COLUMN ONE : Yeltsin’s Defiant Victory : The flamboyant Russian president is the single biggest winner in the political aftermath of the failed coup. He is seen by many as the future of the Soviet Union.

Long after the tanks are quiet in their garrisons and the barricades dismantled, the indelible image of this week’s abortive coup in the Soviet Union will be the picture of one defiant man--Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin--clambering atop the dark green hull of a T-72 tank to rally his people for democracy.

It was a quintessential Yeltsin moment. The burly Siberian had watched from the windows of his Russian Federation headquarters as the tanks surrounded the building Monday afternoon. After little more than an hour, he strode impulsively out the door, clambered up onto one of the armored vehicles and greeted a tank officer as if he were a prospective voter instead of the spearhead of a hostile military force.

Then, with the white, blue and red tricolor flag of an independent Russia by his side, he spoke in a booming baritone voice full of the confidence his anxious listeners needed more than anything else.

“The reactionaries will not achieve their goals!” he declared. “The army will not turn against the people.”

Relentlessly larger than life, courageous to the point of foolhardiness, instinctively in tune with the soul of the Russian Federation’s 147 million people, Boris Yeltsin was the single most important figure in the resistance to the attempted coup--and the single biggest winner in the political aftermath.

“Yeltsin is our absolute leader,” said Alexander I. Riman, 55, an engineer who was among the crowds gathered in the rain outside the Russian Federation headquarters on the Moscow River on Wednesday. “He was the one hope that proved to be true and valid. All the rest evaporated.”

The praise was echoed in the West, where leaders who once disdained Yeltsin as mercurial and erratic now hailed him as dauntless and bold.

“(The coup) leaves the world looking at him as a very courageous individual, duly elected by the people, standing firmly and courageously for democracy and freedom, with enormous stature as a result of that,” President Bush told a news conference Wednesday.

Asked about U.S. officials’ previous dismissive views of Yeltsin as a flamboyant demagogue, Bush said: “I don’t detect any less flamboyance--and in this instance, the flamboyance is a very positive quality as you climb up there and encourage your people.”

“He’s a Slavic edition of Huey Long,” said a former White House official, recalling the charismatic populist who ruled Louisiana in the 1930s. “But he is the future of the Soviet Union, and the Administration better get used to dealing with him.”

In retrospect, it is as though Yeltsin’s whole life had been preparing him for this week’s dramatic events. From his desperately poor beginnings through a career marked by cunning, not obedience, and by a fatalistic willingness to risk all, Yeltsin seems to have been a man made for the hour.

Until the coup, Bush often held Yeltsin at arm’s length. The President’s hopes for reform in the Soviet Union focused on Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as Bush made clear during his summit visit to Moscow as recently as three weeks ago.

But now all that has changed. As a result of the events of the past week, Bush said his feelings for Yeltsin--with whom he spoke repeatedly by telephone during the crisis--”have taken a quantum leap forward.”

Several senior U.S. government analysts interviewed Wednesday said the abortive coup has clearly made Yeltsin the most powerful single figure in the Soviet Union.

“Yeltsin is the winner here,” said one. “Gorbachev could end up being very irrelevant. No matter what happens now . . . he comes out of it with less power than when he was arrested. . . . It was Yeltsin who marshaled the forces of democracy.”

Another government analyst said the abortive coup could ultimately lead to Yeltsin’s election to Gorbachev’s job as president of the entire Soviet Union--not just president of the Russian Federation, his current position. The Russian Federation is the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics.

“This is the end of the Gorbachev era,” agreed Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Boris Yeltsin was the man who stood atop the tank, he was the man that was at the barricade, he was the man that rallied the people and I believe that he is the person that the Soviets must deal with, but also we in the United States must recognize.”

The transformation of Boris Yeltsin is testimony to the fact that, in an age seemingly dominated by vast and impersonal economic, social and political tides, individuals can still make history--and that events can summon greatness from individuals.

“Yeltsin is no great intellect, and in the long sweep of history he may not be an enduring figure,” said William Hyland, a Soviet expert and editor of the quarterly Foreign Affairs. “But intellect wasn’t the first requirement at this point. The first requirement was intestinal fortitude, and he certainly showed that he has that. . . . He is clearly the figure for this moment.”

The object of this sudden respect and fascination is a man who has long been something of a gifted rebel within the Soviet system--and has long displayed more than his share of both ingenuity and guts.

