Mikhail Gorbachev is getting it from all sides. His former prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, denounced him in Russia's Constitutional Court last week for failing to turn up to defend the Communist Party he once led. Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev's former ideology chief, is likely to do the same on Monday.


Even Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Gorbachev era, has come out in favor of what it calls truth. Attacking Gorbachev for staying away from the party trial, it said that the former Soviet president and his successor in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin, should both testify. "If the two presidents fail to attend the hearings", Pravda wrote, "the truth might never be found".


On the other side of Russia's great political divide, the so-called demokraty arc also on the warpath. Komsomolskaya Pravda, a newspaper in the forefront of reform, says that Gorbachev's refusal to testify "cannot be justified on any grounds". The court by all evidence agrees. The highest judicial body in the land and presumably a defender of democracy, it asked Russia's Foreign Ministry and, more ominously, the Ministry of Security - son of the KGB - to bar Gorbachev from leaving. They quickly obliged, refusing to provide him with the passport he needed to make his scheduled trip to South Korea.


Gorbachev has now had to cancel the visit to Seoul, where Yeltsin is heading next month. But the irony does not stop here. Ever the deft tactician, the beleaguered former president lost no time in accusing the court of making him into the new Russia's first refusenik. And, with due respect to Pravda, there is indeed some truth in this.


How quickly Russia's new leaders forget the source of Russia's new freedoms. Can they possibly not have considered the public relations disaster they were inviting by confining the man who opened the Soviet gates of emigration? By asking the very organ formerly used to put down dissent to keep a Nobel Peace laureate from crossing the border?


Gorbachev, whatever his errors may have been, deserves the degree of immunity accorded elsewhere to senior statesmen. Lest we forget, he inherited the Communist system when he took office in 1985. Through his rule, he effectively dismantled it. He liberated Eastern Europe. He freed the press. He allowed Jews to emigrate and let political prisoners go free. For this he deserves the world's respect and gratitude.


It is inconceivable that by traveling abroad, Gorbachev would seek to evade justice. By withholding Gorbachev's passport, the Yeltsin team has badly miscalculated. It should repair the damage at once.