Next Step: The Soviet Union : Swinging to the Right in the Kremlin : Conservatives are altering the very nature of reforms under perestroika.

The Soviet Union appears to be going through a creeping rightist coup d’etat in which five years of reforms under perestroika are being “corrected” and “consolidated” while the country searches for a new direction.

After five years of defeats, conservatives have counterattacked with unexpected success, thwarting plans for a 500-day fast march to a market economy. The military and security forces have launched campaigns to bring down the elected governments in three Soviet republics threatening to secede. And power is again being centralized, contrary to pledges of greater democracy.

Political developments of great scope and impact over the last four months have not only pushed perestroika to the right, but may have altered its very nature. And the pace of those developments is accelerating.

On Sunday night, Soviet commandos shot their way into the headquarters of the Latvian Interior Ministry, seizing the building in a gun battle that raged through the republican capital of Riga for 90 minutes. At least four people were killed and nine wounded.

Radical reformers increasingly see President Mikhail S. Gorbachev swinging hard to the right himself, persuaded by conservatives, particularly the military, that order must be restored to the the Soviet Union and some of his reforms must be rolled back in the name of “stabilization.”

Conservatives see themselves preserving the Soviet Union as a unified state and remaining true to the ideals of socialism. And some, still unhappy with Gorbachev, have begun calling within top Communist Party circles for a “Government of National Salvation” to take over.

Gorbachev himself admits that “power has moved to the right,” but contends that the nation has too.

A final judgment on the rightward shift nonetheless seems premature. Gorbachev, a master tactician, may well be manuevering through difficult times, trying to preserve a broad constituency for future reform and protecting the fundamental elements of perestroika --notably the country’s basic democratization and the commitment to a mixed, market economy--from the conservative counterattack.

“We are not in a crisis, but in a deadlock, and that is worse,” Anatoly P. Butenko, a political scientist at the Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System, a Moscow think tank, commented in an interview last week. “No one--not the radicals, not the conservatives, not the party, not the government, least of all the military--has any idea of how to get out of it.

“There is just a feeling that, to go forward, we must first go back, and that gives the impression of retreat.”

The main danger ahead, Soviet political analysts believe, will be the suspension of democracy through various forms of emergency rule and the removal of popularly elected governments. Other newly gained freedoms, such as an independent press or the establishment of new political parties, might also be limited.

The second danger, as Butenko noted, would be the stunting of perestroika, or restructuring, as the reform program is known. Conservatives from the Soviet military-industrial complex have already forced major changes in plans to put the country’s economy on a market basis.

What Gorbachev seems most likely to defend in a tactical retreat is the philosophical base that he has laid for reform since 1985--the abandonment of the party’s monopoly of power, the primacy of “common human values” over class interests, the ultimate superiority of the market as an organizing principle of the economy--for with these perestroika could be renewed.

While virtually all Soviet commentators rule out a return to the old totalitarian system, opinion polls show up to 45% of the population ready to accept the rule of a “strong hand,” even a military coup, in the hope that it would restore order--and fill shop shelves.

“From the military, there is no coup--that danger is from the radicals, our anarchists,” Col. Nikolai S. Petrushenko, a leader of the conservative Soyuz bloc in the Soviet Parliament, said last week. “Under the banner of democracy and faced with empty stores, the people are being pushed to rise up against Soviet power. That is the danger, and that is what we will fight with all our strength.”

With such sentiments, Soviet paratroopers earlier this month seized the Lithuanian radio and television broadcast center in Vilnius from the republic’s elected government on behalf of the anonymous Committee for National Salvation. Thirteen civilians and one soldier were killed in the action that Gorbachev and his ministers have justified as lawful.

The action, which Gorbachev said was not ordered by Moscow, brought a storm of criticism from liberals and radicals. Describing the attack as an attempt at “an overnight putsch” in Lithuania, former Soviet Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin said: “The generals do not have the right to send in tanks on the call of any committee, no matter how loudly it screams.”

Conservatives praised the assault, disregarding the loss of life, as the type of action sometimes required to restore political order. Leaders of Soyuz called again for the establishment of a National Salvation Committee to take over from the present government in Moscow.

Troops have also taken over the printing plants in Vilnius and Riga, the capital of neighboring Latvia, to restore them to the local pro-Moscow factions of the Communist Party--and thus silence the nationalist press there. Similar National Salvation Committees are getting military backing in Latvia and Estonia.

KGB security troops have moved into grocery stores, warehouses and railway depots to ensure that food and other consumer goods are delivered according to central government orders. They are also supervising the distribution of the foreign assistance sent to help the country through the hard winter. There is even serious talk of the military taking over other segments of the economy.

The Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, has amended the Soviet constitution for a second time in less than a year to increase the presidential powers of Gorbachev, who now has the legal authority to rule by decree, to remove elected governments, appoint replacements and to enforce his orders with the world’s largest army.

The president has already issued decrees permitting the military to round up suspected draft evaders and press them into service, authorizing the armed forces to take actions they deem necessary to uphold their honor and ensure stable supplies to their garrisons and ordering the security forces to seize Communist Party and government facilities taken over by nationalists in separatist republics.

He has also imposed a 5% sales tax without any public debate, ordered enterprises to follow production plans laid down by the central government--undercutting their efforts to move to a market economy--and overrode plans for land reform adopted by the elected legislature of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic.

The country’s most popular television program was taken off the air this month for attempting to discuss the resignation of Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who had warned the country of a slide toward a right-wing dictatorship as he quit. The chairman of the State Committee for Television and Radio explained that viewers want entertainment, not politics.

