have been unable to answer judges' questions.

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