NEWS ANALYSIS : Turmoil in Tbilisi May Be a Sample of What’s to Come : Nationalism: Efforts by former Soviet republics to fill the ideological vacuum are likely to lead to more crises.

Just months ago, Georgians were on the cutting edge of the revolutionary changes sweeping what then was the Soviet Union. They had democratically elected their nation’s first president and were creating a free-market economy. Georgian independence, so long dreamed of, was near.

But just as quickly as they advanced, Georgians have now retreated with a military takeover of their government on Monday, the violent overthrow of the elected president and the collapse of the constitutional order in the one-time Soviet republic.

Georgia’s new rulers defended the need to bring down President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ardent nationalist and former political prisoner who had won 87% of the votes in last May’s election. He had gone mad with power, they asserted, and in his paranoia had turned democracy into a dictatorship.

Their essential argument, as advanced by Georgy Chanturia, an opposition leader and a dedicated democrat Gamsakhurdia had jailed, was that Georgia’s “facade democracy” had to be destroyed in order to create real democracy.

Yet, the coup in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi threw into question the democratization of all the Soviet Union’s 15 former republics; in none of them do the roots of Western democracy go deep.

The outlook, in fact, is for turmoil across much of Eurasia as these old-but-young nations try to form themselves into modern states. Georgia may again prove the cutting edge--this time for a wave of coups and counter-coups, of unrest and violence, of popular impatience with the slowness of change.

Put simply, the dissolution of the Soviet Union last month, the accelerating disintegration of its economy and the collapse of socialism as an ideology destroyed both the political framework and the philosophical underpinnings of all the constituent republics. And their efforts to replace them, largely through the dynamics of resurgent nationalism, are bound to be troubled.

Some of the now-independent republics, like Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova, are caught in bitter ethnic conflicts, in which many have already died; in others, among them Georgia, a power struggle ensued that is based as much on family and tribal rivalries going back generations as on current issues.

In the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, an intense struggle is developing between the present leaderships of old-time Communist bosses and rising Muslim nationalists. Even progressive Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (formerly Kirghizia) are worried that a strong pan-Turkic movement could merge them into one even before they are established in the world.

And in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, there is an amazing effort to return the political systems to where they stood in 1940, when the Red Army rolled in, right down to the re-creation of the old parties under the sons and grandsons of their prewar leaders.

There is also a vengeful settling of scores against those deemed to have collaborated with Soviet rule.

The potential flash points, in fact, are almost too numerous to map; one leading ethnographer and sociologist in St. Petersburg counts 76 present and potential conflicts that he defines as “able to cause a war.”

Speaking just about the sprawling Russian Federation, Ramazan Abdulatipov, chairman of the Russian legislature’s Council of Nationalities, commented last month: “We are, step by step, approaching tragedy, including the danger of inter-ethnic and inter-republican wars.”

But Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin has disavowed a peacekeeping role for his country, the most powerful member of the new Commonwealth of Independent States and the traditional order-keeper. He brought home troops that had separated warring Armenian and Azerbaijani militias--and watched the fighting quickly surge.

“Quite a lot of our Russian lads have perished in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Yeltsin said, explaining his decision to pull the troops back from the disputed Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan. “It is simply impermissible for us to use our army to settle ethnic conflicts.”

The strife, in fact, is not as atavistic as the opposition’s successful putsch in Georgia or the continuing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan might suggest. What is at stake in most cases is the fate of a people who have suffered mightily under the totalitarianism of Soviet socialism and who are now must make fateful choices about their futures.

“The issues are big, the issues are real, but nobody is truly prepared to make the decisions,” commented Sergei Karaganov, a leading political scientist. “Contention is normal, for the questions are important; naivete or greed or stupidity can make it bloody.”

As emergent nation-states, few of the former Soviet republics share the history or the political and social philosophy from which Western democracy in its various forms grew, and 70 years of Soviet socialism gave them only a bookish understanding of how it should work.

In shedding socialism as their underlying political philosophy, they are replacing it with nationalism. Yet, for all of its dynamism, nationalism has had a tendency to grab power rather than to seek smooth constitutional succession. Its history is one of massacres and counter-massacres, of lies, cheating and myth making, of push-and-shove but very self-righteous politics.

“Even among the democrats, today we find the same old Bolshevism, the same yes-or-no, permissive-prohibitive mentality,” says Alexander N. Yakovlev, the Soviet political thinker who helped launched the reforms that eventually brought socialism to an end. “It is the same intolerance as before, this neo-Bolshevism, and I fear it. I hope we shall overcome it, but the same old authoritarian structures may simply resurface in other forms.”

Russia may boast of its defeat of the conservative attempt last summer to oust Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and roll back the reforms of perestroika, and Yeltsin as its president can claim to have almost single-handedly forced the end of Soviet socialism and the dissolution of the state it created.

But there are increasing elements of authoritarianism in Yeltsin’s leadership--rule by decree, reliance on a closed circle of advisers, ignoring the elected Parliament--that admirers and even critics justify as a temporary measures necessary to guide Russia through a tough political and economic transformation.