Next Step : Russia: The Fight for the Kremlin : ‘Putsch II’ looks like a low-budget parody of the 1991 thriller. Crowds are smaller, the mood despairing.

The hot water and elevators didn’t work, the toilets on some floors stopped, the usually gorged snack bars ran short of everything but bread and bottled water and, though people talked with bravado about resisting until the end, their towering stone fortress soon became a trap.

Under the windows roamed a motley crowd that waxed and waned, never topping 5,000. It was dominated by Russia’s new “refuseniks” --people who refuse the great, painful changes that have taken place here, who pine for the Soviet Union, who see the nefarious hand of Israel or the United States in their misery or problems.

Dina Karpenko, 64, whose father was shot as an enemy of the people under dictator Josef Stalin, was among the discontented who longed to turn back the clock. “What do we need the Americanization of Russia for?” the woman, whose bright blue eyes glowed with sincerity, asked in a soft but insistent voice. “My grandson doesn’t know any of the old Russian tales. The only thing he wants to do is watch those awful music videos on television.”

The Moscow grandmother who is against MTV and for the revival of Marxism was one of the bit players in “Putsch II: Russia in Crisis,” last week’s parody of the political thriller that mesmerized the world two Augusts ago, when then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was briefly deposed.

The stage where Karpenko and the others gathered was the same: the marble-trimmed colossus by the Moscow River that Russians call simply “Byely Dom”--the White House. And many of 1991’s leading actors were back for a repeat performance (although plenty had different roles). But, as they know so well in Hollywood, remakes rarely match the original.

In August, 1991, after the State Emergency Committee tried to grab power in the Soviet Union, thousands and thousands of Muscovites flocked to the seat of Russia’s legislature to build bristling barricades of park benches, concrete reinforcement bars, trolley buses, children’s playground equipment and whatever else they could lay their hands on.

Despite the sense at times of real danger and impending onslaught by the Soviet army, the prevailing mood was that of a Slavic Woodstock, a sort of love-in for democracy.

Women stuck bright red geraniums in tank barrels and perfect strangers bonded by sharing cups of hot tea in the cold rains that fell throughout the three-day drama.

In the standoff that began last Tuesday, the dominant tone in the crowd was despair, anger and bewilderment, camouflaged behind the shouting of old Soviet-era slogans such as “All power to the soviets!” or brave claims like the “We will win!” tossed out by right-wing lawmaker Sergei N. Baburin.

Woodstock it wasn’t; at times, the White House crowd definitely had more in common with the graying group you’d find lounging around the pool at Leisure World. A red banner marked the rallying point of “Veterans of the Great Patriotic War and the Soviet Armed Forces.” In the White House lobby, two retired colonels in their 70s squeezed back into their uniforms and strapped on their Sam Browne belts to show support for Soviet-vintage institutions.

Russians at the White House in August, 1991, felt in their bones that the rest of the world was with them; it was a moment when a country that had lived like an armed camp for decades seemed to rejoin the community of nations. People who rallied to the Parliament’s aid this time were furious at the widespread support enjoyed by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin abroad, seeing it as additional proof that the president was in the hire of foreign masters.

“Yankee, go home!” one steel-toothed electronics worker from Izhevsk said angrily to an American reporter who asked for his opinion of events. “How would you feel if Russia approved of Clinton dissolving the Congress?”

An anti-Semitic, xenophobic strain could often be detected. “We will not surrender Russia to Zionism!” a deputy proclaimed to the anti-reform Congress of People’s Deputies as it met inside the building. Posters taped to the White House walls depicted Yeltsin as a wallowing pig covered with stars of David and dollar signs, or with a Hitler-like shock of black hair and mustache. Along with red Soviet banners, the yellow-black-and-white flags of Russian ultranationalists flapped in the chilly September wind.

Anti-Yeltsinites’ attempts at self-defense--fist-sized rocks laid out in mounds for use against police, hurdles cobbled together of sewer pipe and steel bars--looked like a set for a low-budget war film. “What’s important is that the people will stop the tanks. We will,” Tariel M. Bairamov, 47, a teacher of physics, vowed.

But there were no tanks. When Yeltsin was on the inside of the White House during Putsch I, his enemies’ plan, which they failed to put into action, was to storm the building. Yeltsin’s strategy was more that of a doctor dealing with a highly contagious case of measles. The president quarantined the site, which sits kitty-corner from the U.S. Embassy’s new compound, with a fearsome ring of police, sliced its communications and power lines and wouldn’t let through trucks carrying food or kerosene for the White House’s independent but inadequate electric generators.

Brimming toilets, empty snack bars and dead telephones, Yeltsin evidently reckoned, would be more effective than T-72 tanks in suppressing the opposition.

