PERSPECTIVE ON THE SOVIET UNION : The Day Dukakis Moved on the Russian Parliament

Shortly after the coup got under way Monday in Moscow, Soviet television began airing old movies. I don’t know what they were, but I know what they should have been: classic films of the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy. This may go down in history as the “Another-fine-mess-you’ve-gotten-us-into coup.”

Where the lingering symbols of other coups are tanks, guns and troops, this one brings to mind seltzer bottles, cream pies and banana peels. The American TV networks should have had comedians and comedy writers, not Sovietologists, commenting on events of the past few days. Out with Henry Kissinger, in with Jay Leno.

I’m tempted to compare the “Committee of Eight” to the Keystone Kops, but that would be insulting. To the Kops. If any of its members are ever able to leave the Soviet Union and come to America, they wouldn’t be out of work very long. They’d fit right in on the Democratic National Committee. The closest we in America get to seeing the kind of strategic thinking displayed in Moscow this week is a Democratic presidential campaign. The tanks that threatened the Russian Parliament building couldn’t have been funnier unless Mike Dukakis was sitting in one of them.

Where did the coup committee foul up? For one thing, they had their priorities all wrong. If you’re going to send force against institutions in modern-day Moscow, it should be against institutions that people care the most about. Forget the independent press and the Parliament building, the hard-liners should have put Ronald McDonald under house arrest and had troops ring Pizza Hut.

If you want to keep Moscovites off the streets, you don’t air old movies and classical music on state-run TV, you run programs that people will want to stay home and see. Maybe a new game show called “Wheel of Food.”

The committee also stubbed its toe on the supposed reason for Gorbachev’s removal. No one believed he was being replaced because he wasn’t feeling well. But if there had been an announcement that he’d been practicing walking on water, fell and hit his head on a rock, millions might have bought it.

Unless this turns out to be a plot engineered by Gorbachev from the beginning, this coup may be remembered as the one in which more people died laughing than from any other cause. There should be a monument in Red Square that truly captures the spirit of the coup-plotters: The Tomb of the Unknown Klutz.