Radical Democrats See Their Impatience Backfire : Reformers goaded Gorbachev to go faster. Now the movement is all in the opposite direction. They should be ashamed.

Mikhail Gorbachev knew better than his critics that a coup against the liberalization and democratization of the Soviet system was all too real a possibility.

Gorbachev from the outset of his leadership in 1985 had radical reform in mind, and he set about creating the political conditions for that with immense skill as well as the necessary caution. But by the end of the 1980s, reformist change was turning into a fundamental transformation of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev himself had facilitated and protected that process to a degree underestimated by the radicals who had ceased to be his supporters.

Although Gorbachev brilliantly transcended his political background in the apparatus of the Soviet Communist Party, he knew what the unreconstructed elements within it, along with their allies in the military and the KGB, were capable of. Some of those who should have been his friends had, unfortunately, forgotten. As recently as April of this year, the chief editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta (the Independent newspaper) said that “at this moment, any successor to Gorbachev is preferable to Gorbachev himself.”

It may be that the speed of change was such that it was almost impossible to ward off a reactionary coup. The chances of avoiding it would have been greater, however, if radical democrats had realized how much danger Gorbachev was in and had offered him more support as well as constructive--not destructive--criticism.

Now, alas, many of them may learn that it was Gorbachev who stood between them and the wrath of all the most backward-looking forces in the Soviet Union. Although the guilty men in this latest attempt to return Russia and the Soviet Union to the political dark ages are those who deposed the most enlightened and open-minded leader their country ever had, the unrealistic belief of radical democrats and nationalists that centuries of authoritarian Russian rule could be discarded overnight played its part.

Gorbachev’s shift in a conservative direction between last October and March was a tactical one and no more than that. If it was a temporary “center-right” coalition, Gorbachev nevertheless represented the center, and once the very real danger of a coup last winter had been averted, Gorbachev renewed his alliance with the democratic and liberal forces.

But Soviet politics over the past year have been turning in a vicious circle. Gorbachev was presented with a virtual ultimatum last autumn by the Soviet government, the military-industrial complex and the KGB not to accept the “500 Days” plan, with its program for the virtual confederalization of the Soviet state, along with radical market reform. His retreat from that plan led to bitter attacks upon him by the radical and inexperienced new Soviet politicians and the liberal and democratic sections of the mass media. Thus Gorbachev tried to mend fences with the more conservative forces, and, in so doing, lost further liberal support.

As a politician, however, he was psychologically incapable of going to extremes. After skillful secret diplomacy that led to the first of the “nine-plus-one” meetings, he escaped in April of this year from the cold embrace of those who thought that they could destroy him morally before destroying him politically. This they had hoped to do by making him the figurehead of a counter-reformation against his own reformation. They would not, of course, have kept him for long, for the conservative Communists--better than some Western commentators--recognized that in personality and conviction he was of an utterly different makeup from them. Those in the West who said last winter that Gorbachev was showing his true colors should today be ashamed of themselves.

Gorbachev’s enemies on the so-called Soviet right have been the focus of less attention in the West than have his respected liberal critics. The fact that they had no constructive alternative to democratization and market reform was enough to allow some observers to discount them. If, however, you have no intention of playing by the rules of any democratic game, and if you can mobilize a vast military and political police machine in your support, you do not--for a time at least--need a mass following.

The new, self-appointed leaders will do everything they can to secure political passivity and a modicum of support by means of lies and propaganda as well as coercion. We can expect a wave of disinformation about Gorbachev and his circle, as well as about the radical democrats (starting with Boris Yeltsin, whose popularity must be a worry for the putschists).

The unwillingness to be swept into the dustbin of history of those who stand behind the unimpressive and doubtless transitional figure of Gennady Yanayev has been clear for some time. One of the more spectacular pieces of evidence of their implacable hostility to Gorbachev appeared in the pages of the daily newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya last month. The authors provided a foretaste of what is to come from the coalition of hard-line Communists, the military, the KGB and Russian nationalists that has now seized control. Attacking Gorbachev viciously, albeit implicitly, they asked how the country had allowed into power “those who fawn on foreign patrons and who seek advice and blessings across the sea,” and they demonstrated their contempt for the new elected legislatures with their dismissal of “frivolous and clumsy parliamentarians who have set us against each other and brought forth thousands of stillborn laws.”

Among the signatories were Gen. Boris Gromov, first deputy minister of the interior, and Gen. Valentin Varennikov, a deputy minister of defense. Evidently, Gorbachev did not feel strong enough to insist on their removal.

Under attack from free-market and democratic maximalists for moving too slowly, Gorbachev ruefully asked a senior Western official earlier this year: “What makes them think they know better than I how much traffic this road will bear?” As the streets of Moscow reverberate with the noise of tanks, the traffic is already moving in the opposite direction.

It will take much more coercion than in the Brezhnev years to crush support for political liberties, which some millions of Soviet citizens, alongside all their dissatisfaction about everyday economic and social life, were beginning to take for granted. Too much for granted, as we now know. The Soviet Union looks as if it is in for a grim time. But the seeds of democracy that began to sprout over the past six years will eventually bear fruit. And Mikhail Gorbachev will be more revered by future generations of Russians than he has been of late by his contemporaries.