COLUMN ONE : Coup Trial: Once Farce, Now Focus : Some 2 years after the failed Soviet putsch, its accused plotters have their day--after day--in court. The forgotten proceedings may take on new life as Russia’s legal system juggles a 2nd takeover bid.

Meet Oleg D. Baklanov, charged with treason and facing a possible death sentence: He greets a visitor in his spacious apartment here, filled with mementos of a fulfilling career. In his study, scale models of Soviet spacecraft and photographs of historic launches attest to his former position as director of defense production.

The works of Lenin line a bookshelf along one wall. A Western computer hums on his desk. Among his neighbors are a fellow defendant and the president of Azerbaijan, a former top Communist Party and KGB official, who keeps a Moscow flat.

“I’ve lived a good life,” Baklanov says. “Built a house, raised my children, did everything in the service of my country. Now, unfortunately, I’ve fallen under new circumstances.”

Indeed. For most of the last two years, Baklanov, notwithstanding his seeming comfort now, has been in prison or on trial in connection with the August, 1991, hard-line coup attempt.

When the coup collapsed after three days, Russian authorities charged Baklanov and 12 other top Soviet officials with betraying their country.

Given that the coup was a world-famous debacle and that its consequences included the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, the case seemed to be in the bag.

Instead, the trial has turned into Moscow’s longest-running farce.

After 26 months, not a single word of testimony has been taken in open court, and at least another month may pass before the first of 120 witnesses is sworn in. The formal reading of the charges, encompassing 1,000 pages in five volumes, only began Oct. 15 and is expected to continue for two weeks.

Meanwhile, one alleged plotter has died (by suicide) and another suffered a near-fatal heart attack, leading to his case being separated from the others.

“When will it end? It’s very hard to know,” says Oleg S. Shenin, a defendant who rejects contentions that the defendants themselves are intent on dragging out the process. “We’re paying our own lawyers; our families find it hard to live. I can only tell you that we ourselves are as interested as anybody in getting it over with.”

Long having dropped out of Russians’ consciousness, the trial of those accused of plotting against the Soviet Union and former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is now likely to undergo greater scrutiny.

The reason is that it will be running in tandem with the trial of a second generation of alleged coup plotters: the fomenters of this month’s violent attacks on government installations in Moscow.

The attacks provoked Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to shell the Parliament building, or White House, to drive out hard-line opponents barricaded inside.

The episode was the most violent in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

The previous alleged coup plotters are fully alive to the irony of being tried for an event whose human toll pales in comparison to the later incident.

“To come into the trial after what happened this month--it’s absurd,” says Shenin, who was secretary to the Communist Party Central Committee at the time of the failed 1991 coup. “In our time, three young people died, basically of hooliganism. And in this one, more than 160.”

Baklanov, without accusing either side specifically, lectures: “I feel shame for the politicians who had responsibility for that bloodshed. You can’t have economic development under such conditions.”

Like most of the other defendants, he still maintains that he acted to preserve, not betray, the Soviet Union, and that the plotters’ forced removal of Gorbachev was, if anything, ratified by decades of high-echelon Soviet practice.

“You can’t say I betrayed my country. You might say I betrayed one man (Gorbachev), but . . . “ He shrugs. “That’s the way we did things.”

Nothing demonstrates how the way of doing things here has changed like this trial itself.

Defendants such as Baklanov and Shenin never tire of pointing out that they are being tried for traitorous acts against an extinct state (the Soviet Union)--which was dismantled by officials of the government now prosecuting them.

The case has been further complicated by the vagaries of Russian jurisprudence. The country’s legal system, inherited almost intact from the totalitarian Soviet Union, is today changing so rapidly that it gives an impression of being made up as it goes along.

In fact, this trial shows better than any other how--in contrast with a democratic regime--unformed and inadequate Russian trial law has been.

Soviet criminal statutes were written broadly to give the totalitarian government great latitude in prosecuting anyone it wished for any of a handful of all-encompassing crimes. The trial outcome, of course, was predetermined.

“An arrest on political charges was as good as punishment,” says Sergei A. Kovalev, chairman of the presidential human rights commission and a former dissident.

But now that the state is trying to actually give the defense a chance, defendants can manipulate the process to their own advantage.

“All of this is now playing into the hands of the last leaders of the Communist totalitarian state,” Kovalev says. “They are using the numerous defects of the Soviet judicial system to erect multiple obstacles for the investigation and trial, prolonging it indefinitely.”

The coup case defendants, like political dissidents under Soviet rule, have not been above claiming that their human rights have been violated.

Shenin says he was refused medical care for months during his prison stay; since his release, he has had three bouts of surgery. Five defendants contend that their immunity from prosecution as Soviet legislators was breached by their arrests. (That claim was addressed by the formality of having the post-coup Supreme Soviet strip them of their immunity without even a vote.)

The government has clearly learned a lesson from the pitfalls of this case.

In charging the October suspects not with treason but with more concrete crimes of violence and incitement, the Yeltsin government has shown a determination to avoid the protractions of the earlier prosecution.

“It is quite possible that the trial dealing with the October mutiny will be finished before the trial” for those accused in the 1991 plot, Kovalev observes.

The prospects for delay only intensified in recent weeks, when the court approved a defense motion to impanel an independent committee of experts to examine the prosecutors’ charge that the coup plotters damaged the Soviet Union’s defense capability by sequestering Gorbachev for three days at his Crimean dacha.

Both the prosecution and the defense will now have to agree on the makeup of the committee, which, thus far, has no deadline for its report.

When that report is delivered, it will join a mountain of legal paperwork.

