Yeltsin Recalls Coup of ‘91, Says It Won’t Happen Again : Russia: ‘The country is now controllable,’ aide says. Reform plan for citizen investment will start soon.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, recalling the fateful hours of the coup attempt that rocked the world exactly one year ago, assured his fellow Russians on Wednesday that the country need no longer fear upheaval and civil war that could lead to nuclear disaster.

“Civic peace is the most valuable thing there is in Russia today,” Yeltsin told a nationwide television audience. “We have chosen the path of reform and not the path of revolutionary cataclysms.”

Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar also offered rare words of comfort for the population shaken and impoverished by his radical market reforms, saying that the economy has stabilized to the point that “I no longer fear a catastrophe.”

“Despite the remaining serious economic and social problems, the country is now controllable,” Gaidar told the daily newspaper Izvestia. “The market has started to work, and no hunger is foreseen.”

Yeltsin, looking hale and well- rested after a Black Sea vacation, announced the imminent launch of a major economic reform: a plan to issue every Russian citizen a “privatization voucher” that can be used to buy up pieces of state-owned factories and businesses soon to be sold off. Each voucher is to be worth 10,000 rubles--$61 at current rates.

Using the voucher, any Russian can buy shares “in an enterprise in any corner of Russia and become an owner and master of it,” he said, adding that the vouchers will be distributed around Oct. 1.

If they choose not to buy company stock, people can sell the vouchers for cash.

The voucher is “a kind of ticket to the free-market economy for each of us,” Yeltsin said. “We need millions of property owners, not a handful of millionaires.”

His gleaming white hair set off by the silver-patterned silk of his office wallpaper, the Russian president congratulated viewers on the adjustment they have made as the country moves from communism to a market-driven economy.

“By joining the reform, you are making a contribution that is no less important than the contribution you made in August, 1991,” he said.

After the three-day attempted putsch by Soviet hard-liners, Yeltsin recalled, his government faced pressure to launch a new revolution and begin reprisals against the defunct Communist regime. But that, he said, could only have ended with the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s phrase, “You have the floor, Comrade Mauser.”

“Only this time it would have been a machine gun, rather than a Mauser (a German gun),” Yeltsin added. “A tank or, even worse, a nuclear missile. If this storm had begun, no one in this country or the world would have been able to stop it.”

Now, he said, “Reform in Russia is progressing, thanks to you and your support. Every day we move forward, little by little, toward stability and the normal life that we so long for.”

Yeltsin’s pep talk and Gaidar’s self-defense struck the rosiest notes on a chilly, rainy day--eerily similar to the weather on the day of the coup--full of remembrances that were largely painful despite the putsch’s happy ending.

Russian Television news opened its evening program with mention of “this gloomy anniversary,” noting: “People who went through it all (last year) don’t much like to remember it.”

Still, about 2,000 people calling themselves “Defenders of the White House” gathered for a disorganized rally at the towering Russian government building that served as headquarters for Yeltsin and his supporters during the attempted coup.

“Life has become harder, but nothing can be compared to the freedom we enjoy now,” Olga Kudryashova, 19, said at the rally. “There is no KGB eavesdropping on you and peeping into your bedroom window. I can travel to any country I want. Yes, prices went up, but at least you can go to the store and buy something you want. And you don’t have to listen to that ideological garbage anymore and lie to your children about life.

“Freedom is a wonderful feeling,” she said.

It was the defiance of the thousands who ringed the White House, along with insubordination by soldiers and parts of the KGB, that brought down the eight-man “State Emergency Committee” that had imprisoned then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in his vacation dacha and tried to take over the country.

Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, came to pay their respects Wednesday at the graves of the three martyrs of the putsch, young men who died in a confused nighttime confrontation with tanks on Moscow’s Ring Road.

Another graveside ceremony turned into a political forum for the reactionary officers who gathered at the tombstone of Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the conservative military adviser who apparently hanged himself three days after the coup failed.

“Some regard this as a day of victory, but we see it as a day of mourning in a degraded country,” one officer said.

The Russian press too was not in much of a mood for celebrating. Newspapers splashed pictures of last August’s barricades and tanks across their front pages but concentrated on pessimistic assessments of the progress made in the past year as the country has struggled through the first phases of real economic reform.

“One reporter in Izvestia defined what happened a year ago as ‘We have suffered a victory,’ ” renowned film director Stanislav Govorukhin told the Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper). “I cannot find a better description for what we have now.”

Even Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s close adviser, told the Literaturnaya Gazeta: “If some hopes are still alive today, they are much more modest and much, much more cautious (than a year ago).”

The anniversary celebrations themselves have been affected by the deepening crisis. Government organizers of the planned series of gala evenings and concerts complained Wednesday that their sponsors have reneged on promised funding and that they may not have the money to go through with the planned events.

“The main problem of the current holiday is money,” Russian Television commented.

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this report.