PERSPECTIVE ON THE SOVIET UNION : ‘Saviors’ Plot a Return to the Past : Military hard-liners would dismantle <i> perestroika</i> in creeping counterrevolution, not an outright coup.

Several veteran Western Soviet-watchers met in Moscow last fall with a group of leading Soviet public figures, mainly of the liberal persuasion, to discuss models of transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Most of the Russians were far from optimistic. The Soviet Union of 1990 was not comparable with Spain after Franco, when the transition from authoritarianism to freedom had been unexpectedly smooth. Some pointed to the military dictatorship in Poland under Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski in the 1980s. But among the various possibilities discussed, even the most confirmed pessimists did not think of the model that has become the most talked-about in Moscow--that of Chile under Pinochet.

A few days ago Yuri N. Prokofiev, the Moscow Communist Party chief, declared that Chile offered a far better model for the Soviet Union than Western democracies. He was not the first to conjure up this particular form of military dictatorship. In early December, Col. Nikolai A. Petrushenko, one of the central figures in Soyuz, the strongest faction in the Soviet Parliament, elaborated on this theme in a press conference. He suggested the establishment of a committee of national salvation headed by a military man or a civilian enjoying the full confidence of the military.

What was originally a far-fetched idea voiced by some of the wild men of contemporary Soviet politics, the Young Turks of the right, has now acquired respectability.

The fact that Gen. Augusto Pinochet was not known as a Marxist-Leninist, but that, on the contrary, he was loudly denounced as a fascist in the Soviet Union is of no great consequence. Indeed, what does it matter at a time when official organs of the Soviet army publish excerpts from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and the anti-Semitic “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”?

In their public speeches the proponents of national salvation reject the idea of a military coup. They accept the advice given to them by their well-wishers in government and party, that creeping counterrevolution is greatly preferable to a violent, bloody coup. So far the strategy has worked: The main liberals in the leadership have been forced to resign; political liberty and freedom of speech are more and more curtailed; economic reform is virtually discontinued; in foreign policy the Soviet Union is distancing itself more and more from the West.

All this without great fanfare--in fact, the process is only dimly realized in the West, preoccupied as it is with the Gulf crisis. But some of the main tasks have yet to be achieved--the ouster of Boris Yeltsin and his supporters at the helm of the Russian federation, the dissolution of the liberal Moscow and Leningrad city soviets, the suppression of the nationalist forces in the non-Russian republics.

Some of these aims might be achieved more or less peacefully (albeit illegally). In other cases the application of violence, perhaps on a massive scale, will be inevitable; the honeymoon with the West (and the hope for massive economic help) will come to an end.

In his classic study, “The Man on Horseback: the Role of the Military in Politics,” the British historian S.E. Finer noted many years ago that the armed forces have three great political advantages over civilian organizations: a marked superiority in organization, a highly emotionalized symbolic status and a monopoly of arms. But he also stated that they lack moral authority and that they must either rule through civilian cabinets or pretend to be something other than they are.

The Russian colonels agree on keeping the army strong (meaning a higher military budget) and are opposed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They want to turn the clock back as far as political freedom is concerned. But they often disagree on political aims. Some of them would like to reinstate the party bureaucracy and the old Communist social and economic policies, while others believe that the party cannot be revived, that communism is dead and that the only hope now rests in strong, centralized state power, which, as under Pinochet, would supervise the gradual introduction of market forces.

Some are willing to give up the more obstreperous non-Russian regions, others insist on current borders. Some wish to give even greater authority to the political commissars in the armed forces, others would prefer to see them replaced by clerics from the Orthodox Church. Some believe that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the greatest living Russian, a saint and a prophet. Others regard him as the greatest traitor.

Some believe that friendship with Iran and Iraq will be vital in the years to come to keep at bay the Soviet Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Others have misgivings about antagonizing the West beyond a certain point, thus provoking another arms race that the Soviet Union can ill afford.

They agree on the need for order and discipline and the suppression of manifestations of discontent. But what do they have to offer?

Patriotic slogans will not make the workers and peasants work harder; they will certainly not make the minorities love the Russians more ardently. They can bring down Mikhail Gorbachev and stamp out the remnants of glasnost and perestroika . But what then? The prospect of five or 10 more years of stagnation will be difficult to sell to a people who have tasted freedom after many years of repression.

Pinochet has been one of the least lovable political leaders of the 1970s and 1980s. But to his credit, when the Chileans refused to reelect him, he stepped down. Once in power, his Moscow admirers will be reluctant to emulate his example. The Soviet military-industrial complex is infinitely more powerful and will be far more difficult to dislodge than in Chile or Poland.

Perhaps its ascent to power can still be stopped. But who could manage this? Gorbachev has maneuvered himself into a position where he may no longer be able to do so, even if he wanted to.