The New York Times, by Bill Keller

By Bill Keller

ALEKSANDR SIMONOV returned from the war in Afghanistan last summer, tanned and sinewy from carrying his weight in weaponry on mountain patrols.

In the tidy, three-room Moscow apartment he shares with his mother, grandmother and older brother, Simonov keeps two scrapbooks filled with snapshots from his army days. Showing them off to a visitor, he seems nostalgic for the camaraderie of war. Here he is, a boyish, bare-chested soldier striking a Rambo pose with a bazooka slung across his belly; here, lined up with his fellow paratroopers atop an armored personnel carrier; here, in his underwear clowning with comrades at a campsite in the Afghan desert.

''In Afghanistan,'' he declares, ''I learned to love people.''

A little probing, however, turns up less agreeable memories. Once Simonov was caught in a fusillade of rebel dum-dum bullets that exploded against his flak jacket. At the base of his spine, the shrapnel has left a cluster of scars; they look like cigarette burns.

On another occasion, he and his buddies watched an errant rebel rocket hit a local bus, then rushed to pull survivors from the carnage. The 21-year-old soldier tells of trying to separate a baby from its dead mother, and having the tiny body come apart in his hands.

After all this, did Simonov, who is now a law student at Moscow State University, have any trouble readjusting to civilian life? ''The first three months back home were pretty difficult,'' he admitted. ''The air in Afghanistan is pretty rarified. Every night, I dream of war and of my fellow soldiers.'' Then he suddenly turned away, covering his face with his hands and choking back tears.

DURING THE PAST YEAR, as glasnost has slightly lowered the wall of propaganda and secrecy surrounding the war, the hurt that Afghanistan has inflicted on Soviet society has become more evident.

The aches of returning veterans like Simonov are the most visible, but not the only domestic pain caused by eight indecisive years of combat in a hostile country.The analogy often drawn between America in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is glib in general and wrong in many particulars, but in critical respects, the similarity is keen. Wars, especially prolonged foreign wars of questionable purpose, do not confine their damage to the battlefield. They leave physical and emotional scars; they tear at the social fabric; they cast doubt on official policies.

For the Russians, the war in Afghanistan has contributed to drug abuse and draft evasion; it has encouraged a cynical malaise among the young, and among the intellectuals who make up one of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's core constituencies. The Soviet press recently published the complaints of mothers who wonder why the sons of top party officials escaped service in Afghanistan, and who suggest that the war would have been over long ago if the leaders' children were dying there, too.

The mounting domestic discontent - along with the damage Afghanistan has done to Gorbachev's peace-monger image and the sheer intractability of the war - appears to have convinced the Soviet leadership that some form of retreat is inevitable. Although the timetable of a withdrawal of the 120,000 Russian troops and of a cutoff of American arms to the Afghan rebels remains to be negotiated, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, on a visit to Kabul last month, said he hoped to have the troops out by the end of 1988. Soviet officials now say that withdrawal no longer depends on reaching an agreement to leave behind a government in which Moscow's client, the governing People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, plays a leading role. Indeed, talk of withdrawal is now so rampant at home that the Soviet leadership will have a good deal of explaining to do if it does not come off.

But wars, unlike sporting events, are not over when they're over. If the Soviet troops are brought home, there is a real danger that Afghanistan's civil war will continue, that the Afghan Government for which thousands of young Russians died will collapse, and that the Soviet Union will find itself with a self-destructing, chaotic Lebanon on its southern border. This prospect raises questions the Soviet authorities have not yet allowed to be asked in public - questions about the blame for the Afghanistan fiasco, and about the credibility of Soviet power.

PERHAPS ONE MILLION young men from the Soviet Union have served in Afghanistan since the invasion in December 1979.

The Kremlin refuses to divulge the number of dead and wounded, but the State Department's most conservative estimate is 35,000 casualties, more than a third of them deaths. That does not include the many soldiers felled by malaria, jaundice, typhus, dysentary, hepatitis and heatstroke, or stung by scorpions in the eerie desert moonscape of Afghanistan.

