COLUMN ONE : Now, KGB Has Cause to Fear : Once the Soviet people resisted the coup, the security police alone could not overpower them. Dramatic changes at the spy agency are likely.

WASHINGTON —  They were such stuff as nightmares were made on, the stewards of centuries of fear.

Four hundred twenty years ago, Ivan the Terrible sent his Oprichniki, clad in black and riding coal-dark horses, to massacre the citizens of the restive city of Novgorod.

Three hundred years later, the Oprichnina’s successors, the Okhrana, fomented anti-Jewish pogroms, spied on Russian emigres in Paris and helped send about 290,000 of the czar’s subjects to misery and death in Siberia.

In 1917, one month after the success of his revolution, Vladimir I. Lenin directed his associate Felix Dzerzhinsky to establish a new, and more terrible, incarnation of the machinery of repression--known at first as the Cheka, now the KGB.

“We represent in ourselves organized terror,” Dzerzhinsky said. Four years later, in the winter of 1921, Soviet sailors at the Kronstad naval base rose in mutiny and denounced “the Cheka oprichniki”--linking Lenin’s secret police with the czar’s in one pungent phrase. In response, Dzerzhinsky’s men ringed the fortress with machine guns and darkened the ice of the frozen Neva River with the blood of thousands.

This week, the heirs to that merciless tradition, the leadership of the KGB--Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, Committee of State Security--along with their counterparts in the military and the police, mounted the attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. But to the astonishment of a watching world, the KGB and its heavily armed partners seemed to lack the will or the cohesion to snuff out the forces of opposition led by Boris N. Yeltsin.

So total was the KGB’s failure to sustain the coup that, by late Thursday evening, a crowd of young men had climbed the huge, 12-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky that stood in the center of Moscow, placed a noose around its bronze neck and--with the help of five cranes--carted it away. The toppling of the statue, many Soviet analysts believe, may be merely a harbinger of fundamental changes to come to the agency itself.

What happened--or rather did not happen--in the streets of Moscow was a break not just with the 74-year saga of Soviet communism, but with centuries of history. For once in the long, sad chronicles of Russia, individuals forced state power to retreat.

Over half a millennium, the security police of the world’s most practiced police state had refined their techniques and stratagems, murdering millions, imprisoning millions more and--increasingly in recent years--helping to pick the leaders of the Soviet state. Their very initials--from Cheka to OGPU to NKVD to MGB to the current KGB--have long been enough to terrorize nations.

But no longer. The Soviet citizens of 1991 were not the same as the citizenry of earlier times. And neither were many who filled the ranks of the KGB and other security forces.

“I think they just miscalculated,” said Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general, when asked why, this time, his former colleagues appeared to have lost their brutal nerve. “They counted on a bluff, on frightening people in the old style. They were sure the people would accept it out of the old atmosphere of fear and repression.”

“But over the last five years, the people have changed,” said Kalugin, who since leaving the KGB has become the Soviet Union’s most prominent crusader against the agency. “A palace coup was one thing in the old days. In 1964, the people took that silently. But this time it was a counterrevolution . . . the people could not tolerate that.”

Forces Spread Thin

Once the people demonstrated that they would resist, the KGB alone probably did not have the force to overpower them, said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a Soviet specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The KGB has about 270,000 troops, but the vast majority are border forces “spread out on the world’s longest frontier.” The 40,000 special forces troops have a fearsome reputation but were not designed for the sort of challenge that confronted them in central Moscow.

And much as the people of the Soviet Union have changed, so too has the KGB. Still capable of acts of unspeakable brutality under some circumstances, the agency “has been bureaucratized” in the years since Stalin’s bloody purges, said Robert Conquest, the leading historian of Stalin’s terror. “They’ve lost some of their initiative and verve,” he said.

Over the last three years, as the pace of Gorbachev’s reforms escalated, many of the KGB’s older agents, veterans of the attempts to squash dissident movements of the 1970s, retired. As the laws against political dissent were wiped from the statute books, the KGB directorate that was in charge of political persecutions was disbanded.

Under Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the now-deposed KGB chief who has been identified by many as a key leader of the coup, the agency began to cooperate with foreign police forces, working with Interpol on drug cases and trading intelligence with the CIA on terrorism. Kryuchkov even launched a publicity campaign, including a weekly one-hour television program called “The KGB Today” and a “Miss KGB” contest that was won by a striking dark-haired agent. All this was designed to portray a benign, non-threatening image.

Chasing drug dealers and combatting corruption and the ubiquitous Soviet Mafia, not harassing dissidents and spying on political leaders, were the agency’s true missions, Kryuchkov insisted to interviewers.

And with the rise of the independent power of Soviet republics, functions of the central, Soviet KGB began to be dispersed among semi-independent units responsible to the governments of several republics, including Yeltsin’s Russian government and the independence-minded government of Georgia.

Inside the Lubyanka, an old insurance company building in downtown Moscow that has served as the headquarters for the secret police since Dzerzhinsky’s day, the Russian and Soviet KGBs divide office space. But in recent months, the two groups have become increasingly separate, even to the point that agents from the two services reportedly now refuse to eat lunch at the same tables in the agency cafeteria.

Political Split Appears

Not only institutional divisions split the KGB. Political fissures opened too. The reforms of perestroika and glasnost , as they developed, fractured many Soviet institutions, including the Red Army, the Communist Party and the Interior Ministry, with its 300,000 troops. The same forces took their toll on KGB discipline as well.

