NEWS ANALYSIS : Plotters Forgot Lessons of Poland and Romania : Eastern Europe: Results in former satellite nations would have shown them the hazards of their ways.

VIENNA —  If the architects of the failed Soviet coup considered ordering the Soviet army to crush rebellious defenders of democracy, they had only to recall the bloody consequences of such action in Romania to conclude that soldiers cannot be relied on in battles against their own people.

If the plotters pondered countering the opposition by repressing the charismatic figure of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, they might have been deterred by reflection on how similar miscalculations in Poland and Czechoslovakia created heroes out of communism’s pariahs.

For both the perpetrators of this week’s Kremlin putsch and its pro-democracy opponents, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe provided a number of valuable lessons.

Those who attempted to topple Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev might have realized from their neighbors’ experience that force is a poor match for popular resistance. And anti-coup activists clearly picked up practical pointers from those who had fought dictatorship before them.

Western analysts say one reason the Kremlin coup collapsed was because its plotters seemed to lack the will to take the brutal measures that would have been necessary to gain full control of the country.

But it may also have been the prospect of ultimate failure, as shown throughout Eastern Europe in 1989, that deflated their dreams of turning back the clock to a time when the Communist Party could wield absolute power through the organs of repression.

“In East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, in Romania and Bulgaria, history has shown that democratic change cannot be stopped, even by force,” said Zoltan Szasz, deputy director of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Historical Science.

“What happened in Poland in 1981 was exactly what happened in Moscow in the past few days,” Szasz said. “The political leadership tried to use military force to stop reform, but as was proven in Poland, you cannot solve basic problems of the economy by calling in the army.”

Nothing short of an all-out attack on Yeltsin supporters who ringed the Russian Federation Parliament would have given the Moscow junta unchallenged control. Yet such desperate action would likely have cost thousands of lives and unleashed widespread social conflict that could have escalated into civil war.

“In the Soviet Union, as in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the party-state system has affected military units as well,” said Istvan Sejto, an academician at Budapest’s Institute of Political History. “The signs were not always on the surface, but it had to be in doubt whether the rank and file would carry out (the coup leaders’) commands. They had to be aware of the example of Romania, where the army went to the side of the revolutionaries.”

Lessons taught during the popular uprisings against communism that swept from the Baltic to the Black Sea two years ago did not go unheeded in the Soviet Union, even though the pace of political change there has been slower and the Communist Party still plays a dominant role.

“Soviets have come to appreciate the role the media play in such political confrontation,” observed one Balkan diplomat based in Vienna. “They saw how the Romanian revolutionaries’ control of television and radio swung the battle to their side. It’s no coincidence that resistance to the Soviet coup brought crowds out to defend the broadcast centers.”

Soviet coup opponents also commandeered buses to cordon off their power bases and erected makeshift barricades out of scrap metal and wood--the same measures of passive resistance employed by defenders of the breakaway republic of Slovenia to fend off the Yugoslav army when it attacked in June.

Some experiences of Eastern Europe since the revolutions have been decidedly negative and may have encouraged the coup plotters to try to escape the same fate.

Reform has so far dealt a body blow to the economies of Eastern Europe, especially in Bulgaria and Romania, where public resentment against unemployment and inflation portends long-term instability and mounting chaos.

The failed Kremlin coup may have the positive influence of deterring similar acts of desperation by ousted Communists in the tumultuous Balkans.

Why Moscow’s coup masters chose to overlook the fate of their former hard-line allies in Eastern Europe and plunge ahead with the ill-fated putsch is one of the dramatic event’s many unanswered questions.

Like the former dictators of Eastern Europe, they probably underestimated the public desire to dispense once and for all with the legacy of Stalinism.

Why the coup ran out of steam at the first sight of serious resistance is clearer, if one looks to the lessons of recent history.

The deployment of tanks and armored vehicles in Moscow and the Baltic capitals galvanized opponents of the coup, in the same way that harsh measures meted out by security forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany served only to stiffen pro-democracy demonstrators’ resolve.

Faced with mounting popular resistance and the meteoric rise of Yeltsin as democracy’s hero, the Kremlin junta would have had to marshal a massive assault on opponents to gain political control.

Polish and Czechoslovak Communists tried without success throughout the 1980s to dilute the respective influence of Solidarity’s Lech Walesa and reform champion Vaclav Havel. Jailing them only intensified their popularity, evidenced by both men’s landslide victories in last year’s presidential elections.

There was also little to inspire confidence among the coup leaders that even a ruthless crackdown on opponents would result in triumph. The Yugoslav army’s attempt to deploy federal units in a political cause hastened the disintegration of that fighting force along ethnic lines. The same might have been expected of the Soviet army, since many Russian soldiers had already rushed to Yeltsin’s side.

With the risk of failure nagging at the coup leaders’ consciousness, memories must have traveled back to Christmas Day of 1989.

Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his hated wife, Elena, were summarily tried and executed for unleashing a bloodbath when they sought to set the army against the people.

The photographs of their bullet-riddled bodies may have provided one of the most chilling lessons for Moscow’s junta: the price they would pay if they took desperate action and still failed to turn history’s tide.

Predicting that communism’s days as an ideology are ever more numbered, Bulgarian President Zhelyu Zhelev told television viewers in his country that the Soviet coup’s collapse proved that “a deep and irreversible change has taken place in the world.”