From Vilified to Victims: Coup Plotters Get Sympathy : Anniversary: A year after failed putsch, polls show Russians are taking a softer view of hard-liners.

One year after the defeat of a hard-line Communist coup, public sympathy for the jailed plotters appears to be growing.

Opinion polls and interviews with ordinary Russians on the first anniversary of the Aug. 19-21, 1991, coup indicate a sizable majority of them still think the attempt to roll back democratic reforms was wrong.

But after a sharp drop in living standards and a frightening rise in discrimination against ethnic Russians in other former Soviet republics, many now take a softer view of the conspirators’ effort to hold the Soviet Union together by force.

A poll published Saturday shows Russians increasingly favor leniency for former Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, former KGB Chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, former Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov and others in jail awaiting trial for trying to seize power.

“Formerly Evil-Doers, Now Victims” said the front-page headline announcing the poll in the reformist Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Only 1.7% of Moscow residents questioned in the poll favored the death penalty for the conspirators, and 24.8% said they should be freed.

That is a reversal of public opinion. A September, 1991, poll found 24.7% favored the death penalty for members of the self-proclaimed Committee for the State of Emergency, which put former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest and sent tanks into Moscow. Only 3.1% then wanted to free the coup plotters.

According to Saturday’s poll, the percentage of Moscow residents who believe they would be better off if the coup had succeeded has risen from 3.1% a year ago to 12.2% this month.

The number who think that life under the hard-liners would have been worse than under Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has plummeted from 69.9% to 31.8%.

“From this data it is clear that in the course of a year the hearts of Muscovites, which were so hard in August, 1991, now are softening,” the newspaper commented.