CRISIS IN THE KREMLIN : Experts Hail Yeltsin as a Folk Hero : Assessment: Sovietologists praise his virtuoso performance. They are not nearly so glowing in reviewing Gorbachev’s role.

Whipsaw-swift developments in Moscow left Soviet-watchers struggling for superlatives Wednesday to describe Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin but considerably less sanguine about the future for a reborn Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Much as President Bush heaped praise on Yeltsin, so too did academics around the country, saying he had quieted rumblings about his reliability in a crisis and assumed a mantle of leadership that cannot be stripped from him.

Yeltsin emerges from the crisis vastly stronger politically, they said. If not eclipsing Gorbachev as the nation’s leader, he has at least placed himself in a position of sharing authority with the titular Soviet leader, analysts said.

And Gorbachev, while returning to Moscow to triumphantly claim his presidency, faces a troubled future in which he will have to decide, once and for all, whether to cast his lot with the reformers who saved him.

In a broad sense, the academic armchair quarterbacks said the overthrow of the coup was a victory mostly for the quiet heroes who filled the streets of the Soviet Union in defiance of tanks. And it was a clear sign that the careful efforts of Gorbachev and other leaders to persuade Soviets that they had a stake in their future had taken root.

“This is bound to go down as a major turning point in Soviet political history,” said Arnold Horelick, a senior Soviet analyst for the RAND Corp. and a professor of political science at UCLA.

“What the collapse of the coup shows is that . . . the clock can’t be turned all the way back, that something irreversible has happened in the Soviet Union.”

The personification of democracy, for the last three days, has been Yeltsin, and Soviet-watchers described his performance as virtuoso.

“He played it beautifully,” said Coit Blacker, senior fellow at the Institute of International Studies at Stanford University. “He either got very good advice or has absolutely brilliant political instincts.”

Richard Staar, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said Yeltsin had zoomed to folk-hero status on the strength of his optimistic defiance of the right-wing coup.

“They could have sent tanks in there at any moment and blown everyone away, including him,” Staar said. “All of these people (leading the coup) were terribly mediocre, lightweights. This guy is a heavyweight.”

Several academics said Yeltsin’s masterstroke was to avoid the temptation of seizing power for himself, instead insisting that Gorbachev be released to resume the presidency. The gesture showed that Yeltsin not only understood how best to cater to the desires of the West but also sensed that his power among everyday Soviets was drawn from the fact that he embodies reform.

“Obviously, he has advanced his own interests, but he’s done it in a way that strengthened the constitutional and legal process,” said Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute in Washington.

Gorbachev, out of the whir of events under house arrest in the Crimea, was unable to move aggressively to defend himself during the crisis. Soviet-watchers expect him now to make up for it by embracing reforms in a way that he has not in his 6 1/2 years as president. For years, Gorbachev has been criticized by both sides, first for courting the left, then for courting the right, and ended up pleasing none.

Several said they now expect him to hastily pursue a reformist agenda and, as his first move, to grant much-desired independence to the Baltic republics.

“One of the interesting effects of this experience will be to allow Gorbachev in a psycho-emotional sense to abandon this duality and jump over heart and soul to the camp of the reformers,” predicted Stanford’s Blacker. “He will be able to be more sympathetic to the cause of the Baltics. . . . He is likely to be much more open to economic reform, to dismantling bureaucracies.”

Many of those who have studied Gorbachev believe that while he does get a second wind from the failure of the coup, he may be limited in the future to working in tandem with Yeltsin as power is dispersed from the Soviet national government to the various republics.

“The victimization of Gorbachev resulted in making Gorbachev more acceptable,” said RAND’s Horelick. “But really, in the sense that he is still beholden to Yeltsin, I think his political future depends on his ability to carve out a respectable position in tandem with Yeltsin.”

If not completely upended, the relationship between the two men has been markedly altered by the events of the last three days. But while they have been thrown together in opposition to the coup, it is not at all clear that Yeltsin and Gorbachev can maintain a respectful alliance during peaceful times, analysts said. Indeed, they have a long history of scratchy relations.

“The alliance, it seems to me, was built upon a coming together of interests,” said Donald Barry, director of Lehigh University’s Center for International Studies. “An awful lot of other matters, including the pace of reform, degree of marketization and political style, separate Gorbachev from Yeltsin. Now, their differences will become manifest again.”

The clear losers, analysts agreed, were not only the coup leaders themselves but also the right-wing cause they espoused. Most predicted that it will be nearly impossible for like-minded rebels to confront Gorbachev in the future.

“The right wing comes off as looking like they’re in some Gilbert and Sullivan comedy,” said the Kennan Institute’s Ruble. “And they clearly have discredited themselves.”

Contrary to what they had hoped to achieve, the coup members succeeded in proving how the Earth has turned under the Soviet Union during Gorbachev’s tenure, the academics said. By Soviet standards, the coup was carried out with an air of democracy.

“It demonstrates how far the political culture of the Soviet Union has changed. Even the right wing felt they had to act as if they were democrats,” said Ruble. “Their policy program was a chicken in every pot. This is simply not the way the politicians behaved in the past.”