PERSPECTIVE ON THE SOVIET UNION : The Terror Will Come, and Will Target Yeltsin : The rusty Bolshevik bandits may have moved too late. If they try to crush the people, the army will turn.

The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 by a coup and now they have restored their power by a coup. Like the Bolsheviks of 1917, the new bandits in the Kremlin, who Mikhail Gorbachev wittingly accommodated, only know how to attain power by illegitimate means. They cannot trust their own people who, in the case of the Russians, trounced them resoundingly in elections that brought Boris Yeltsin to power.

These bandits believe that a strictly controlled media is essential to giving legitimacy to their lies. Lenin said, “Give me a newspaper and I will organize a Party.” They know that, without its own television or publications, the opposition will not be able to organize effectively.

Glasnost, the first act of Gorbachev’s reforms that led to the unraveling of the communist system, was therefore the necessary first victim of Monday’s coup.

A cannon stands at the doorway of my magazine’s offices in Moscow. That magazine, Ogonyok, now has been forbidden. My top editors are sleeping in different places each night to avoid arrest. Only Pravda and eight other Communist Party publications are being allowed to publish. Once again, the truth can make its way to the Soviet people only through Voice of America. It is the only way Russians know what Yeltsin is saying.

The Union Treaty, which was to have been signed Tuesday, was the principal reason for the Bolsheviks’ move. It was their last chance to seize full power, because that treaty would have irreversibly gutted the authority of these unpopular and hated men who have now taken over. The all-Soviet Defense Ministry would have been broken up. The great Soviet landlord of the kolkhozes (collective farms) would have been dispossessed. The Interior Ministry would have lost its police to national states.

In other words, this reform would have finally dismantled the empire Lenin put together by force.

But there was another factor that finally spent the patience of the Bolsheviks. Gorbachev spat on the whole Bolshevik heritage when he buried the communist idea during his recent visit to London. The economic summit finally drove home to hard-liners the fact that the ultimate price of normalization internationally was genuine democracy at home. Naively, they had expected their front man, Mr. Gorbachev, to bring home boxes of green bills with no obligations attached.

President Bush correctly drove the point further home when, in Kiev, he said that the West conditioned its support not so much on the independence of the republics as on democratization of the entire system. That would be the end of the Bolsheviks.

As the coup unfolded, the Bolshevik bandits apparently met surprise in the Crimea. They obviously thought that they could blackmail Gorbachev into resigning and yielding power to Vice President Gennady Yanayev. Otherwise these people, who once arranged to have Bulgarian dissidents killed by poison-tipped umbrellas, could have easily arranged a heart attack or some such sudden means of death for Gorbachev. I believe Gorbachev balked and demanded to address the nation. Thus, they had to commit the coup in a panic.

Following the same plan they employed in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the bandits will try to bribe the public with increased supplies of food and other goods at lower prices. They will try to lull the people into acquiescence with what the Czechs called a “second liberty”--the creation of a false impression that, after a period of chaos and decline, life is improving.

Academician Oleg Bogomolov, who sits on the Soviet parliamentary commission on food and agriculture, told me some weeks ago that it was very suspicious that food imports from the West were being stored at military installations. The official explanation was that civil storage facilities were not safe. I am certain that the authorities will now open up those supplies and fill the empty shelves of Moscow and Leningrad with low-priced foodstuffs.

But, as in the Czech case, terror will follow the “second liberty.” In Czechoslovakia, authorities initiated mass arrests as soon as the popular outrage settled down. We can expect the same scenario in the Soviet Union.

Thousands of arrests are planned, to smash the heart of democratization in Moscow and Leningrad. Siberian prison camps are being refurbished.

Nonetheless, these rusty Bolsheviks may have moved too late. When they try to clamp down in Georgia or Armenia the way they are in Moscow and Leningrad, they will meet armed resistance. They will face an internal Afghanistan.

If the hard-liners’ coup is to succeed, they must kill Boris Yeltsin. Snipers are probably the biggest threat. Yeltsin is the obvious rallying point--not only for all Russians, 60% of whom voted for him as president of the Russian republic, but also for the international community that supports democratization of the Soviet Union. If he is not killed, the general strike he has called will be successful.

If the junta tries to crush the resistance as the strike takes hold in coal mines, oil fields and steel factories, the army will break ranks and side with the people. They will turn mercilessly on the bandits in power, just as the Romanians did against Ceausescu.

Everything will be determined between now and Sept. 1, when the students return to Moscow and could turn Red Square into Tian An Men Square.

The world must stand against this illegal Soviet regime the same way it stood against Saddam Hussein, whose quick and enthusiastic support for Monday’s coup reveals its real nature.