MOSCOW: President Mikhail Gorbachev back in office after a failed coup declared Thursday he stood by the communist party and vowed to purge it of reactionaries even as the coup leaders were arrested and one of whom interior minister Boris Pugo committed suicide.

Ruling out a witch-hunt Gorbachev told a press conference here his first since the failed coup that till the end he will work to contain the reactionaries in the party.

i am a committed socialist and I am not one of those people who are afraid to stand up to their beliefs he said responding to questions at the conference where he gave a detailed account of his three-day isolation at his Crimean resort Dacha. Gorbachev said there was nothing anomalous or ignoble in being a socialist. The idea of socialism has supporters in the world he added.

The Soviet leader stressed that he remained a socialist. I am not a weather-vane he said. I am not ready to change my position. I am aman of principle and] am not abandoning my socialist principles.

Interior minister Boris Pugo shot himself dead to evade arrest but five of his accomplices were detained. Gorbachev ordered the dismissal of all the ministers who conspired against him in the abortive coup and announced the start of criminal proceedings against them.

Former vice president Gennady Yanayev KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov defence minister marshal Dmitry Yazov and a little known figure Alexander Tizyaov all members of the eight man slate committee for state emergency were arrested.

Soviet premier Velent in Pavlov is under guard in a hospital where he went reporting sick on August 19

Gorbachev said he could have done more to prevent this week’s abortive coup and regretted he had chosen as his vice-president the man who became one of the chief plotters. He made the admission in a 15-minute broadcast to the nation over Soviet television.

I must say that what we have been through in these recent days has been a difficult lesson first and foremost for me particularly as regards the choice of the country’s leading figures.

Gorbachev was all praise for Russian president Boris Yeltsin for his outstanding role and for Russian parliament. The principled stand of people of Moscow Leningrad and other areas jubilant crowds ‘try ‘bringing down a KGB monument.

Thousands of people jubilant at the collapse of the CPSU hardliners coup tried to bring down a monument in front of the KGB headquarters threatening to storm it but President Mikhail Gorbachev warmed that such actions would be scandalous

Gorbachev said two members of the party politburo had quit it to protest the failure of the central committee secretariat to support the hardliners coup.

Meanwhile TASS news agency said that Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev had quit both the Politburo and the central committee charging that the central committee secretariat had supported the coup.

The evening sky over the Russian parliament was lit up with fireworks as Gorbachev recounted the ordeal of the three-day coup at the press conference.

Article extracted from this publication >> August 30, 1991