Plotters Overlooked Will of Soviet People : Coup aftermath: Popular resistance brought them down in what promises to be a turning point for nation.

In old-style Kremlin politics, the rightists who sought the ouster of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev appeared to have lined up most of the key forces: the army, the police, the KGB, the prime minister, the Cabinet and Gorbachev’s own vice president.

What they overlooked were the people, historically the pawns of power politics.

But on Wednesday, growing popular resistance brought the coup d’etat to an end after less than three days as the plotters virtually fled their Kremlin stronghold, the troops returned to their barracks and Gorbachev reasserted his authority and returned to Moscow.

“They have not succeeded, and this is a great victory for perestroika, “ Gorbachev said of his conservative foes upon his return to the capital.

Perhaps for the first time since the Russian czar was overthrown in 1917, the will of the people had overcome raw power, and that will demanded a return to constitutional order.

This promises to make the failed putsch a turning point, strengthening the country’s democratic development and accelerating its economic reforms. In the end, the coup appears likely to give impetus to almost everything that it was meant to reverse.

“This victory should not be underestimated, for it consolidates our democracy and promotes our goals,” Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Russian Federation Parliament, told an emergency session of the legislature Wednesday. “The defeat of the right was decisive, and the people deserve the credit.”

The session was broadcast live in a celebration of what speaker after speaker hailed as the triumph of democracy over seven decades of totalitarian rule.

Led by Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic, Muscovites made clear their determination to defend--with their lives if necessary--their young and fragile democracy rather than revert to Stalinism.

Although its institutions are still weak and often wobbly, the new Soviet democracy had convinced people that they could and should make the fundamental decisions, and more than five years of reforms under Gorbachev had given them enough power to thwart the conservative takeover.

The clear losers in this struggle were those who had launched the conspiracy--notably the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence agency; the country’s military-industrial complex, and the Interior Ministry--and that will bring yet further shifts in political balance here.

But there will be other losers among those institutions that stood silent. The Communist Party leadership waited until late Wednesday to declare the coup “inadmissible.” The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, met only Wednesday before deciding that the seizure of power had been unconstitutional.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, formerly Gorbachev’s senior adviser, who had quit the party last week, warning of an impending coup, called on party members to resign in protest against its “cowardice . . . and shameful silence.”

“It is immoral for honest party members to stay in the organization that did not oppose this coup,” he told Russian Television.

“If you view this putsch as the final effort to preserve the ancien regime, you have to see that in its defeat we have strengthened the new institutions considerably,” a Yeltsin aide commented. “The political ground in the country as a whole shifted this week, and nothing is as it was.”

When Yeltsin called on Muscovites to defend the Russian Parliament, it was a summons that brought hundreds of thousands of people to defend the foremost achievement of the country’s democratization and the principal instrument of further reforms.

As Russia’s first freely chosen leader, Yeltsin thus had the moral authority, a crucial element in current politics here, to call upon those who elected him in June to defend that choice and the political system through which it was made.

“The people played the major role,” said Victor Sheinis, a prominent reform economist and a member of the Russian Parliament. “This should give Gorbachev an idea of the real balance of power in the country.”

Coups are not new in Soviet politics--Nikita S. Khrushchev, another reform-minded leader, was ousted in 1964 after foiling an earlier conspiracy against him in 1957--but what was at stake in those was power, one group trying to take it away from another.

This coup was aimed at more. Gorbachev was less the target than the country’s new, still emerging political system based on pluralism, a planned devolution of power to the republics and a shift to a free-market economy.

In its first declarations, the self-proclaimed Committee on the State of Emergency made plain its intention to take the country back to the point where the old political and economic system was being “reformed” and before Gorbachev began to promote its radical transformation.

But those who planned the coup overreached, for they could count neither on the passivity of the people nor on the unity and commitment of their own forces.

Another serious miscalculation, by far, was the assumed willingness of the country’s army conscripts to obey unquestioningly their officers’ orders, particularly if those included firing on peaceful demonstrators.

Even as they deployed in Moscow, the troops began to question their orders, and the doubts that arose among the privates and young lieutenants soon spread to the sergeants and captains. The army’s overall lack of resolve was quickly apparent as the soldiers passively watched the demonstrators and did little to interfere in the anti-coup protests.

In the aftermath of the fighting near the Russian Parliament early Wednesday, in which as many as four people were reported killed, no one seemed to have the stomach for ruthless repression that would be required to maintain power.

“The KGB lost its nerve after the first deaths,” Oleg Rumyantsev, a Russian lawmaker, commented.

As the coup crumbled Wednesday, the top leadership of the Soviet Defense Ministry, the “collegium,” issued a rare collective order sending the troops out of the capital and back to their barracks.

Other elements also appeared to have contributed to the coup’s collapse. The coalition that brought together the country’s military-industrial complex, the security forces and the Cabinet began to disintegrate after just a day, so poorly was the operation planned. No real effort was made to broaden the group by including conservative members of Parliament. And the uncompromising opposition of world opinion, including the cutoff of Western aid, clearly had not been anticipated.

From the outset, the putsch had appeared poorly planned.

“To organize such an operation, they had not only to cut the telephones, the telegraph lines and television and radio, but they had to arrest all the leaders, particularly Yeltsin, who could mount an opposition movement,” Oleg D. Kalugin, a retired KGB general who is now a reformist member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, commented. “They did it timidly, and so they failed.”

In contrast, the Polish army began its crackdown 10 years ago with sweeping predawn arrests of Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity trade union and now the country’s president, and most of his supporters.

In trying to create the impression that this was a normal transfer of power and not a declaration of martial law, the State Emergency Committee failed to act decisively at the outset.