The assimilation of Soviet veterans from Afghanistan seems, on the whole, less traumatic than the ordeal of many American veterans of the Vietnam War. But for many Russian youngsters, brought up to glorify the soldiers who fought in what their history calls ''the great patriotic war'' against German fascism, the Afghan adventure has been a disorienting experience.

''You go to war to fight one enemy, and when you get there, there's a real war there and it's difficult to understand who is fighting whom,'' said Aleksandr Simonov.

Because for years the Soviet press minimized the nation's involvement in Afghanistan, portraying the Soviet troops as noncombatant aides to the Afghan Army, veterans have found that their countrymen do not always understand what they went through.

''In 1984, we performed a combat operation in the Kandahar region,'' said Valery Burkov, a 30-year-old Air Force major. ''But later I heard on Soviet radio that it was performed by Afghan troops. Of course, Afghans took part in it, but the ratio was their 10 to our 1,000. . . . There were lots of such cases. Our press distorts reality and weakens people's trust in anything that is said or written.'''

During the past year, a few Soviet writers have been able to report some of the tension and danger, even lunacy, of guerrilla war in a land of dubious loyalties. The accounts do not question the moral superiority of the Soviet troops, and the horror of war is toned down. But beneath the heroic paeans to Soviet soldiers, there is now an unmistakable subtext: It is a nasty business down there.

The most gripping accounts have been written by Artyom Borovik, a young journalist for Ogonyok, a popular weekly magazine. Borovik's stories of war-weary soldiers playing Rod Stewart tapes as they prepare for battle in a strange land, of bewildered troops confronting ambushes and mine fields, bear a striking resemblance to his favorite Vietnam book, Michael Herr's ''Dispatches,'' and they have made him a celebrity among veterans.

At a crowded public meeting sponsored by his magazine in Leningrad not long ago, Borovik says, he recounted the torture of a Russian soldier by the rebels - they allegedly made an incision around the soldier's waist and pulled his skin up over his head like an undershirt. Afterward, one horrified woman whose nephew was fighting in Afghanistan came up to Borovik and implored him not to write about such things. ''Before, it was easy waiting for our boys to return,'' she told him.

Borovik says he set out to portray the horrors of the war in order to combat public indifference toward the sacrifice of Soviet soldiers, and to embarrass officials into giving the veterans better treatment.

Valery Burkov, the airman, whose job was to travel with the infantry and call in air strikes, lost both legs at the knees when he stepped on a land mine in 1984. He now suffers with wretched wooden prostheses from a factory that has not been significantly modernized since it supplied World War II veterans. Wheelchairs and crutches are in short supply. Medical facilities are understaffed and often lack hot water and other basic amenities.

''I was wounded and needed serious medical care,'' recalled Sergei Sokolov, a pilot who was shot down by what he believes was an American-made Redeye missile. ''In the hospitals and clinics, they were interested only in paperwork. I went around in an endless circle.'' While he waited, nursing his wounds, for housing authorities to give him an apartment, he lived with his pregnant wife and child in a house with no indoor toilet or running water.

Some of the veterans, humiliated by their disabilities in a society that tends to hide its invalids, seek refuge in special sanitariums rather than return to their families. Newspapers occasionally print letters from World War II veterans who question whether ''the Afghantsi,'' as the veterans are commonly called, deserve the same advantages they receive, which include priority for scarce housing, a more desirable choice of vacation times, and the right to ride buses free and skip to the head of food and ticket lines. Returning soldiers sometimes encounter citizens who ask about reports of Soviet attacks on innocent Afghan civilians or outright atrocities. These allegations, based on the stories of Soviet defectors, have not been discussed in the official press, but many Soviet citizens have heard them on Voice of America and other Western radio broadcasts.