The government tried to close the country’s leading independent news agency, tiring of having its reports undermine the credibility of official versions carried by state media.

Gorbachev, angered by criticism over all these developments, last week proposed the suspension of the country’s new law establishing a free and independent press and Parliament’s takeover of all news media to ensure their objectivity.

Liberals among Gorbachev’s top aides have largely disappeared and been replaced by conservatives. The informal advisers from the country’s universities, think tanks and the press who helped draft the initial reforms are now fierce critics, worried equally by Gorbachev’s current course, his sheer power as president--and their own loss of influence in the Kremlin.

And the country’s defense minister, Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, and the head of the KGB security and intelligence service, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, have spoken out dramatically and frequently about the dangers they see coming from “anti-Communist forces” and the need for further tough measures.

Against all these developments, however, there is a counterpoint--new freedoms that remain unabridged, reforms that are still proceeding, democratically elected local governments that are exercising their powers and threatened measures that are never taken.

Despite the army’s intervention in Lithuania, the nationalist government elected last February remains in power there; Gorbachev may yet impose “presidential rule” in Lithuania and in the other Baltic republics, but the political costs of doing so following the deaths in Vilnius last week would seem to be too high.

The KGB has not returned to its old role of political repression aside from a scattering of local trials, and the Soviet political scene remains populated from right to left with all sorts of opposition and openly anti-government groups.

The use of presidential decrees to transform the economy was envisioned when Gorbachev’s authority was enhanced; what liberals object to is the lack of boldness in the measures.

Radicals still control the Moscow and Leningrad city governments and hold strong positions in the Russian and Ukrainian republics’ legislatures as a result of election victories last spring. However, they have been unable to run the huge bureaucracies they took over and now accuse one another of having assumed power too soon.

Even the press curbs are less dramatic than they seem. “We must take very seriously Gorbachev’s demand that the press law be suspended,” a senior journalist at the liberal newspaper Izvestia commented, “but we and others still have the freedom to criticize that proposal in our columns.”

Stanislav S. Shatalin, the pro-market economist who nearly won Gorbachev’s endorsement of a radical plan of economic reform before the rightward swing, said last week that he is not convinced that Gorbachev has “capitulated to right-wing forces.

“I think he either ignored or just did not see the blow coming from the right,” Shatalin commented. “For me, it is obvious that the current scenario is being written by a rightist hand. But I still think that, if he relies on the left and the center, he could withstand any pressure.”

Gorbachev, moreover, has paused before to consolidate his position--before undertaking further reforms.

A year ago, for example, he was contending that the country was unprepared for a multiparty political system, for the introduction of private ownership into the economy or for a free press. Once his position was strengthened, he ended the Communist Party’s constitutional monopoly on power, legalized limited private ownership, abolished censorship and moved ahead on other reforms.

Conservatives see the recent changes as necessary corrections in Gorbachev’s reform policies.

The newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna commented this month: “A hard and unbiased review of the grave mistakes that brought on the present situation is the only chance for saving the very idea of democracy in this country.”

Yuri Belov, a party secretary in Leningrad, argued last month in a seminal article in the conservative newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya that the real threat to democracy is coming from the radical left. Demanding “resolute action in defense of the present constitutional system,” Belov said the party should remove Gorbachev as its leader and president unless he recovers ground lost to “anti-Communist forces.”

What he and other conservatives are demanding is a tougher leadership and a “tightening of the bolts” to enforce discipline throughout Soviet society with only a gradual transition to democratic pluralism and a market-based economy.

Gorbachev’s strategy is far from clear, however, and to Soviet analysts that is at the core of the swing to the right.

“What Eduard Shevardnadze saw from within the ruling circles is that Gorbachev has no plan, no strategy, no program to deal with the crises we face,” Butenko said. “When a government has no program, it relies on power, and the more the better.”

Gorbachev indeed won broader authority last month from the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Parliament, on a “trust me” basis. Liberals objected while conservatives argued the need for a “strong hand” to run the country. Gorbachev received almost everything he asked for as the Congress approved the necessary constitutional amendments and legislation.

With the rapid disintegration of the economy, many people--most, according to some opinion surveys--have lost confidence in the reforms and lost patience with Gorbachev as supplies of food and consumer goods have declined. And that gave conservatives a new political base, because in the popular memory, at least, the old system delivered.

The conservatives’ base was further broadened by the growing threat of the Soviet Union’s dismemberment through the threatened secession of the three Baltic republics and perhaps others, such as Georgia. The loss of Moscow’s “external empire” in Eastern Europe was difficult to absorb, and the loss of the “internal empire” would be even harder. Moreover, the very identity and integrity of the Soviet Union as a state is threatened.

“The shift to the right is politically natural for Gorbachev,” Stanislav Kondrashov, a veteran political commentator at Izvestia, observed. “He needs a constituency. That which the liberals provided has shrunk to almost nothing, but (the one) the conservatives have pulled together is huge and growing.

“But the costs of this conservative support have been high--just look at the compromises he is having to make on economic reforms, on Cabinet appointments, soon probably on foreign policy and maybe on freedom of the press.”

Gorbachev will not be able to satisfy the conservatives with endless concessions, the more skeptical analysts here say, and he will then become a victim himself of the rightward swing.

“Another Vilnius or two, and Gorbachev will realize what he has done, and that perestroika is finished,” Butenko said. “He may have embarked on these maneuvers (intending) to use the right, but in time he will become the one who is used and manipulated.

“When that point comes, he will be pushed aside in a Kremlin coup, or perhaps he will resign in acknowledgement that perestroika has failed.”