COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Maybe Lenin Should Have Stayed in Bed : The conservatives had no strategy, no plan.

This was Two Days That Shook the World, Part 2 1/2; History as Farce. The Gang of Eight should have read their Lenin, assuming copies of his works are still available in the Moscow public library. If you plan to seize power, then seize it. Don’t sit around all day watching CNN and complaining that Boris Yeltsin is getting too much air time.

The night before the Russian Revolution in 1917, many of the comrades began to shift around in their seats, saying maybe this wasn’t the right time to seize power after all. Lenin walked halfway across the city in the middle of the night to stiffen the spine of the Bolsheviks.

Maybe it would have been better if Lenin had stayed home in bed. That way we would have been spared the final, farcical outcome of so much tragedy and sacrifice: Western ambassadors supervising the restoration of constitutional order, while Boris Yeltsin thanks George Bush for his support in these difficult hours.

The Gang of Eight seem to have thought that it would be somewhat of a rerun of the way Khrushchev got dumped back in the early ‘60s: solemn talk about the Motherland, a new lineup on top of Lenin’s mausoleum while Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on life-time convalescence in a well-guarded nursing home. Very retro.

In fact, much of what the Gang said in their initial proclamation was true. After six years of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union is, in economic terms, falling apart. According to estimates of the International Monetary Fund, the growth rate of the Soviet gross national product, which had been running at about 1.7% in the three years up to 1988, turned negative in 1989, dropping to -8.4%, and tumbling down to a negative rate of -17.7% in 1990. So in two years, using the GNP measure, the Soviet economy shrank by a quarter. It’s hard to think of any government that could survive disaster on this scale.

As the Gang stated, “Torrents of words and piles of declarations and promises only underline the scanty and meager nature of their (that is, the Gorbachev crowd’s) deeds.” True enough. “Whereas only yesterday,” the Gang’s proclamation went on, “a Soviet person finding himself abroad felt himself a worthy citizen of an influential and respected state, now he is often a second-rate foreigner, the attitude to whom is marked by either contempt or sympathy.” True, too.

And besides, the Gang said, there was all this sex and violence, which they described as “the octopus of crime and glaring immorality.”

Probably a lot of Soviet citizens felt the same way, as they watched their living standards tumble. What the Gang didn’t have was a plan. The conservatives haven’t had one since the mid-1980s, unlike the reformers around Gorbachev, like his old associate Alexander Yakovlev.

“Our task,” Yakovlev said a week ago, “is to enter the international division of labor so that foreign investors accept us as a normal country, so that Western capital sees us as a place with laws. Our psychology here is still different. All the normal layers of society here were exterminated--the aristocracy, the merchants, business people. Now everything has to be built up again.” Whatever one thinks of it, this is at least a strategy. All the Gang could offer in response was a mood: Let’s get back to the good old days.

But the trouble is that even before it was willfully disassembled by reformers naively hoping that “market forces” would come to the rescue, like hair restorer, the old command economy was jamming up. In Stalin’s time the planners were supervising allocation of about 300 essential items. By the 1980s this had risen to more than 1 million. Try to supervise the distribution of 1 million commodities of one sort or another and you’ve got bureaucrats shifting at least 10 million forms in triplicate from one desk to another. Their in-and-out trays were the size of warehouses.

The Gang of Eight probably had the Tien An Men precedent in mind, but they didn’t study the whole menu. When Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues decided to clamp down, they went all the way. They wouldn’t have given a Chinese Boris Yeltsin the chance to harangue the crowd from a tank in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. But the Chinese leadership also had an economic strategy, embarked upon in the late 1970s, and which has now produced a growth rate of 10%, the highest in Asia.

The Gang of Eight had no strategy. They also had no sense of history. They didn’t realize that whatever their economic travails, the Russians cared passionately about the political reforms and had no yearning to turn the clock back. If they had been reading their Marx, the Gang would have known that. But then they were probably too busy watching CNN.