''We are not sadists,'' Valery Burkov said, denying these allegations. ''There were cases when we were provoked. Once the dushmani [ the rebels ] opened fire on us and we fired back, but it turned out there were only five dushmani and the rest were peaceful inhabitants. They suffered a lot, but it was not our fault.''

Though no studies have been published to indicate the extent of the problem, it is believed that many Afghantsi turn to alcohol, and some to hashish, opium or even heroin to kill the nightmares that haunt them. ''Poppy is everywhere in Afghanistan,'' said one recently returned Soviet officer interviewed in Dushanbe. ''It's not forbidden there, and, well, some of our guys develop an easygoing attitude toward drugs.''

Afghantsi have been blamed for beatings, rapes and drunken rampages in some cities, and for vigilante-style attacks on hippies and other youngsters who do not conform to their standards of patriotic behavior.

''They return from Afghanistan just like jets taking off,'' said Borovik, the journalist. ''They want to remake society, to make it work maybe more like the army works. But many of them got accustomed to solving problems with Kalashnikov rifles or with fists.

''They have an allergy to bureaucracy. An invalid visits 10 places to get a card saying he is an invalid. Prosthetics are bad, terrible; they make the legs bleed. The doctor says, 'So what? I didn't tell you to go to Afghanistan.'

''We have to make our society understand that we did send these people to Afghanistan, and to think about how to re-integrate them into society. Otherwise, they may be a lost generation.''

ONE OF THE FEW Soviet cities that has built a monument to honor a local hero of the Aghanistan war is Dushanbe, in the Soviet Republic of Tadzhikistan. Dushanbe is a city of squat, modern cement buildings ringed by the soaring Pamir mountains, and inhabited by a polyglot population of Tadzhiks, Uzbeks and Russians. From Dushanbe it is 75 heavily guarded miles to the Pyandzh River, across which rise the mountains of northern Afghanistan.

When I visited the city last month, officials took me to visit the former Grade School 37, which has been renamed for former student Aleksandr Mironenko. In 1980, Mironen-ko, so the story goes, was surrounded by an Afghan rebel band and rather than surrender pulled the pin on a hand grenade, killing himself and his captors. Each year, on the first day of school, Mironenko is eulogized, and last September, across the street from the school, the city installed a bust of the young soldier, inscribed with only his name.

In Dushanbe, there are few other outward signs of the war, but there is much evidence of Afghanistan. Because the Tadzhik language closely resembles the Farsi widely spoken in Afghanistan, many of the Afghan youngsters who have been brought to the Soviet Union for schooling and indoctrination came here - about 1,700 are studying in Dushanbe schools now, a local official said. There is an active border trade, which includes the legal exchange of Soviet consumer goods for Afghan oranges and olive oil, and a great deal of smuggling. Many Tadzhiks have relatives living in Afghanistan.

''Sometimes when we were in the kishlaks, the native villages, I forgot that I was in Afghanistan,'' said Mansour Sadykov, a Tadzhik from the town of Pyandzh who served as a commando in Afghanistan. ''I felt that I was at home.''

If the troops are pulled out, officials in Dushanbe say, Tadzhikistan will be an important way station for the increased trade and development projects Soviet authorities believe will be necessary to keep their hand in Afghan affairs. It will also be the first place to feel the spillover of whatever chaos is left behind.

Like Afghanistan, the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union are predominantly Islamic. Each night, Pakistan beams radio broadcasts to Soviet Central Asia that condemn Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and call for Islamic solidarity. Although the Communist Party has battled the influence of Islam at home with apparent success, local officials must look with discomfort on the prospect of Islamic fundamentalists - who are among the most zealous of Afghanistan's rebels -someday seizing control in Kabul.

In December, Dushanbe's Communist Party newspaper published a speech by the official who heads the Tadzhikistan K.G.B., which is responsible for maintaining security along the mountainous, 1,000-mile Afghan border. The K.G.B. chief charged that Moslem ''prejudices,'' encouraged by neighboring Islamic countries, had led to an acute draft-evasion problem in the Soviet border provinces, sometimes with the acquiescence of local party officials. He warned that Afghan rebels ''are stepping up their activity in provinces bordering on the U.S.S.R. The enemy is trying to transfer armed forms of struggle to Soviet territory.''

