COLUMN ONE : Death Throes for the Party? : The Communists have been in retreat for years. Now, with leaders accused of supporting the coup, the organization may have written its own obituary.

Until now, these were scenes from Soviet history that most people had witnessed only on grainy newsreel film or yellowed photographs: Mobs hauling down the hated symbols of the ancien regime , or making ready to storm the seats of power.

But such events are happening once again in the streets of Moscow. This time, it is true, there is an enormous difference--now the Communists are not at the head of the crowds, leading them on the attack, but inside the buildings and the targets.

At the Central Committee building, the former cockpit of the world revolution, they were burning and shredding documents Friday afternoon, fearful that the narod, the people, in whose name they had ruled uncontested for more than 70 years, might soon be breaking down the door.

In the offices of the city party organization, the phones were cut off, depriving Communist apparatchiks of the instrument that they had formerly used to dictate every single important aspect of local life.

Somewhere, perhaps, the ghosts of Czar Nicholas II, Alexander Kerensky and the millions and millions of victims of Bolshevism were enjoying a laugh. For a specter is now haunting the Soviet Union, and it looks a lot like that of a mortally wounded Communist Party.

Even before the sudden, shocking events of this week--the bungled attempt by right-wingers to oust Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--the party, once the general overseer of the international working-class movement and the unchallenged ruler of a superpower, had been in retreat. In some places, it was practically on the run.

But the involvement of high-level Communist Party officials in the coup, and their seeming betrayal of Gorbachev, their comrade as the party’s general secretary, may have sealed the fate of the instrument forged by V. I. Lenin, Josef Stalin and their comrades-in-arms to seize and hold political power.

“I am not a Communist and have never been one because I have a head on my shoulders. Our beloved Communist Party--goddamn it! This is an anti-people party and a fascist party by its nature,” Mikhail I. Yudin, 80, a decorated World War II veteran and retired driver, exclaimed as he stood with other members of a hostile crowd outside the Central Committee’s offices on Old Square.

What, then, did the Communist leadership know of Gorbachev’s captivity and when did it know it? The available evidence is damning. Judging by revelations from Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president and party leader of Kazakhstan, party leaders were working hand-in-hand with the coup’s short-lived Emergency Committee.

Starting Monday, Nazarbayev said, he received a number of documents from the Central Committee, the party’s policy-making body, proving irrefutably that the party’s Secretariat had supported the right-wing committee and its resolutions.

On Tuesday, the day after Gorbachev was deposed, an attempt was even made to convene an extraordinary plenum of the party Central Committee, with the aim of supporting the plotters, Nazarbayev said.

In the first remarks made by Gorbachev after he returned to Moscow, he called himself a committed Socialist and denied that the party as a whole was a “reactionary force.” But that was before he had been fully informed of the situation.

“The party, in fact, turned its back on its own general secretary,” said a source close to Gorbachev. “It is hard to believe just how cowardly and unpretty this all looks.”

The motives of such betrayal go deep into the jolting changes experienced by Soviet political life over the last three years. Indisputably, the party has been the No. 1 loser--it has been mauled at the ballot box, lost 4 million members since 1990 and is reported to be running a billion-ruble debt this year.

“The party,” said the source close to Gorbachev, “is mortally wounded.”

Before Gorbachev, before perestroika and democratization, politics had been so different. All society marched in lock-step with the CPSU--Communist Party of the Soviet Union--and those rare dissenters could be harassed, jailed or even hospitalized as lunatics.

The party claimed to be omniscient, omnipotent--the slogan on countless factory walls was, “What the Party Orders, We Shall Fulfill!” Its program was a blueprint for all of society, even though only a fraction of the citizenry belonged.

“They say that the English Parliament can do everything except change a man into a woman. Our Central Committee is far more powerful than that,” one Soviet once said of the party’s chief policy-making body.

The party’s accomplishments have, indeed, been impressive, a long list that would spring instantly from party members’ lips, and still does--creation of the world’s first Socialist economy, victory over fascism in World War II, the Sputnik.

But the price has been horrifyingly high.

“No country in the 20th Century has suffered like ours, which, within its own borders has destroyed as many as 70 million people over and above those lost in the world wars--no one in modern history has experienced such destruction,” the exiled Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has said.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, the architect of Gorbachev’s social reforms, said before quitting the party last week: “I came to the conclusion that our misfortune has come from the dogma of Marxism. I read much about the scornful, mocking attitude of (Karl) Marx and (Friedrich) Engels to the peasantry. And how much attention they paid to such terms as class struggle, violence! Only through this struggle can people reach harmony. Wonderful! First, one class destroys another, and then they get harmony.”

What evolved into the current party was born in 1898 in a wooden house in a quiet street of the Byelorussian city of Minsk. There, nine delegates from rival social-democratic organizations met to found the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. It elected the Central Committee’s ancestor, a steering body that had only three members.

