Ussr Government Officials

Conservative die-hards and reformers went to war Tuesday for the hearts and minds of the Soviet Communist Party, with Yegor K. Ligachev denouncing the Gorbachev era's "reckless radicalism" and other leaders defending policies that stripped the "evil empire" label from their nation. One day after President Mikhail S.

In the end, not one of the men who plotted to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the 1991 failed coup will be punished: On Thursday, Gen. Valentin I. Varennikov, the last of 12 defendants, was acquitted of treason by the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court. That brought to a close a three-year trial that has degenerated from high political drama to disturbing farce.

Josef Stalin's feared police chief, Lavrenti P. Beria, went on a hunger strike before his 1953 trial and begged on his knees for mercy before he was shot, a government newspaper reported over the weekend. Eyewitness accounts, published in the weekend supplement of Izvestia, provided dramatic details never before released of the fall of the man known as "the Kremlin Monster" and said that unlike many of Stalin's purge victims, he refused to plead guilty.

"Lies! Arrogant lies! Lies and slander!" When, at long last, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took the stand Thursday to set the record straight on the 1991 Kremlin coup attempt, his main message--publicly under oath for the first time--was a disgusted denial that he had collaborated with the plotters.

A Soviet newspaper Wednesday published the first account to appear in public here on how the late Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered the arrest of Josef Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti P. Beria. An article in the weekly Literary Gazette quoted Khrushchev's account of the dramatic 1953 downfall of Beria, Stalin's heir-apparent, who was later shot.

Thirteen men accused in the plot to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev were charged Wednesday with high treason, a crime that can carry a sentence of death by firing squad, as vigilante groups sprouted around the country to ferret out their accomplices. The Russian Federation prosecutor general made it clear that the net has been cast wider for the others involved.

If he hasn't stumbled across a better deal in the help wanted ads, outgoing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev may want to talk to Don Laughlin. Laughlin, the patriarch of this booming southern Nevada gaming community, says he would pay Gorbachev $1 million a year to serve as a host and public relations executive at his resort on the Colorado River. "He would bring a lot of business to Laughlin," Laughlin said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his office at his Riverside Resort.

H eeeeeeeeeeeere's Gennady! Live and in person and peering out the window of an Amtrak car rumbling from San Diego to Los Angeles, the chief of information for the Soviet Foreign Ministry is musing about the brouhaha over Larry Speakes, his one-time counterpart as superpower mouthpiece. "Yes, I was surprised that he revealed he had made up quotes for President Reagan, and I feel sorry for him because he lost his job of $300,000," Gerasimov explains.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus on Sunday declared the Soviet Union dead and established a new "commonwealth of independent states" with the capital in Minsk, capital of Belarus, rather than Moscow. "We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, as the founding states of the U.S.S.R. and co-signatories of the 1922 Union Treaty . . . state that the U.S.S.R.

A trick telephone call helped track down Boris K. Pugo, the interior minister who killed himself rather than face arrest for his part in this week's coup attempt, an adviser to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said Friday. "It was like something out of Hitchcock," Grigory A. Yavlinsky, an internationally known radical economist, said in an interview. Yavlinsky said the head of the Russian KGB, Viktor Ivanenko, invited him to witness Pugo's arrest early Thursday.

What promises to be the longest-running show in Moscow reopens Wednesday: the trial of 12 men accused of state treason for engineering the hard-line Soviet coup attempt of August, 1991. The trial, which opened in mid-April, has recessed repeatedly, first because one of the aging defendants fell ill and later because the court accepted defendants' attempts to discredit the prosecution.

The trial of the alleged plotters in the 1991 Kremlin coup attempt hit a major snag Tuesday when judges agreed with defendants' assertions that Russia's top prosecutors are biased, and the court was adjourned until a fair trial could be assured. A three-judge military tribunal appealed to the Russian Parliament, which oversees the country's prosecutor general and his office, to examine "gross violations" of the law in the handling of the case.

Russia's Supreme Court indefinitely suspended the trial of the alleged ringleaders of the August, 1991, coup Friday because one of the 12 defendants is ill. The die-hard Communists who briefly seized power from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev argued that the trial could not continue without Alexander I. Tizyakov, 67, who was rushed from the courtroom with heart trouble on Wednesday, the opening day of the trial. The presiding judge, Maj. Gen.

The trial of 12 of the most powerful men of the Gorbachev era, who face charges of high treason for their roles in the August, 1991, coup, commenced Wednesday with the accused audaciously challenging the court with one legal maneuver after another.

In a last-minute attempt to divert attention from themselves, key figures in the August, 1991, Soviet coup, who are scheduled to go on trail for treason today, are spreading the word that they will accuse then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of encouraging their plot. After long months in prison awaiting trial, the 12 coup leaders remain steadfastly unrepentant. They say Gorbachev had the power to stop their coup but failed to do so.

Soon to go on trial for their lives, many of the 12 aging Soviet Communists who tried to wrest control of the Kremlin are making no secret of their determination to turn the case into the bruising inquisition of a former comrade: Mikhail S. Gorbachev. "Gorbachev was a traitor," charged former Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, a baggy-eyed heavy drinker whose hands visibly quaked when he announced Aug. 19, 1991, that he was assuming the Soviet president's duties.

Under pressure from top Soviet government and Communist Party officials, Moscow city authorities agreed Wednesday to permit a weeklong international Jewish film festival despite their earlier fears that the festival might bring anti-Semitic demonstrations. Reversing their previous decision, the city authorities said that "the political situation in the city . . . was less complicated" and that security could be provided for those attending the festival, scheduled to begin Saturday.

Quietly and without any public debate, the Bush Administration is preparing drastic changes in the basic U.S. strategy for fighting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, including the creation of new weapons so devastating that they could penetrate the deepest underground bunkers and "decapitate" the entire Soviet leadership.

One is penning verse behind bars. Another shot himself to death to avoid the shame of capture. A third is back at work on his farm but had to promise not to engage in politics. One year after they tried to usurp Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's powers and take control of a superpower, members of the short-lived State Emergency Committee and their accomplices have no idea when--or even if--they will stand trial. Valentin G.

The plotters of the August coup had made elaborate plans to turn back the clock to a time just before former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power and were prepared to launch massive Stalinist repressions, Russian prosecutors said Tuesday.