Last March, the rebels fired a rocket into a matchstick factory in Pyandzh; in April, a rebel band crossed the border and killed two Soviet border guards. More recently, the Afghan rebels have been lobbing rockets into Soviet territory, which is common knowledge in Dushanbe, though unreported in the press.

Among soldiers who have served in Afghanistan, a common rationalization for the invasion is that if the Soviet Union had not stepped in, the United States would have -if not with military force, at least with eavesdropping installations. ''The border is very long and it's difficult to close it because of the mountains,'' explained Aleksandr Simonov. ''The C.I.A. would be a great threat. And if they deployed missiles there, I think that would be the end of everything.''

One likely condition of a Soviet withdrawal would be a pledge by both superpowers to observe Afghanistan's neutrality, so Simonov's fears seem unlikely to be borne out. What is interesting, though, is that the kind of withdrawal Soviet officials now seem to be contemplating could undermine the carefully constructed rationalizations for which thousands of young men have died.

Simonov, like many veterans, has doubts about his Government's apparent determination to withdraw the troops. ''I don't think they should be pulled out, because then the throat-cutting will really begin,'' he said. ''There will be a sea of blood and fights all over the country between the different Afghan groups. At this stage, it's not the right time. When it's calm there, O.K. Each soldier will leave Afghanistan with pleasure.'' FOR A LARGE PART of the population, the rationalizations for the occupation of Afghanistan have already unraveled. The depth of feeling against the war was evident one evening last November when hundreds of Muscovites packed the modern auditorium at the Moscow House of Film for a public meeting sponsored by Borovik's magazine.

Ogonyok regularly sponsors such ''evenings'' in theaters or small concert halls around the country, and they are a peculiar form of public therapy. The program usually begins with a lecture, a poetry reading, perhaps some songs. The audience passes forward slips of paper containing general questions or comments. The tamer questions are read aloud and discussed by the magazine's onstage panel, which usually includes journalists, cultural figures and other guests; the rest are filed away by the magazine as an informal measure of the public temper.

On this occasion, Borovik talked about his impressions from covering the war; Valery Burkov, the veteran, played the guitar and sang ballads about death in Afghanistan. In the blizzard of notes passed hand-to-hand to the stage, the angriest concerned the war. Here are a few that were not read aloud:

''Why don't you just come out and say that we don't need to fight in Afghanistan, that we don't need these heroes, these wounded, these homes for the crippled?''

''Don't you understand that until you call a dirty war a dirty war, any attempts to glorify this hopeless affair are in vain? You are only feeding the flame of tragedy.''

''The main question about Afghanistan is not the truth about the horrors and the deaths, but why are we there?''

And this one, scribbled on a ticket stub, with the seat number judiciously blacked out: ''Remember Vietnam!''

In a poll conducted by French and Soviet pollsters last October - the first published survey to touch on the question - more than half of the Soviet respondents said they favored a complete withdrawal of troops. The sentiment was much stronger among Russians aged 45 to 54, the generation of parents whose sons are eligible for conscription.

''In the first years of the war, our action seemed quite justified to the majority of people,'' said Gennadi S. Batygin, a sociologist and editor of the magazine Sociological Research. ''It was common to hear such phrases as 'internationalist duty' and 'the interference of imperialism.' But in the past two years, the society has become a more open one, and that opened the eyes of a lot of people to the war. Not in the sense that we know more about it, but that we now face a diversification of opinion.''

''Those who take the trouble of thinking about it consider the war to be our most important problem today,'' continued Batygin, stroking his goatee. ''I agree with that view. All the rest - economic reform and so forth - is secondary to the war. I'm sure that if the war stops, we shall remove the largest obstacle standing in the way of perestroika [ restructuring ] . Our society cannot be open as long as the Afghan problem exists.'' ''I do not want to pass judgment on who is to be blamed,'' he added. ''But I know it should be stopped. We must take all possible measures to stop it. Any compromises are permissible.''

