But court-appointed defense attorneys Nikolai Gerasimov and Kirill Goncharov petitioned for the trial to be put off until May so that they could study the case files.
On 26 June 1990, for example, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov said that if the USSR gets financial assistance from the European Community, it will use the aid to pay off chronic Soviet foreign payment arrearages.
Gerasimov and Goncharov told reporters at preliminary hearings earlier this month that as members of the Moscow Bar Association they had no choice but to take part in the trial once they were appointed to represent the dead lawyer, otherwise they would lose their licenses to practice.
Velikhov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, top arms control negotiators like Ambassador Victor Karpov, propagandists like Georgi Arbatov and Gennadi Gerasimov and senior military officers would be trotted out to deny that the Krasnoyarsk facility was for early warning or that it in any other way violated the ABM Treaty.