Born to a poor peasant family in the Ural mountains in 1931--in the midst of both the worldwide economic depression and the political terror of Josef Stalin--Yeltsin grew up in a wooden hut without electricity or plumbing. The deprivations made him “an outsider” from the start, he wrote in his autobiography, tellingly entitled “Against the Grain.”

When he was graduating from the seventh grade, he wrote, he stunned a school assembly by publicly denouncing a tyrannical teacher--and was expelled from school the next day.

Despite his defiant streak, Yeltsin was a good student with a clear gift for leadership, and he graduated from the Urals Polytechnic Institute as a construction engineer in 1955. But his first job--and his first, obligatory involvement with the ruling Communist Party--taught him that the Soviet system did not live up to its own ideals.

As a construction engineer, Yeltsin recalled, he often had to scheme and barter just to get the materials needed for a job. And when he applied to join the party, he recalled: “Among the numerous questions put to me was the following: ‘On which page of which volume of Marx’s “Kapital” does he refer to commodity-money relationships?’ Knowing perfectly well that my examiner had never read Marx closely and that in any case he didn’t even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half-jokingly, ‘Volume two, page 387.’ To which he replied with a sage expression, ‘Well done, you know your Marx well.’ After it all, I was accepted as a party member.”

Yeltsin rose swiftly within the party ranks as an honest, hard-working but doggedly reformist manager. More than two decades later, when he had risen to become chief of the Moscow city party organization, Yeltsin still professed the creed of a convinced Communist--but one who was fed up with hypocrisy:

“It is necessary to stop the lies,” he declared at a time when most of his superiors still wanted to confront the truth in small, slow doses.

It was also as Moscow party chief that Yeltsin first felt the heady adulation of ordinary people when he publicly attacked the privileges enjoyed by the political elite--and even rode on crowded buses, stood in line at food stores and tramped through rutted streets to check on snow-removal efforts.

Brought to Moscow by Gorbachev as a reformer in 1985, Yeltsin found himself increasingly at odds with his mentor, whose own life and career--a story of bright but obedient triumph largely within the system--gave him little in common with an outsider who had always lived by his wits and his daring.

The conflict came to a head in 1987, in an episode now rich with irony: Gorbachev engineered Yeltsin’s dismissal as Moscow party chief, and later his ouster from the Soviet Union’s ruling Politburo.

The Bolshevik old guard that Gorbachev sided with in ousting Yeltsin--and, Yeltsin noted, subjected him to public ridicule--was the very faction Yeltsin faced down this week in defeating the hard-liners’ coup and restoring Gorbachev to the Kremlin.

Yeltsin later wrote that the experience of being fired was a turning point in his career; he began to view the Communist Party as an obstacle to the reforms he wanted, instead of as a vehicle for reform.

But the Communist Party’s attempts to discipline Yeltsin only increased his popularity among the common folk--and in the unprecedented era of free elections, popularity for the first time meant real political power.

His bluff approach and his instinct for action--rather than the endless talk of the Soviet intelligentsia, who made up most of the reform camp--also endeared him to a public with a traditional hunger for strong leaders and years of disappointment with the practical results of fine-spun theories.

After being elected head of Russian Federation with 57% of the vote, he cannily allied himself with Gorbachev to help the Soviet leader achieve his goal of a new treaty regulating the ties among the Soviet Union’s 15 republics--but at a price to Gorbachev. Yeltsin forged a powerful alliance with the leaders of the largest republics, then used the negotiations to formalize many of his own demands for the autonomy of the Russian Federation.

Yeltsin had a quirky streak that made foreign governments skeptical. In 1989, during his first visit to the United States, he was chronically late for appointments and an Italian newspaper reported that he appeared to be drinking heavily--an episode his opponents in Moscow gleefully lampooned. The next year, he staggered into a police post in suburban Moscow and announced that he had been kidnaped and tossed into the Moscow River, but he refused later to clear up the details of the alleged incident.

None of that harmed his standing in the polls.

But Yeltsin could never quite escape from the shadow of Gorbachev--until this week. When the hard-liners arrested Gorbachev, they left the political field wide open, for the first time, to Yeltsin. And for the poor boy from the Urals, it all came together at once:

His fierce resentment of the old party elite, his instinct to rebel against arbitrary authority, his limitless self-confidence nurtured during seven years of growing public adulation.

Schooled since childhood to put himself on the line, he stepped into the void and plunged to greatness.