The prosecution case already fills 150 volumes of investigative materials, including documents and interrogation transcripts.

“By law, all the defendants and their lawyers have the right to see all the material and take notes,” says Alexander M. Gofshtein, who with a partner, Genrikh P. Padva, is defending Anatoly I. Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet at the time of the attempted coup. “With more than 10 defendants, some of whom have more than one lawyer, you can see that, even if one defendant read one book a day, that would be 150 days.”

He adds: “The defendants are not young, they fall ill. (At least six have spent time in the hospital in the past year.) All these factors influence the length of the trial.”

Each defendant and lawyer expect to be heard on every question and motion in court, meaning that every issue gets a full airing by no fewer than 20 speakers. It is a rare technicality, no matter how trivial, that can be debated and decided in less than a full six-hour day. The resultant proceedings have all the conciseness of a congressional hearing being broadcast on C-SPAN.

The prosecution deserves its share of the blame for dragging out the proceedings.

In August, 1992, when the trial was finally about to begin, Prosecutor General Valentin G. Stepankov decided to reopen the investigation. The court allowed him to refile the indictment.

“So all the defendants had to reacquaint themselves with the case anew,” Gofshtein says. “The entire process began again.”

Once the court began sitting in April under the chairmanship of military Judge Anatoly Ukolov, Stepankov caused another delay.

He and an assistant published a book--”The Kremlin Conspiracy,” with a dime-novel cover of a drooling Communist ogre snarling at the reader--that purported to lay out the prosecution’s case.

The book drew heavily on interrogation transcripts and other investigatory materials not otherwise made public.

Given that it referred to the defendants as “conspirators” and “criminals,” they not surprisingly applied to have Stepankov removed.

His junior prosecutors, they also argued, could not be expected to remain independent if they knew their boss would face libel damages if they lost the case. (In Russia, the prosecutor is responsible not only for bringing charges, as in the United States, but for ensuring the overall fairness of the courts. The latter function is performed in the United States by the judiciary.)

The motion went up to the Supreme Soviet, or legislature, which dodged the entire issue as not within its jurisdiction.

Ukolov and his two military jurors also declined to take a strong stand, finally ruling this August that Stepankov could stay on but that the issue of his underlings’ independence would be “taken into consideration” when the panel eventually renders its verdict.

The entire affair placed the trial in suspended animation for eight weeks.

As it happens, Stepankov this month was fired by Yeltsin for not adequately supporting the president’s dissolution of the Russian Parliament on Sept. 21.

Today, the trial seems finally to be moving ahead steadily, if slowly.

On most weekdays at 10 a.m., Judge Ukolov and the two military jurors step up to a dais in a third-floor courtroom of the Russian Supreme Court.

Before them, dressed demurely in suits and sitting behind long tables along opposite walls, are 11 mostly elderly men--three are 69, three others are older than 60 and only one is younger than 50. As they scan the daily newspapers from behind thick glasses or cup their ears to hear their lawyers speak, it is sometimes hard to realize that they represented the very peak of Soviet state power right up to their capitulation to democratic forces on Aug. 21, 1991.

Among them are Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, 69, then the KGB chairman and to many the possible instigator of the alleged coup plot; Gennady I. Yanayev, 55, former vice president; Valentin S. Pavlov, 56, onetime prime minister; former Parliament Chairman Lukyanov, 62; Dmitri T. Yazov, 69, ex-Soviet defense minister, and four highly placed military men.

The case is uncomplicated only on the surface, for the legal and factual background is labyrinthine.

All the alleged plotters’ actions took place within the Kremlin corridors, under the storied conditions of Soviet secrecy. By comparison, this October’s mutiny unfolded on public squares and in front of international television crews.

“The plotters this time were of lesser caliber; they resorted to inciting the unruly crowd to mass disturbances,” says Boris A. Zolotukhin, a Moscow lawyer with no direct involvement in either case. The suspects in the previous incident, in contrast, “gave orders in the privacy of their offices. They were smart enough not to shout direct commands into the megaphone at a public gathering.”

Moreover, not all the defendants participated equally.

Only seven of the 12 now on trial are actually alleged to have been members of the Government Committee on the State of Emergency, the body established to run the country after Gorbachev’s ouster; the rest are charged largely with obeying the committee’s orders.

Former Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov’s defense, for instance, is that he was not a member and signed no documents linking him to the failed coup.

Defendants have even contended that Gorbachev himself abetted the coup by not availing himself of dozens of opportunities to quash it.

The former Soviet leader is likely to be a star witness for the prosecution once testimony gets under way; his spokesman said Gorbachev was held under armed guard for the entire period at issue.

The defendants also contend that their asserted rationale for the declaration of a state of emergency--that Gorbachev’s planned signing on Aug. 20, 1991, of a new treaty on the relations between the central government and the Soviet republics would provoke the violent dissolution of the Soviet Union--has been borne out by the vicious ethnic fighting around the perimeter of the former union.

“We tried to preserve the integrity of the country,” Baklanov says. “And now look how many tens of thousands have died, how many hundreds of thousands wounded, how many millions made refugees.”

Nevertheless, many observers see parallels between the two attempted coups.

“The goals of the mutineers in both cases were similar--to stop reforms and turn back toward totalitarianism,” lawyer Zolotukhin says. “In both cases the hard-liners got no popular support.”

But Baklanov himself agrees that the exit of Gorbachev and advent of Yeltsin as political leader have produced one reform he finds personally appealing. “I agree that Yeltsin has made one big step toward democracy,” he says. “Under Gorbachev, I would have long ago been judged and shot. So things could have been worse.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.