PERSPECTIVE ON THE SOVIET UNION : Yeltsin--Democrat, Not Autocrat : Americans, of all people, should understand that shedding an illegitimate government means going outside the old laws.

Three weeks after Russia’s August coup, we still find in America a strange misunderstanding of what, in fact, occurred, and what it means.

First, the providentially botched coup was in fact no coup at all, but an act of the Soviet government, representing the whole Communist Establishment--the party, the military-industrial complex, the army command and the KGB. Its leaders’ aim was to depose a chief whose indecision they believed, correctly, was letting the system drift into catastrophe. Once he was deposed, they intended to physically suppress Boris Yeltsin and the other democratically elected Russian leaders, an altogether more serious matter than a coup within the self-appointed Soviet government, which had never enjoyed democratic legitimacy.

The August coup was begun last December with Gorbachev’s appointment of Boris Pugo as interior minister and Valentin Pavlov as prime minister, actions that provoked Eduard Shevardnadze’s warning resignation. The first stage of the coup was the bloody January attacks on the Baltic states. If Gorbachev did not know or understand what was going on, he was incompetent, which is just as bad as active complicity.

The second stage of the coup was the attempt last March by the Communist-dominated Russian Parliament to impeach Yeltsin, and so end the “Democratic Russia Movement” and the republic’s new “sovereignty.” Yeltsin beat back this attempt by mobilizing several hundred thousand people in Moscow’s streets, as well as by appealing to striking workers from the Siberian coal mines to Byelorussia. The defeated Communists in the Parliament then had to accept direct election of the Russian president. This Yeltsin won handily in June, putting the Communists openly in a minority, which made a showdown inevitable.

A Coup Foreseen

After March, therefore, a less visible part of Yeltsin’s program took shape. Knowing the system from the inside, he understood that the Communists would not accept being dethroned by mere elections, and would attempt another coup. So he and the democrats organized to meet it. Any other course--such as trusting to Soviet “legality”--would have been criminal irresponsibility.

The democrats also concluded that the totalitarian nature of the system made further perestroika half-measures futile, indeed potentially fatal to the country. The estimated drop in GNP for 1991 was 20%, compared with 9% for the worst year of the Great Depression in America. The only possible “reform” of a total system was its total dismantling. Gorbachev’s persistent delusions about communism’s reformability were therefore as dangerous as his government’s impending coup.

Then, in June, Pavlov tried to usurp Gorbachev’s presidential powers of emergency decree, and Gorbachev responded only with a speech. So the Russian democrats prepared to act in self-defense and at the same time turn the coming coup into a counter-coup, with the aim of eliminating communism root and branch.

It is this preparation that explains the swift, comprehensive response of the democrats between Aug. 19 and 21. No mere reflex, their reaction was the flexible application of a vast contingency program. Since they were unarmed, the first problem was military. Thus, a Yeltsin man in the Russian branch of the KGB, Vitaly Ignenko, thwarted the projected attack on the Russian White House; his general, Valentin Kobets, defused Gen. Dmitri Yazov’s army.

Politically, the democrats played according to strict Soviet “constitutionality.” They called for Gorbachev’s return when they might have seized power themselves. This fig leaf for their own de facto exercise of state authority both minimized the risk of internal violence and won over governments moonstruck with “democrat” Gorbachev.

At this point, a national epiphany occurred: Yeltsin’s resistance ignited a spontaneous, nonviolent explosion of the population against seven decades of the Leninist fraud. Though this explosion could not be planned, its possibility had been sensed, and so it was orchestrated by “Yeltsinian” city councils across Russia’s 11 time zones. And so the counter-coup became a genuine democratic revolution.

It is both untrue and unworthy to caricature this August liberation as “Yeltsin’s revolution” or to imply that it was a strong-arm usurpation. One “Sovietologist” went the final slanderous step and called Yeltsin “fascist.” Fortunately for Russia, this tells us more about American political innocence than about the prospects for democracy in Moscow. For these prospects are almost miraculously good for a country emerging from 70 years of lobotomizing Leninism and caught in one of the most colossal economic collapses in history.

Dismantling the System

To meet this crisis, Yeltsin followed through with a cascade of decrees and appointments dismantling the entire Soviet system: Grigory Yavlinsky, co-author of last year’s 500-Day Plan, to end the command economy through marketization and privatization; Vadim V. Bakatin and Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov to de-communize and professionalize the KGB and the army. Finally, even General Secretary Gorbachev, in a residually useful act, dissolved the system’s centerpiece, the party itself.

This universal disestablishment was completed last week. The pseudo-union was dissolved and replaced with the provisional framework of a loose, voluntary confederation. This framework also provides for nuclear safety, a coordinated economic market, minority rights and respect for international treaties. Also dissolved was the 1989 pseudo-constitution, since its embodiment, the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, was chosen by a suffrage rigged to yield a Communist majority. Again Gorbachev was employed to undo his own handiwork, replacing it with a more democratic legislature to be drawn from the republics, plus a new executive State Council in which he is retained as a mere figurehead. Yeltsin, far from “bullying” his defeated foe, was wisely magnanimous in the patriotic interests of national stability and foreign sensibilities.

All of this amounts to an intelligently premeditated grand design for a post-Communist Russia. And the circumstances account for Yeltsin’s famous August decrees, at the time widely denounced abroad as autocratic. It would have been total absurdity to try to pass them through the “due process” of a Communist legislature. The only logical course was to seize the opportunity provided by the post-coup interregnum. But many of the decrees had been written as far back as April and May; their gestation went back still further, to the summer of 1990--for example, the 500-Day Plan.

These decrees, moreover, had been prepared in the Russian Council of Ministers, duly constituted by an elected president and thus endowed with a democratic legitimacy that the “center” of Pavlov and Pugo totally lacked. And these decrees had been researched and written by the best, most westernizing talents of Russian liberalism. For an aspiring autocrat, Yeltsin keeps oddly democratic company.

It is embarrassing to have to remind the political heirs of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson that there are times when evolutionary due process must give way to revolution, and that there can be no revolution without violating existing legality. For when that legality violates the will of the civil society it becomes illegitimate, and must be replaced by a more authentic rule of law.

The necessary secrecy with which the Russian democrats drafted the outlines of their new order recalls the secrecy with which Madison and Hamilton surrounded the American Constitutional Convention. Moscow’s August uprising produced nothing like the riots that accompanied the Stamp Act protests of 1765. And in 1776, loyalist newspapers were closed, not suspended (the mild fate of Pravda, so deplored in the United States), by “patriots” in Massachusetts.

Yet our Founding Fathers were confronted with an adversary not even remotely comparable to the conspiracy in power that the Soviet state, under Lenin, Stalin--or Gorbachev--has always been. There was simply no other way to get rid of such an institutional conspiracy than through a legalistically minded counter-conspiracy.

And thanks to the Washingtonian statesmanship of Yeltsin among his democrats in the besieged Russian White House, the world was offered the most benign and legitimate conspiracy possible. We should not insult these authentic heroes with unsubstantiated accusations and insinuations. For their highest ambition is to make Russia our star pupil.