And leaders of the abortive coup clearly underestimated the threat that Yeltsin would pose to their plans--for they apparently made no move to arrest him, even though they could have taken him by surprise when they launched their putsch in Monday’s early hours.

When he first heard news of the coup, Yeltsin was at a suburban dacha outside Moscow with other members of his Russian Federation government. He raced into Moscow before dawn on Monday, and--with swollen red eyes and a putty face--appeared before the press just hours after the hard-liners’ committee of eight claimed Gorbachev had stepped down for health reasons.

“This is a criminal coup,” Yeltsin thundered.

His headquarters, the towering Russian Federation building in central Moscow known as the “White House” because of its gleaming white stone exterior, became the center of the wildfire opposition to the coup. His embryonic political movement, “Democratic Russia,” became the nucleus of a nationwide resistance. And the Red Army tanks that had originally come to seize the building were gradually replaced by armored cars manned by soldiers who courageously chose to defend the first democratically-elected leader in Russia’s thousand-year history against the junta of Communists that might, even then, have attacked.

And on Wednesday, it was Yeltsin who told the Russian Parliament that the coup would fail if the people of Moscow stood firm. “There is no panic. There is no despair,” he said, as the legislators bent forward to hear him. “We hope the days of the junta are numbered. They must be removed from power.”

Hours later, the junta gave up--and to the people gathered outside the White House, it was Yeltsin who deserved the credit.

“Yeltsin is our indisputable leader--he proved this by his actions,” said Mikhail A. Boldyrev, 50. “He and his team saved the entire country from the darkness of blind, rigid, destructive communism.”

Even as the coup crumbled on Wednesday, Yeltsin maintained the political initiative--and demonstrated that, even in the turmoil of the coup, he was looking ahead and gathering in new instruments of power. He announced that he had taken command of all military units in the Russian Federation; he fired dozens of officials who had supported the coup, from the director of the state television network to the chiefs of the army’s Moscow and Leningrad garrisons.

To some, he appeared to be acting almost greedily, capitalizing on his sudden opportunity without asking whether all his actions were constitutional.

But that, too, was characteristic, some U.S. officials said. “Yeltsin is a democrat, but it isn’t always clear that he’s a civil libertarian,” said one.

That was one of the reasons the Bush Administration kept its distance from Yeltsin after he first rose to international prominence in 1987. The other problem was that Yeltsin swiftly became the most popular reformist critic of Gorbachev--and the United States government, under both Bush and President Ronald Reagan, was banking on Gorbachev to turn the Soviet Union’s foreign policy from Cold War hostility to new-era cooperation.

And the problem with the Administration’s new enchantment with Yeltsin may be that Bush will have difficulty tearing himself free from his sentimental attachment to Gorbachev--and adjusting to the new reality of Yeltsin’s power.

“I hope we can do it,” said a State Department official. “But it won’t be easy.”

“The minute there is a divergence between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, there will be friction between Yeltsin and Bush,” predicted a former official. “This is a brief honeymoon that won’t last.”

U.S. officials noted that Yeltsin’s fortunes were rising even before the coup attempt; his political touch seemed surer than the Soviet president’s.

Yeltsin lacks Gorbachev’s polish, they said, but he has understood three factors that Gorbachev never accepted:

* That the Soviet Communist Party was an obstacle to democracy.

* That economic reform based on halfway measures could not succeed.

* That the Soviet Union’s republics would be unbending in their demands for independence.

“Yeltsin is a Russian nationalist; Gorbachev doesn’t understand nationalism at all,” said a State Department official. “That’s why Yeltsin can get along well with the Baltic leaders, and Gorbachev can’t. Yeltsin understands in his gut why they want independence.”

That is a grand way of saying the man who this week almost single-handedly faced down the entire Communist old guard has the instincts of a natural politician. Wednesday, a U.S. official recalled a recent incident that illustrated that overriding quality in the most elementary terms:

At the state dinner Gorbachev held for Bush at the Kremlin during last month’s Moscow summit meeting, Yeltsin deliberately came late--and made a grand entrance to the room as the last guest.

Then, as all eyes watched, he mischievously drew both Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev into animated conversation--and, as their husbands watched helplessly, swept into the dining room with one First Lady on each arm.

McManus reported from Washington and Shogren from Moscow. Staff writer Burt A. Folkart contributed to this story from Los Angeles.