"Down with Gorbachev!" some 10,000 protesters shouted within earshot of the Kremlin. "Down with the KGB!" The demonstrators had gathered to support criminal investigators Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov. The two became popular heroes last year after publicly accusing Politburo conservative Yegor Ligachev of corruption; both were elected to parliament last spring. But now they are accused of illegally detaining witnesses and forcing confessions in a six-year probe of a multimillion-ruble scandal involving racketeering and influence peddling in Uzbekistan, which nailed the son-in-law of the late Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev, among others.
Last week a Supreme Soviet session agreed that...
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