NEWS ANALYSIS : Fragile Empire Crumbling Fast Under Pressure

How fragile it all was--an empire in such total decline that an attempted coup d’etat , three days of street protests and a night of violence brought it down.

Today, the Soviet Union is dying as a state.

Its central government has all but collapsed after an abortive putsch.

Its republics are declaring their independence at the rate of nearly one a day, reducing what was the Soviet Union to perhaps just Russia.

Its confidence in socialism, once its raison d’etre, dissipated long ago.

Its Communist Party, once all-powerful, appears almost on the brink of dissolution, lacking the will to rule.

Its president, a year ago the world’s most admired statesman, is struggling to understand what is happening and how to direct a process he cannot control.

Shrunken and diminished, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged Monday that he had returned from three days’ captivity to a much-changed nation and he pledged to see it “with different eyes.”

All this did not happen at once. But the dramatic events of the past week brought to a climax the political, economic and social disintegration, the systemic collapse, that had been developing here for years.

“The center has fully outlived itself,” Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan said of the whole Soviet structure during a parliamentary debate here Monday on the coup and its aftermath. “It is dead, it has committed suicide.”

Outwardly, the Soviet Union had remained a superpower; it covered a sixth of the Earth, had the world’s second largest economy and its largest army. Although its problems were critical, its leaders professed themselves optimistic for its long-term prospects as did others.

Yet so little was holding the country together--far less than anyone suspected--that when the conspirators grabbed for power last week, it all fell apart.

The coup exposed the Communist Party, the successors of the Bolshevik revolutionaries who founded the Soviet state in 1917, as little more than a power-mad clique frightened by the rapid ebb of its authority--and its privileges--but totally out of touch with the society they had ruled for so long.

The popular resistance, marked by street protests and strikes, showed how power had shifted in the past two years to the country’s new democratic institutions, notably the Russian Federation led by its president, Boris N. Yeltsin, who led opposition to the coup. Legitimacy now came from the ballot box, not the barrel of a gun, as Gorbachev acknowledged in calling Monday for national elections.

And the violence of just a single night last week in Moscow--although three were killed, it was minimal after warnings of impending civil war--demonstrated to all that there was no real determination among those who launched the coup to reverse that shift in power, not if it meant a fight with an aroused people about the right to make the decisions governing their lives.

“The old Stalinist universe has collapsed,” Yuri N. Shcherbak, a Ukrainian nationalist and active environmental campaigner, told the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, at an emergency session on Monday assessing the failed coup. “That single and indivisible empire has collapsed.”

What remained of the three pillars on which V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, had founded the Soviet state had, indeed, collapsed.

One-party rule had given way not only to political pluralism but to the electoral victory of the opposition.

The elimination of private ownership of the “means of production” had been reversed as part of the country’s economic reforms.

And the forceful incorporation of non-Russian nationalities into the Soviet Union is now about to be ended with the imminent independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and perhaps later that of the Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova.

“We all think differently today,” Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, told the Supreme Soviet. “It’s time to stop running after an era that is gone.”

But for Soviet conservatives, this virtually amounts to history’s most daring counterrevolution, a reversal of the Bolshevik victory of 1917. They blame Gorbachev.

“I suppose that the president will have his usual reassurances, his usual ‘not to worry,’ his usual business-as-usual approach,” a conservative member of Parliament told the session Monday after hearing Gorbachev. “I doubt whether (the president) has visited the markets and talked with the old grandfathers and grandmothers in the food queues. But then he was slapped with all this. It makes you rethink things.”

But Gorbachev’s reforms, launched six years ago as perestroika, were initially an attempt to repair and later to transform that same system. Although it had begun failing in the 1950s, it had continued to function, reinforced by waves of repression and financed by oil revenues.

Only gradually, as the Soviet Union’s crisis deepened, did Gorbachev come to realize that, as forged by Lenin, the system was fatally flawed and that the country could only be saved by the abandonment of the very principles on which it had been founded.

Gorbachev in recent months had finally accepted what for a “convinced Communist” was a bitter truth.

He had negotiated a treaty establishing a new constitutional basis for the country with those republics, then 9 of 15, that wanted to remain. He had pushed through a new Communist Party program, reorienting the party toward European social-democracy. He had finally accepted the need for private enterprise in a free-market economy.

For the conservatives in the party hierarchy, the army, the security forces, the military-industrial complex, the government and his own staff, Gorbachev had now gone too far--and the prospect of the success of this counterrevolution prompted them to strike last week before the new Union Treaty could be signed.

But the disintegration had gone too far. The Soviet Union’s top-down command-and-control system, initiated by Lenin, had been supplanted by democracy; even crack KGB and army units refused orders they thought unlawful. The people were no longer intimidated by the government, not even by its tanks.

Leningrad Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak, a law professor, warned the Supreme Soviet that the coup’s defeat, in which he had played a key role, really settled little and that the country’s future remained in question.

The pursuit of independence might well be “just a trick to preserve those scandalous (party) structures,” Sobchak said. “Let us first liquidate all those elements of the system that has been strangling us . . . and then everybody--every nation and every state--will have a right for independence.”