COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : A Friendly Face for the Next Russian Coup : The August plot failed, but the next one may be better prepared.

In the flesh, Yegor K. Ligachev comes as something of a surprise. Formerly No. 2 to Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Politburo, Ligachev is on his first visit to the United States. He’s doing a little advance promotion for his autobiography, due out next year. But he also wants to correct his image in the West as the arch-enemy of democratic reform--and perhaps correct the impression that his career is over. On both counts he is partly successful.

Ligachev does not spit and snarl like the villain in a Sylvester Stallone movie. He is a rather rumpled figure, with sparse white hair and a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. And much of what he says, expressed in eminently reasonable tones, will fall on receptive ears in the hard times to come in the former Soviet Union.

After the failure of the August coup, it’s easy to think that the worst is over. But it is probably just beginning. I ask Ligachev if the coup was perhaps only a botched preliminary, with the real thing yet to come. It all depends, he says, on the outcome of Boris Yeltsin’s radical free-market reforms. Ligachev thinks that “only real immediate improvements will stave off a social explosion”--and then proceeds to demonstrate why such an explosion is all but inevitable.

Even by Yeltsin’s most optimistic predictions, once price controls are removed at the end of December, a year of traumatic suffering will follow. There will be critical shortages this winter of milk, eggs and meat. Unemployment could reach 30 million in 1992. Inflation is already running at 96% and many economists expect Weimar-style hyperinflation.

The only question is whether Soviet citizens can take it. Last month’s elections in Poland show how rapidly a people can become disillusioned with shock therapy--and the Soviet Union’s problems are infinitely greater. Ligachev believes that the public’s patience may be near exhaustion, and it’s hard to argue with him.

The temptation to look for authoritarian solutions is already evident in the behavior of Yeltsin, the apparatchik turned capitalist. Market forces, too, may take a hand in crushing the recent democratic opening. According to Martin Walker, a knowledgeable British reporter who recently surveyed the Soviet press on behalf of the Committee to Protect Journalists, many of the new democratic media may now be silenced by the simple effect of hyper-inflation on the supply of newsprint and videotape.

Against a backdrop of chaos, Ligachev’s call for a strong, disciplined state will sound more and more enticing. Instead of Stalinist cliche, he offers persuasive appeals to order and democracy.

He answers my question about a second coup by cleverly turning it around. “The second coup is already under way,” he says--and its perpetrator is Boris Yeltsin. “It involves the banning of the Communist Party, the witch hunt, the reprisals without trial. Before, we had a multiparty system. Now we have a monopoly of power.” Thus do party conservatives become aggrieved democrats.

Ligachev is careful to distance himself from the “anti-democratic methods” of the August coup plotters, but he insists that “these were decent citizens, intellectually developed, people who sacrificed for their country, who fought fascism.” He invokes the silent majority--the millions who remained on the sidelines as Yeltsin stood atop a tank, calling for support. He uses a line from Dostoevsky to appeal to their anger at so much dirty linen being washed in public--”We should stop spitting on ourselves.”

A second coup would avoid the mistakes of August. It might involve a more quixotic alliance of party old guard and the new right wing. It would find a ready-made power base among the tens of thousands of interior and defense ministry officials who are due to be laid off this winter. It could include figures who are hardly household names in the West--men like the “Black Colonel,” Viktor Alksnis, or the racist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who ran strongly in last June’s election for the presidency of the Russian Republic.

Washington would have done its bit to ensure this outcome. George Bush, as parsimonious with Yeltsin as he was with Gorbachev, is now abetted by the Democrats, who are infatuated with their silly election-year notion that there is no such thing as good foreign aid.

For the rest of us, we experience the Soviet crisis only as a random series of disconnected TV episodes. So, when the next Soviet coup comes, it will probably take us all by surprise--even though a conversation with Yegor Ligachev makes it seem the most likely thing in the world.