As of Monday, he had made the right calculation. But inside the White House, some anti-Yeltsin leaders actually viewed the army’s failure to attack as proof of support. In yet another sign of how out of touch he was with the widespead indifference to the lawmakers’ plight, Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov said he had dispatched emissaries to factories to call on the proletariat to arm itself and come to the aid of the White House.

Having been on the inside of that building himself a little more than two years earlier, when he emerged the hero in defeating the attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev, Yeltsin learned and remembered plenty. In August, 1991, for example, some phones in the Parliament continued to work. Last week, the entire “205” exchange serving not only the legislature but the surrounding Krasnopresnyensky neighborhood was switched off, as were ties to the special government phone network.

The 1991 coupsters banned all but friendly newspapers but exercised such ineffective control of broadcast media that a defiant Yeltsin was shown on state-run TV the first day. Yeltsin this time ignored the printed media while making state-run TV--the chief information source for most Russians--air thoroughly biased reports in his favor. The always docile Itar-Tass news agency ran one-sided dispatches like last Thursday’s item that began, “The Nation Backs Yeltsin’s Tough Measures.”

One key reason Yeltsin triumphed in August, 1991, over his opponents (who did deploy tanks) was that some military units came over to his side, including 10 tanks on the very first day. And last week, his mutinous vice president-turned-”acting president,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Alexander V. Rutskoi, was clearly counting on at least some symbolic support from his former comrades in arms; in fact, he even named his own rival defense minister as part of his first decree.

But over the weekend, when a show of force was staged in support of “President Rutskoi,” it was hard for observing journalists not to burst into laughter. On the plaza in front of the White House, Russia’s would-be acting president reviewed a goose-stepping “Special Parliamentary Regiment” composed of no more than 250 young and middle-aged volunteers in parkas and ski caps. One man had a sword, another a whip, but many carried only shopping bags. Many had trouble responding to simple commands such as “turn left” and “turn right.”

Covering “Putsch II” in some respects was more complicated than the original since the telephones, a reporter’s lifeline, had gone dead this time. Show up in the White House with a portable radiophone, as a reporter for the English-language Moscow Times did, and you might find it commandeered by Rutskoi’s defense minister, Vladislav Achalov, so he could make local calls.

Unlike in August, 1991, when Yeltsin told assembled reporters to “get going” and tell Russia and the world of his determination to resist the hard-liners, many of the White House defenders this time had little love lost for foreign journalists. Some were even violently hostile.

CNN cameraman J.R. Hall, 33, of Los Angeles, suffered a concussion, three cracked ribs, and a broken camera at the hands of a score of right-wingers angered when he tried to film what he thought were weapons being stockpiled by the Parliament’s defenders. Another CNN cameraman, Michael Johnson, had his wrist broken in two places when he raised his hand to ward off a brick heaved at him.

The graying Communist apparatchiks who tried to overthrow Gorbachev held a single news conference that degenerated into a fiasco. This time, the Yeltsin camp set up a special press center outside the Kremlin and paraded government officials before the media to make its case.

One important difference between August, 1991, and September, 1993, makes the events of last week more than a pathetic imitation. The original featured a determined man--Yeltsin--manifestly in the right who courageously climbed on a tank to demand “the return of the country to normal constitutional development.” This time, to conclude the film analogy, the protagonist, as in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western, was flawed and complex; in fact, with time, Yeltsin may turn out not to have been such a good guy at all.

After all, it was Yeltsin last week who violated Russia’s constitution, who disbanded a legally elected Parliament, who clamped down on the broadcast media so that they sang only his song.

He said he was doing it to sweep away the institutional vestiges of the Soviet Union and to put Russia firmly on the road to a true democratic system. But his foes this time were many of the very people who risked their lives with him inside the White House against the State Emergency Committee: Khasbulatov, Rutskoi, Russian deputy Oleg G. Rumyantsev and many other members of the Russian legislature that he has ordered dissolved.

For some Russians, that was the most disturbing difference between Putsch I and Putsch II, carrying worrisome implications for the future.

With a bubbling demeanor and a Dr. Ruth-like silhouette, Valentina I. Verstova, an employee in the Russian Parliament’s press office, rode out both government crises in her sixth-floor office at the White House. She was a Yeltsin supporter during Putsch I. She isn’t now.

“When all this started, and the phones didn’t work, and then the water, I thought, ‘This is not the Communists doing this to us, it’s Yeltsin,” she said. “The Communists had more conscience--no, that’s not the right word. They had less meanness. My 84-year-old mother is sitting at home, listening to the radio and worrying about me here. And I cannot call her. Last time I could. What is this craziness? This is democracy in Russia?”