Their credo was anti-czarist, militantly anti-capitalist: “The Russian proletariat will throw off the yoke of the autocracy in order to continue, and with still greater vigor, the struggle against capitalism, until the complete victory of socialism.”

The small ring of earnest men who met in Minsk could not have known it, but they had planted the seeds for what in only a quarter of a century would become one of the world’s biggest multinational organizations.

Like a church, the party laid claim to knowing revealed truth; it also ultimately built a worldwide bureaucracy to propagate its message around the globe.

But that still lay in the future. Lenin, a man obsessed with the art and science of seizing power, led the party to victory in the Russian Revolution by transforming it from a loosely organized movement into a tightly organized band of professional revolutionaries.

In light of what full-time Communists later became in the Soviet Union--often stocky men in suits with chauffeured limousines on call--it is worth recalling the self-abnegation, the passion for social justice and the readiness to use violence that drove many of the Bolsheviks.

“From Russia, swarming through the whole world, came men and women who had been formed in ruthless battle, who had but one aim in life, who drew their breath from danger,” wrote Victor Serge, a European revolutionary of the time. “The comfort, peace and amiability of the West seemed stale to them, and angered them all the more since they had learned to see the naked operations of a social machinery which no one thought of in these privileged lands.”

The party that Lenin and his comrades built came to be a fusion of traditional Russian autocracy and Marxism, as historian Richard Pipes has written. The key institution in party ranks was “democratic centralism”--the modifier aside, it meant subjugation of the individual Communist’s will and opinions to his superiors.

Once in power, yesterday’s revolutionaries had to rapidly mutate into commissars and managers of farms, power plants, steelworks and eventually of the national drive to build an atomic bomb or put a man into space. Under Stalin, who destroyed the ranks of the Old Bolsheviks with his purges and show trials, the party became the nation’s managerial elite, with wide-scale terror as one of its management techniques.

It was Stalin, who had headed the party apparatus even during Lenin’s lifetime, who gave the Communist Party its modern face and functions. In lookalike offices all over the land, it exercised unfettered rule over the world’s largest country and issued orders to scores of “fraternal” parties around the globe.

As the party arrogated itself the role--later enshrined in Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution--of the “leading and guiding” force in society, it took on a far different character, one Lenin might have not recognized.

The membership roles swelled with careerists, because of the institution called nomenklatura --the need for Communist Party approval to staff virtually all key jobs. Its highest circles became bourgeois in appearance; all over the country, the leaders of the party who claimed to speak with the voice of the toiling masses wore ties and worked in buildings where the badge of status was not mastery of Marxist-Leninist dialectics but the number of telephones on a comrade’s desk and the size of his office.

With an automatic, constitutionally guaranteed mandate to rule, there was no need for the Communist Party to learn to do what political parties in other countries must do--contest elections with the goal of winning them.

And the principle of “monolithic” unity, imposed from the top down, also meant that in Kazakhstan or Latvia or the Ukraine, the party came to be seen not as representing local interests, but often as the hand of Moscow, blindly carrying out Moscow’s policies.

Then came Gorbachev, the former party chief in a southern Russian region about the size of South Carolina, and the national party’s leader since 1985.

Striving for some degree of citizen participation in decision-making and popular endorsement for his policies, Gorbachev instituted political changes, including the first multi-candidate Soviet elections in modern times and the decision by the party to renounce its legal monopoly on power.

It is unlikely Gorbachev or anyone in his entourage foresaw the scale of the debacle that was awaiting the party at the polls. In the 1989 national parliamentary elections, even before other political parties were legalized, one Communist bigwig after another was defeated. In other balloting, the party lost control of Moscow and Leningrad.

And significantly, when Russians for the first time in their 1,000-year history were given the right to choose their own leader, they opted decisively against Communist candidates, and for Yeltsin, who walked out of the party last year.

So even before the events of this week, the party had clearly been on the defensive, with the new leader of the Russian party organization, Valentin Kuptsov, even saying that it would have to get used to the role of an opposition, rather than a ruling, party.

In an effort to cut back its influence even further, Yeltsin last month issued a decree evicting Communist cells from the factories and farms of Russia.

Before the coup, the hope of reform Communists had been that somehow they could return to the pristine font of Socialist ideology, sweeping away the bureaucratic superstructure. But the Communist Party may now be so compromised by collusion of high-level figures with the plotters that no one but extreme conservatives will want to be associated with it.

To save the party, Gorbachev has proposed a party platform that, with a few modifications, could be adopted by a West European social democratic party. It includes insistence on human rights and endorsement of a market-based economy. Conservatives do not approve: “Any American millionaire, the British queen or the Japanese emperor would sign such a program,” one economist wrote.

Increasingly, the party that had begun at the close of the 19th Century as the advocate of working-class revolution has become the rallying point for people nostalgic for the older ways of Soviet society.