SPECIAL EDITION: CRISIS IN THE KREMLIM : Gorbachev and Khrushchev: The Perils of Soviet Summer Vacation

The American public saw them as opposites. One was the symbol of the Cold War, a man who sent missiles to Cuba and spoke ominously og burying us. The other tore down walls and dismantled nuclear warheads, emerging as a symbol of peace, friendship and hope.

But in the end, the umpredictable Mikhail S. Gorbachev went very much the way of the enigmatic Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Some parallels between Gorbachev’s ouster early Monday and Khrushchev’s downfall 27 years ddn are obvious. Both Soviet leaders were vacationing on the Black Sea when associates in the Kremlin moved against them. In both cases, poor health was the ostensible reason for change.

There were philosophical similarities as well. “On the Soviet political compass, in both cases you had someone of the left-liberal persuasion subjected to a coup by people on the right,” said Arnold Horelick, a Soviet affairs expert with the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. “But a lot more is at stake now than there was in 1964. . . . They don’t begin to compare in significance. This is much more of a defining movement in Soviet and international political history.”

Gorbachev himself would credit Khrushchev for initiating the anti-Stalinist reforms that, a generation later, enabled him to embark on the sweeping changes that reshaped his country and the world scene and have now resulted in his own fall.

Both men rose from the lower classes of Soviet society to the pinnacle of power. Despite his menacing image in the West, Khrushchev, like Gorbachev, was a reformer who upset the status quo and thereby alienated powerful Communist Party colleagues. Although not nearly as liberal by Western standards as Gorbachev, Khrushchev decentralized government authority and ordered massive military cuts. His denunciation of the bloody rule of dictator Josef Stalin angered old-line Communists.

Just as old allies Leonid I. Brezhnev and Alexei N. Kosygin engineered the October, 1964, coup against Khrushchev, Gorbachev was apparently done in by associates whom he had promoted during his time in power.

Gorbachev should have known better than to leave Moscow when his own status was shaky, said Richard H. Dekmejian, a USC political science professor who has studied the Soviet system.

The coup would have been much more difficult to accomplish if he had stayed in the capital, Horelick said. “It’s easier for the plotters to coordinate when he and some of his staff aren’t there. And there’s less opportunity for the incumbent to mobilize forces to resist.”

Horelick does not dismiss the possibility that the coup could fizzle and Gorbachev could return to power. “The whole thing could unravel,” he said. “That’s perfectly possible.”

But if parallels to Khrushchev hold true, Gorbachev faces another kind of fate. Years after the October, 1964, coup relegated Khrushchev to the status of a nonperson, Soviet historian Roy Medvedev presented this portrait of the fallen man:

“Khrushchev was at a loss and did not hide it. The recently almighty dictator would sit motionless in a chair. He could not hold back the tears.”