That point was dramatically illustrated by the conduct of Gorbachev’s guard--a KGB unit. Although their chief, Lt. Gen. Yuri Plekhanov, joined the coup, presenting the junta’s demands to Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha, the 32 guards themselves remained loyal to the president, earning his warm praise at his press conference Thursday.

A presidential guard independent of the KGB may be needed in the future, Gorbachev said. “This question has been on the agenda a long time . . . . But I never thought it was a very important matter in those days. I am rather calm about the question of my guards, maybe too--too much so.”

And that is far from the only change the KGB is likely to see.

In comments to a small group of journalists after his press conference, Gorbachev insisted that in the future “there will be a security service.” But the form and size of the service are likely to be strikingly different.

“What is likely to happen is that the process of breaking up the KGB, decentralizing it, will accelerate,” said Arnold Horelick, senior Soviet specialist at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. The central government is likely to retain control over foreign operations, Horelick said, but the internal functions of the agency probably will be split among the separate republics and probably will be greatly reduced in their overall size.

U.S. intelligence analysts also predict the breakup of the KGB, although they expect the survival of the agency’s First Directorate, which oversees its foreign operations and is roughly analogous to the American CIA.

“What should happen is that the KGB should be broken up and put under oversight by the republics,” said retired Gen. William Odom, now with the Hudson Institute. “If the KGB survives, it’s a bad sign for reform.”

Analysts Opinions

So far, Gorbachev has given no clear signals of his intentions.

Leonid Shebarshin, named by Gorbachev as the new KGB chief, was head of the First Directorate, and his appointment may have been intended as a signal from Gorbachev that foreign intelligence functions of the KGB would be protected, some analysts suggested. Others noted that Kryuchkov too had worked his way up through the KGB’s foreign ranks.

Some analysts predicted that Gorbachev may try to preserve the KGB’s power. “If Gorbachev stays in his present position, he will perpetuate the KGB,” predicted Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.

Horelick, for his part, described the Soviet leader as “torn” on the issue.

“On the one hand, he has sought to preserve central institutions like the KGB because they gave him some leverage in dealing with the republics,” Horelick said. “But what he now sees is that it was those very organs that turned against him.”

Gorbachev himself owed his rise to power in large part to the KGB’s influence, American and Soviet analysts said.

In the early years of the Soviet state, under Lenin and Stalin, the security apparatus was a ruthless but loyal tool of the leader. Under Stalin, the NKVD, as the security service was then known, carried out purge after bloody purge at the dictator’s orders, wiping out virtually the entire upper level of the Communist Party that had been in office before Stalin’s rise to power and killing millions during the campaigns to collectivize the Russian and Ukrainian countrysides.

But after the KGB was created in a 1954 reorganization of the security services, the agency and its leaders played an active role in the power struggles within the party, said Jeremy Azrael of RAND, who described the machinations in a 1989 study of the KGB’s role in Soviet politics.

KGB chief Ivan Serov was a key aide in Nikita S. Khrushchev’s rise to power until Khrushchev dumped him in favor of Alexander Shelepin. Shelepin returned the favor, becoming a major player in the 1964 coup in which Khrushchev was deposed and eventually replaced by Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Serov and Shelepin had ambitions of achieving the top job themselves, as did Stalin’s last secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. They fell short, but Shelepin’s eventual successor, Yuri V. Andropov, succeeded where they had failed.

Andropov, who took over the KGB in 1967, amassed vast power in 16 years heading the agency. Along with that power, he also developed extensive knowledge of the seamier side of Soviet life, including information about the extensive corruption indulged in by members of Brezhnev’s family. That sort of knowledge, many analysts believe, allowed Andropov essentially to blackmail Brezhnev into guaranteeing him the succession.

Some analysts believe that Andropov marked Gorbachev early on as a potential candidate for the leadership; others say that speculation reads too much into the vague hints and sketchy guesswork on which Sovietology was based before the glasnost era.

But what is known for certain is that after the quick deaths of Andropov and his successor, Konstantin U. Chernenko, the KGB supported Gorbachev in his bid for power, helping him overcome several formidable rivals.

And in his early years in office, as he pushed for economic revival through renewed discipline and an end to corruption, Gorbachev echoed themes that Andropov and other KGB leaders had pushed earlier.

Shifts in Position

Only in more recent years, as he began to move to truly open up the Soviet system, did Gorbachev and the leadership of the KGB begin to split. And even in the last few years, Gorbachev has been notorious for shifting his position--first favoring the reformers, then the hard-liners, then the reformers again.

Now, analysts say, he may finally be forced to decide whether to tackle the dismantling of the agency that for so many years has symbolized all that is dark and brutal in his nation’s history.

Or, perhaps, the future of the Soviet Union’s once-omnipresent spy agency may have been taken out of Gorbachev’s hands by the coup itself.

Yeltsin, who emerged from the episode with his power greatly increased, has made changes in the KGB a major priority and is likely to push the issue further, Soviet analysts say.

And the crowds streaming past Lubyanka on Thursday left no doubt of their position. “Down with the KGB,” they chanted.

Times Staff Writers Carey Goldberg, Michael Parks and John-Thor Dahlburg in Moscow and Jennifer Toth in Washington contributed to this story.