Bunglers of the Year the Coup Plotters.

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

ONE DIED BY HIS OWN HAND, OR WAS MADE TO LOOK AS though he had. Thirteen more are in prison, most in Remand Center No. 4 in the Moscow suburbs, which has been cleared of common criminals to house only the elite of the Russian underworld -- and the accused plotters of last August's coup. There they await trial on charges of high treason. If found guilty -- and several insist they were innocent dupes -- they could be imprisoned for 10 to 15 years, or put to death. But whatever their eventual fate, one thing is totally clear: the plotters have no rivals for the title of Bunglers of the Year. In fact, not just of the year. If there were such a thing as an Incompetence Olympics held every four years, the Moscow plotters would easily win the gold medal and set a world record that might last as long as Leapin' Bob Beamon's mark in the long jump.

Not just because they failed either. Anyone can fail, even fail abysmally. The special accomplishment of the Moscow plotters was to speed the total destruction of everything they wanted to preserve and ensure the triumph of the trends they most hated and wanted to stop.

They did fail, of course, and farcically, and because of their own blunders. The collapse of the coup was inevitable only because it was so badly planned and halfheartedly carried out: had the plotters acted with half the acumen and ruthlessness of the routine Latin general or African strongman seizing power, they might have succeeded. But some appeared to be more terrified than any of their prospective victims. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Vice President Gennadi Yanayev, the ostensible head (really figurehead) of the so-called Emergency Committee, reportedly spent most of the three days of the coup dead drunk. Though Yanayev pulled himself together long enough to hold a press conference the first night of the coup, he and some other members of the committee looked scared out of their wits.

Some of the conspirators, notably Interior Minister Boris Pugo (the apparent suicide), Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, are said to have begun plotting in December 1990. If so, eight months later they still had not organized the most obvious, and essential, opening moves: arresting, or preferably killing, potential opponents (some supporters of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev operated unmolested from a Kremlin office almost next door to Yanayev's); assuring themselves of the loyalty of military units and then moving them into position to crush resistance speedily (army and KGB units flatly refused to storm the White House, the marble-faced Moscow headquarters of the Russian republic and the center of resistance); and cutting the communications of resistance leaders (George Bush was openly surprised at how easy it was for him to put through a phone call to Russian President Boris Yeltsin). Some of the ringleaders apparently did not even make sure of the cohesion of their own group; they duped others into joining the coup by telling an easily disproved lie, that an ill Gorbachev had authorized them to take over.

No one can say, of course, exactly what would have happened had they never tried their putsch. But quite likely their continued presence in the government would have forced repeated compromises that would have kept a brake on reform and democratization of Soviet society. The new treaty of union the putschists acted to forestall would have been signed and kept at least some of the bigger republics in a union with a weakened but functioning central government. The Communist Party, though declining, might have retained considerable influence.

Instead revulsion against the coup resulted in the downfall of the party and an accelerated move toward complete independence on the part of the Soviet republics. That move has now killed the union completely, forced the resignation of Gorbachev, and has given birth to a Commonwealth of Independent States that is more of an alliance than a nation. To fail so totally as to bring about the exact opposite of what you want -- that calls for more than run-of-the-mill incompetence. It requires a kind of perverse genius that will make the Moscow plotters memorable long after the state they betrayed has faded into history.