Batygin clearly speaks for a large portion of the educated Soviet public, and particularly for intellectuals. But the eagerness to be out of Afghanistan is tempered by a pessimism about what happens afterward, as a survey of young Russians, conducted for this article by the youth department of the official Novosti press agency, confirms.

Only a little more than half of those questioned said they considered the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan to have been justified -a remarkable ambivalence about a war Soviet officials have been trying to justify for eight years. Yet almost half said the troops should not be withdrawn until a stable, neutral government can be left behind. More than a third of those queried - 37 percent -agreed that ''if the Soviet Union withdraws its troops, then a bloodbath may begin in Afghanistan,'' and less than a third (31 percent) disagreed. An overwhelming 65 percent agreed that ''the Western powers want to establish control over Afghanistan in order to use it as a base against the Soviet Union.''

Although the sample size (300 people) and the polling methods (a questionnaire distributed at Moscow schools and workplaces) leave a large margin for error, the results are consistent with those found in interviews for this article.

It seems that eight years of war and eight years of propaganda have succeeded in giving the Soviet public a sense that they have something important to lose in Afghanistan.

DURING THE PAST few months, Soviet authorities have set out to contain the domestic impact of the war.

Last November, more than 2,000 military reservists, most of them Afghantsi dressed in their battle fatigues, converged on Ashkhabad, the capital of the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenia. Komsomol, the youth arm of the Communist Party, had organized the meeting in an attempt to assert control over independent Afghantsi organizations that had grown up spontaneously around the country, and to channel them in directions the party considers constructive. Most of the veterans' groups had been innocent enough, meeting to swap war stories, provide moral and financial support for war widows, teach karate and boxing to students approaching draft age, and raise money to build monuments to fallen soldiers. But the groups were an embarrassment and a potential rival to Komsomol, which had virtually ignored the veterans.

Between sharpshooting matches and jeep-driving contests arranged for their entertainment, the former soldiers debated the merits of making their groups Komsomol adjuncts. Many soldiers felt it would mean endless bureaucracy and dilute their purpose. But in the end, Komsomol won over a majority of the veterans with offers of financial assistance and promises that the Afghantsi would have greater influence over policies governing veterans' benefits and training of future soldiers.

The council of military reservists created in Ashkhabad is governed by a 50-member steering committee consisting entirely of Komsomol and Communist Party members. By definition, veterans groups that choose to remain independent - and some have done so - are now outlaws. The documents published in the Komsomol press after the Ashkhabad conference downplayed the war, making no mention of the acute problems of disabled veterans or of the veterans' wish for a national memorial honoring their sacrifice, and focused instead on the need to cultivate patriotic thinking and physical fitness in Soviet youth.

In Moscow, Ashkhabad and Dushanbe, Komsomol organized meetings for me with veterans active in the new organization. Under the watchful eye of Komsomol choirmasters, Afghantsi in three-piece suits told me about the deep love of the Afghan people for the Soviet Union, the impressive fighting ability of the Afghan soldiers, the certainty that the rebels fight only because they are paid to do so, and the likelihood of peace after the troops withdraw. Their accounts of fraternal Soviet soldiers building public baths in the Afghan kishlaks and teaching Afghans to read reminded me of Borovik's description of the rosy press accounts in the early days of the war: ''They gave the impression that Soviet soldiers were down there planting flowers.''

The Komsomol-run group has opened a bank account that will be used to build two national memorials, one in Moscow and one in Tashkent. The memorials will not explicitly commemorate Afghanistan, however, but will honor all Soviet soldiers who ''fulfilled their internationalist duty'' in foreign campaigns, including those who fought in the Spanish Civil War, aided the Cuban Revolution, or helped quash the 1968 ''Prague Spring'' in Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the plan to build these memorials has not been widely publicized. There is still a powerful official hesitation about dealing directly with the consequences of the war.

