Lawyers see no perspectives for the request to initiate a case against M.Gorbachev

Advocates questioned by RAPSI believe that the request by the deputies of the State Duma to initiate a criminal case against the first and last USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev in connection with the disintegration of the Soviet Union has no legal perspectives – there is no corpus delicti in M.Gorbachev’s actions, and all reasonable limitation periods have already expired.

It became known on Thursday that a group of the State Duma deputies requested Yury Chaika, the Prosecutor General of Russia, to initiate criminal cases against those, who were involved in the disintegration of the USSR, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the leader of the country then. As one of the authors of the request, Deputy Evgeny Fedorov (“United Russia”), told RIA Novosti, the request was motivated by the need to ascertain the mechanisms of the coups d’état organized from abroad, in the light of the current situation in Ukraine. The former President of the USSR himself expressed his willingness to cooperate with the Prosecutor General’s office, if it begins the investigation, but considers the deputies’ actions populism.

Advocate Alexander Petrov of the Law Firm "YUST" points out that, even if certain actions done by M.Gorbachev may be classified as indications of a crime, 24 years have passed since the moment of those actions anyway, and the limitation period for bringing to liability even for heinous crimes is 15 years.

A.Petrov noticed: “The limitation periods are not applied only to crimes against peace and safety of humanity, namely: planning, preparation, initiation or making of an aggressive war (Article 353 of the PCRF), use of forbidden means and methods of war (Article 356 of the PCRF), genocide (Article 357 of the PCRF) and ecocide (Article 358 of the PCRF). I don’t believe that any actions done by M.Gorbachev may be qualified under those articles”.

He added that the PCRF stipulates no liability “for the disintegration of the USSR”, so no case may be initiated against M.Gorbachev for such “crime”.

A.Petrov believes: “Besides, penal law contains such category as the subjective part of the crime – the internal mental attitude of the person to the publicly dangerous deed he is committing. This means that, in order to discuss M.Gorbachev’s responsibility for the disintegration of the USSR at all, one needs to prove the cause-and-effect connection between the President’s actions and the disintegration of the Union, and also to prove that that was the actual objective of the actions, which seems unlikely”.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the first and last President of the USSR. He returned the seals in December of 1991, when the heads of 11 republics of the Union signed the Belovezhskoe agreement on dissolution of the USSR and the Alma-Ata protocol to it.