COLUMN LEFT : Plotters Saw One-Way Bent in U.S. Policy : We may have distorted their expectations of how the world would react to a Soviet coup.

Citizens against soldiers, truth against tanks--the Soviet people have successfully risen to engage in the fateful struggle for freedom that so marks our time.

Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement, Nelson Mandela and the movement to free South Africa, Cory Aquino and Philippines’ people power, Vaclav Havel and Czechoslovakia’s revolution--so often freedom demands that citizens stand against the bayonet. In the end, democracy cannot be imported or imposed; it must be anointed by the sacrifices of those who would enjoy it.

It is clear that the hard-line usurpers underestimated the Soviet citizenry. Authoritarians assume that people crave only order and bread, that an iron fist will cow the timid many while they dispose of the courageous few.

Sometimes they are right. There is no good measure of what combination of hope and desperation, of courage and fear makes a mother or a father leave family behind to stand unarmed against a tank. Democratic movements can be suppressed--witness Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, Czechoslovakia in 1968, China’s Tian An Men Square.

But history teaches that you cannot long lock up an idea. Jail cells will not contain the demand for freedom. Bloodshed will only nourish it. A people armed with freedom and hope can sweep aside the most powerful armies.

Whatever his shortcomings, President Mikhail Gorbachev has introduced the Soviet people to the taste of freedom.

We must draw the right lessons from the struggle in the Soviet Union. Some want to use upheaval there to justify more military spending here. This is surely wrong. As events have made obvious, the coup was a sign of weakness, not strength. Even the most carbuncled Soviet apparatchik realizes that the old Cold War order has passed.

What we truly need is not more guns but more sense. The coup was triggered largely by internal crisis--the collapse of the Soviet economy, the threat that nationalist and democratic movements posed to the old order. But we must challenge U.S. policies that may have abetted the miscalculations made by the Soviet old guard.

American administrations of the past 10 years have “played” Gorbachev in a shameless fashion. They collected his concessions while offering little in return. Years ago, when Gorbachev initiated a moratorium on all nuclear-weapons testing, President Reagan dismissed his invitation to join. When Russian troops left Afghanistan, we continued to fund the covert war. When the Soviet Union joined in U.N. sanctions against Iraq, President Bush spurned negotiations and rushed to war, decimating that former Soviet ally. When the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO announced a new rapid deployment force. When Gorbachev went to London seeking economic aid last June, he returned home empty-handed. U.S. arms negotiators chortled over the disproportionate cuts exacted from the Soviets in nuclear- and conventional-arms talks. This enabled hard-liners in the military and the KGB to argue forcefully that a once-proud nation was being humiliated for little in return.

U.S. policy may also have distorted the usurpers’ assessments about the likely international reaction to a coup. When Bush embraced the Chinese leaders so soon after the 1989 massacre in Tian An Men Square, the Administration signaled that it valued order over democracy. When the Administration stood by as Saddam Hussein crushed the Kurds and the Shiites, it showed a preference for stability over self-determination.

The Soviet plotters may even have assumed that there would be an economic benefit if they succeeded in their repression. Investors, after all, crave order, not democracy. A few months ago, a delegation of Soviet party leaders traveled to Chile to lavish praise on Pinochet. The coup leaders may have believed that a disciplined citizenry would attract foreign investment, as exemplified by Taiwan, South Korea, Chile and China.

America should play the game with one set of rules. The President cannot embrace ruthless dictators like those in Beijing without sending a message to their would-be counterparts in Moscow. Western bankers cannot praise the order created by Pinochet’s bayonets without having their words echo in the Kremlin.

The failed coup is no rationale for a renewed U.S. military buildup. We need not more missiles for our military, but more principle for our policy. Let that be the lesson we learn as we pray for and stand with the people struggling for freedom in the Soviet Union.