CRISIS IN THE KREMLIN : Bush Was Right: Junta Violated Constitution : Law: A series of amendments in 1989 and ’90 spelled out procedures for the direct election of the Soviet president.

When President Bush coldly rejected the attempted ouster of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as an “illegal coup” that violated the Soviet constitution, he was not simply imposing an irrelevant Western notion of government onto the Soviet situation.

A key component of the reforms set in motion during Gorbachev’s presidency was a series of amendments to the Soviet constitution that prescribe, for the first time in the nation’s history, a procedure for the popular election of his successor.

Before the Gorbachev reforms, the Soviet constitution vested ultimate authority in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The Presidium could hire and fire leaders at will, a fact demonstrated 27 years ago when it summarily deposed Nikita S. Khrushchev and replaced him with the collective leadership that eventually devolved into the 18-year rule of Leonid I. Brezhnev.

By the standards of the day, that coup was perfectly constitutional; one set of Soviet leaders had as much legitimacy as the next. Gorbachev himself was selected the old-fashioned way, by the Supreme Soviet in a closed-door proceeding totally insulated from the populace at large.

But under the 1989 and 1990 amendments to the Soviet constitution, succeeding presidents after Gorbachev will be elected directly by the people for a maximum of two five-year terms. The revised constitution also provides for removal of a Soviet president by a two-thirds majority vote of the Congress of People’s Deputies. Members of the congress, in turn, are popularly elected at five-year intervals, and for the first time in Soviet history, political parties other than the Communists are allowed to field candidates.

When the coup plotters announced their intentions Monday to take control of the country, they characterized the action as a constitutionally sanctioned move to replace an ailing leader in accord with “demands by broad popular masses.” But no observers seriously asserted the legality of the maneuver.

Indeed, as it became increasingly clear Wednesday that the coup had collapsed, Bush’s constitutional analysis was endorsed by leading Soviets. Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh branded the attempted power grab “unconstitutional,” and the Communist Party itself later used the same term to describe the move.

More important than the coup’s constitutional status, perhaps, was the sweeping consensus among what seemed to be a vast majority of Soviet citizens that any government imposed on them by an inner clique of the Communist Party would lack legitimacy. That, more than the coup’s illegality or unconstitutionality, is what gave Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin--himself popularly elected under a recently ratified constitutional procedure--the legitimacy to successfully resist it.