The Soviet authorities, exercising their tremendous power to shape public opinion, have begun to lay the psychological groundwork for withdrawal. The reporting this winter on a major military offensive to reopen supply lines to the besieged city of Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, portrayed the Afghan Army as a fighting force that can stand on its own, a judgment that makes returning veterans laugh derisively. (In fact, as Western correspondents who visited Khost in January were told, Soviet firepower dominated the battle there, and even so the hold on the city was tenuous.) The press has stopped referring to the Kabul Government as Socialist, subtly suggesting that withdrawal would not violate Moscow's obligation to defend fraternal Socialist states. The stature of Najibullah, the Soviet-backed Afghan leader, seems diminished, leading some Western analysts to believe he is being set up as the scapegoat if Afghanistan falls to pieces after Soviet troops depart.

Lately, Soviet officials have also come close to admitting that the decision to invade Afghanistan was a political mistake, the product of ''the old way of thinking'' under former party leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.

''If you take the, let's say, democratically thinking intellectuals, they believe the war was a mistake, and I think this opinion will dominate when the war is over,'' Batygin, the sociologist, said. ''One can say that Brezhnev is to blame for it. That will comfort many people, although of course the reality is more complicated.''

But if the Soviet Union cannot even leave behind a stable neighbor, let alone some assurance of a congenial one; if the retreat is even thought to leave the Soviet Union at some risk, then the Afghanistan adventure cannot be so easily dismissed as the foreign policy blunder of Leonid Brezhnev. Then it becomes harder to escape certain questions: Who ''lost'' Afghanistan? What will be the impact of such a defeat on a government whose legitimacy rests so heavily on the invincibility of the Red Army? What will be the reaction of client states like Nicaragua, Cuba and Ethiopia? And how would the collapse of Afghanistan sit with the Soviet military, which even now seems less enthusiastic about withdrawal than the foreign ministry?

After his return from Kabul, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze was asked whether Afghanistan had raised doubts among Russians about the uses of Soviet power abroad. ''That's a very difficult question,'' he replied pensively. ''We could discuss it until the early morning hours.''

''The invincibility of Soviet power is the last great myth of our system,'' one young Moscow intellectual mused recently. ''We can accept sacrifice if we see a result, but we are psychologically unprepared to deal with the idea that we fought for nothing. That's why the real problem of Afghanistan will emerge after it's over.''

By Bill Keller

MOSCOW, June 17— When local newspapers announced the names of Moscow delegates to the coming national Communist Party conference, many residents of the Kirov district were distressed to learn that one of the Communists representing them would be Anatoly S. Ivanov, a conservative editor.

The other day they told him so, in a cathartic two-hour hectoring at the Znamya factory club that left the portly Mr. Ivanov mopping his brow and, perhaps, puzzling over this strange new contact sport they call democracy.

'Torturing the Man'

''Comrades, you are just torturing the man,'' a woman in the fifth row finally implored in Mr. Ivanov's behalf, as the public interrogated its delegate on his views of politics and literature, prices and permissiveness, party secrecy and especially, relentlessly, the specter of history.

Citizens' meetings have traditionally been one of the soporific duties of membership in Soviet society. Under glasnost, and especially with the approach of a party conference dedicated to the general proposition of greater democracy, they have become a chance to exercise new-found vocal cords.

On the Spot

But few of the 5,000 delegates to the conference this month have been quite so put upon as Mr. Ivanov, a man vilified by the perestroika vanguard as a remnant of the disreputable past.

He is the chief editor of Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), a Communist Youth League monthly that, against the grain of glasnost, still appeals to the popular nostalgia for patriotic verities.

''Molodaya Gvardiya is an anti-perestroika magazine,'' declared Otto R. Latsis, deputy editor of the authoritative party magazine Kommunist. Mr. Latsis is also a conference delegate and a prominent partisan of perestroika, as Mikhail S. Gorbachev calls his campaign to remake Soviet society.

