Soviet Right Tightens Its Grip : Troops Deployed; Some Defy Coup Leaders : Kremlin crisis: Yeltsin calls for a nationwide strike. Outraged citizens rally at the Russian government headquarters.

Backed by fearsome military might, the chiefs of the Soviet army, KGB and police and fellow right-wingers on Monday sequestered Mikhail S. Gorbachev, clamped a state of emergency on Moscow and swiftly moved to freeze or gut many of the deposed Soviet president’s reforms.

But less than 24 hours after the Kremlin hard-liners made a move that shocked the world, some army units were defying them by racing to the aid of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who called on soldiers to ignore “illegal” orders and demanded an unlimited national strike to bring the “putschists” to their knees.

Thousands of frightened, outraged Muscovites braved a menacing cordon of Soviet armor to rally outside Russian Federation government headquarters on the Moscow River, which rapidly turned into the chief focus of resistance to the self-proclaimed Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R.

“Soldiers, officers and generals! The clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night,” declared Yeltsin, who clambered onto a tank earlier in the day to plead with the troops.

“I believe that in this tragic hour, you can make the right choice,” the barrel-chested Siberian told the army from the balcony of his government headquarters as night fell. “The honor and glory of Russian men of arms shall not be stained with the blood of the people.”

In the early hours today, as bonfires lit by defenders burned around the Russian government building, thousands of cheering Muscovites welcomed tanks from the elite Taman Guards division as they took up positions to protect Russia’s democratically elected leaders. Ten heavy tanks, their guns initially pointed toward the Parliament building, later shifted position so that the guns were directed outward.

An airborne battalion from Ryazan, south of Moscow, wearing full battle dress and equipped with automatic weapons, arrived with at least six small armored personnel carriers to stand shoulder to shoulder with Yeltsin’s supporters. The soldiers said that a high-ranking officer in the paratroops, a Maj. Gen. Lebed, was helping direct defense operations.

“We came here for the people’s sake, for Russia’s sake,” a lieutenant said.

Earlier Monday, all of the armed might had appeared to be on the side of the conservatives, as olive-drab tanks, armored personnel carriers and troop trucks by the hundreds rumbled through the streets.

The Emergency Committee, citing the ostensible danger of “chaos, anarchy and fratricidal civil war,” decreed in its Resolution No. 1 that all press and broadcast organs are now subject to official “control,” political parties that break the peace are to be shut down, government bodies that violate Soviet law are to be dissolved and strikes and demonstrations are banned.

“There was no alternative but to take resolute action to stop the country from sliding into disaster,” Gennady I. Yanayev, the acting president, told a news conference called to explain and justify the transfer of power. He pledged not to erode the perestroika reforms launched by Gorbachev, but the committee’s initial actions indicated that those words were largely rhetoric.

The Emergency Committee moved quickly to reassure the United States and other nations enamored of Gorbachev that the new leadership would remain true to commitments made by the Soviet president, who brought about the end of the Cold War, won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize and signed the START Treaty only last month with President Bush in Moscow.

“We wish to live in peace and friendship with everyone,” Yanayev said.

U.S. Consul General Sandra N. Humphrey said the embassy here had been assured by the Soviet Foreign Ministry that despite the change of leadership, Moscow’s airports would remain open and there would be no curbs placed on travel by U.S. citizens.

Pressed repeatedly at the news conference for details on Gorbachev’s whereabouts and physical condition, Yanayev said he was “on vacation and undergoing treatment in the Crimea,” where he had gone earlier in the month.

Yanayev said the 60-year-old Gorbachev was worn out from serving as Soviet leader since 1985.

“He grew very tired over these years, and he will need some time to get better,” Yanayev said, speaking at a Foreign Ministry building guarded by at least five tanks. “Nothing threatens Comrade Gorbachev. He is in a safe place, except that he needs some time to feel better.”

Yeltsin’s press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov, reported that Gorbachev was being detained at his summer dacha in the Crimea, but that could not be independently confirmed.

Within hours of announcing the sudden and sensational Kremlin power grab that stunned the world, Yanayev and his comrades were moving rapidly and ably to assure themselves virtual monopoly of the Soviet airwaves and to muzzle the press, which had experienced unprecedented freedom under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness.

Russian television, loyal to Yeltsin, was knocked off the air before it could begin its regularly scheduled 3 p.m. broadcast. Echo of Moscow, an independent radio station, went off the air about 8 a.m.

By midday, Yeltsin said, all Soviet radio and TV facilities were in the hands of the rightists.

Paratroopers with Kalashnikov automatic rifles stood guard outside Moscow’s main broadcast center, the source of the hard-liners’ highly propagandized and constantly repeated radio and TV messages to the people.

Yeltsin Supporters

Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB agent turned democrat, said the KGB had gone on alert at 2 a.m. Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were sent into the streets in Moscow. A lieutenant deployed with eight armored personnel carriers in Pushkin Square, long a site of radicals’ protests, said his unit went to “red alert” at 5 a.m. and was ordered into the capital.

Despite the huge display of military force, no deaths or violent clashes were reported Monday.

Yanayev imposed a state of emergency throughout Moscow in the afternoon, claiming there had been “attempts to organize rallies, street processions and marches” in defiance of Resolution No. 1 and “instances of incitement to unrest.” Col. Gen. N. V. Kalinin, commander of the Moscow Military District, was put in charge of enforcement.

The tough talk from the Emergency Committee did not stop thousands of angry people--many carrying white, blue and red Russian flags--from marching through the streets chanting: “Strike! Strike!” and “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!”

Outside Russian government headquarters, known as the “White House” because it is built in gleaming white stone, Yeltsin supporters hastily erected barricades made of city buses, cement mixers, jeeps and scrap metal. Inside, Yeltsin was guarded by Russian Federation police. The Soviet White House is across the street from the U.S. Embassy.

“The actions are illegal--they shall not pass!” Yeltsin proclaimed to the crowd, which echoed him: “Shall not pass!”

The Russian leader accused the Emergency Committee of fomenting a “state coup” and in an extraordinary decree said all Soviet soldiers, Interior Ministry police forces and KGB troops now stationed in Russia should obey orders only from him.

Heeding Yeltsin’s appeal for a strike, thousands of members of the Independent Miners Union, one of the country’s most radical and anti-Communist groups, began walking off the job early today at coal mines in the vicinity of Vorkuta.

Yanayev, who claimed he would do everything to avert bloodshed, ominously warned at the news conference that the throwing up of barricades and Yeltsin’s demands for a general strike were tactics “fraught with danger” and could lead to “provocation.”

In its Resolution No. 2, the committee suspended publication of all but nine Moscow-based newspapers. Among those banned, supposedly only until publications “reregister” with the Emergency Committee, are the liberal or radical Moscow News, Kuranty, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda, which is the largest-circulation daily in the land.

Press Censorship

In Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city, the military commandant, Col. Gen. Viktor Samsonov, went on TV to announce that military censorship was being imposed on the press and that army patrols had been authorized to check citizens’ identification papers and search them.

Leningrad TV, however, remained at least for a time in the hands of enemies of the rightists, and members of the radical-dominated City Council called on soldiers to hand over all officers who had helped organize the abrupt and irregular change of power.

The commander of the Baltic Military District, Col. Gen. Fyodor Kuzmin, announced he was taking charge in the independence-minded republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Latvian officials said.

Troops were said to have invaded television facilities in Riga, the Latvian capital, and shut down broadcasts.

In Lithuania, the radio and TV stations in Kaunas were stormed at about 9 a.m. by paratroopers, and the phone exchange in Vilnius also was occupied, government spokesmen said.

In Estonia, authorities reported that Soviet warships had entered the harbor in Tallinn, the capital.

Vytautas Landsbergis, president of Lithuania, called on the world to protect his republic from “the danger of Soviet military intervention.” Crowds rallied to serve as human shields outside the Parliament in Vilnius.

Yanayev told reporters that he had sought the backing of leaders of the Soviet republics and that an “absolute majority” supported the committee’s intention to “restore order to the country.”

Indeed, the heads of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the largest republics after Russia, had dissociated themselves before the end of the day from Yeltsin’s call for a general strike.

“What happened had to have happened,” said Leonid Kravchuk of the Ukraine, blaming national disorder.

Citing the critical state of the Soviet economy, the Emergency Committee in its first resolution ordered the Cabinet of Ministers to make an inventory of the country’s most critical food and consumer goods and take steps to safeguard their stockpiling and distribution.

‘Saving Harvest’

With the specter of a possible famine looming because of a projected drop in the annual grain yield, special labor brigades of workers, students and soldiers will be sent to villages in the countryside for the “saving of the harvest.”

Additionally, the government was ordered within two weeks to come up with an urgent plan to arrest the decline in oil production, the single most important source of foreign trade.

After reading Resolution No. 1, Channel One of state-run television--which an announcer said was now the sole TV outlet authorized in the Soviet Union--broke into a spirited concert performance of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude.”

Before going off the air, one independent Moscow station played a sad Russian folk tune called “Farewell, Joy!”

The Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, is scheduled to hold a special session next Monday to give the parliamentary sanction required for the committee’s state of emergency proclamation, a legal nicety that the rightists had not bothered with beforehand.

The Supreme Soviet’s Speaker, Anatoly I. Lukyanov, was seen by many here as the mastermind, or eminence grise, behind Gorbachev’s ouster, but he was keeping a low public profile.

The Emergency Committee includes the chiefs of the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and KGB, as well as Soviet Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov and leading lights of the country’s military-industrial complex, such as Oleg D. Baklanov, first deputy chairman of the U.S.S.R. Defense Council, and Alexander I. Tizyakov, president of the Assn. of State Enterprises and Industrial Construction, Transport and Communications Facilities.

The inclusion of Yanayev, a bland career apparatchik --who, like the four other committee members who attended, wore a mousy gray suit to the news conference--appeared at least in part a figleaf to mask an illegal transfer of power, since the constitution entitles him to replace the president if the latter is incapacitated.

“I think he was forced to do it, because it was the only way to conduct a coup apparently by the constitution,” commented the deputy Russian foreign minister, Andrei Fyodorov.

Tanks Move In

Many Muscovites were struck speechless at the sight and din of the armed might deployed in their city’s streets. A crowd gathered by the brick wall behind the U.S. Embassy compound and silently watched at least 30 camouflaged T-80 heavy battle tanks rumble by, grinding the asphalt into powder as they passed.

“There will be resistance all over Russia; I am convinced of this,” predicted Vladimir N. Lukashin, 51, the head of the anti-Communist Democratic Russia coordinating committee in Moscow’s northern suburbs. “The army will also join the people.”

Anti-riot police wearing black berets blocked off Red Square sometime after noon. Squadrons of tanks roared up to the Kremlin from the Moscow River side, past the gaily colored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. By night, tanks stood outside major Kremlin gates, including Borovitsky Gate, where Gorbachev used to enter in his Zil limousine.