Ogonyok, the adventuresome weekly magazine, asserted that Mr. Ivanov had been foisted on the residents of the Kirov district in a secretive and anti-democratic cabal, a charge the audience was fully prepared to believe.

Mr. Ivanov responded that much the same could be said of Ogonyok's editor, Vitaly A. Korotich, who is a delegate from a city in the Ukraine where he no longer lives.

However he was chosen, Mr. Ivanov speaks for a significant category of Soviet citizens - he might call them the silenced majority - who are offended at seeing their history so mercilessly raked over by an aggressive press.

That, Mr. Ivanov said from the stage of the factory club Wednesday afternoon, would be his message to the party conference.

''I am not against change,'' the delegate said. ''I am against the blackening of our history. I am the enemy of all these distortions.''

''You said that you are against the blackening of our history!'' a middle-aged woman shouted a bit later. ''But maybe the fact is that our history is really black?''

''No, dear friends, if it was really black we would not have accomplished the great things - collectivization, industrialization. There were many good, beautiful things in our history.''

''So, concretely, what do you mean by the blackening of history?'' someone else pressed.

''When somebody says we built the wrong kind of socialism, or that we paid too high a price to build socialism and that we have nothing to be proud of, how can they say such things?'' Stalin's Other Side

''But Stalin killed millions of people!'' came an angry cry from the balcony. ''Millions were killed!''

''Correct,'' Mr. Ivanov conceded. ''But we don't praise Stalin for killing millions of people. The party has condemned his mistakes and crimes. At the same time, I think that this man was not just a one-sided figure, as people write so often these days.''

Sometimes the questions were passed to the stage on slips of paper, sometimes yelled out from the crowd of about 150, most of whom appeared to be workers from nearby factories and offices, but some of whom evidently came from the editorial staffs of rival magazines to beleaguer Molodaya Gvardiya's chief.

What about the xenophobic Russian nationalist group Pamyat, whose views sometimes find their way into his magazine, Mr. Ivanov was asked. (In the past it showed unhealthy anti-Semitic tendencies, he explained, but ''Now it is being cleaned of extremist leaders.'') As a member of the national legislature representing Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan, could Mr. Ivanov claim he knew nothing about the vast official corruption in Uzbekistan that is now being exposed in the Soviet press? (That was before his time.) Why is a 59-year-old man editing a youth magazine, anyway? (''I am near retirement. Don't worry.'') Challenge on Literary Scandal Mr. Ivanov was challenged hard for his role in one of the unforgiven literary scandals of the Brezhnev years, the purge of the pioneering editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky. In 1969 Mr. Ivanov signed a famous public letter condemning the liberal works published in Mr. Tvardovsky's journal, Novy Mir.

''We did not decide the fate of Novy Mir,'' Mr. Ivanov retorted defensively. ''We wrote about the tendency to replace our ideological values with lies.''

On economic issues, Mr. Ivanov was scornful of the views of the market-oriented economists who advise Mr. Gorbachev. The proliferation of free enterprise, he said, has ''opened the hatches'' for shameless money-grubbing. Private businesses should have their prices controlled, he said.

The delegate got his one round of applause when he took his populist bat to the notion - Mr. Gorbachev's notion, by the way - that state price subsidies should be phased out.

''I react negatively, negatively, my dear friends,'' the delegate said, relishing a moment of solidarity with the audience. ''I am not an economist, but as a simple citizen my attitude is negative. I don't understand why it is not possible to cut prices and increase the quality of goods.''

Afterward Mr. Ivanov mingled with a few residents, then turned his back brusquely on an American reporter and escaped from the griddle of democracy in his black Volga sedan.

Konstantin Ivanov, a 63-year-old worker from a nearby auto repair shop, shook his head in awe at the spectacle he had witnessed.

''You know,'' he said with a broad grin, ''after such a meeting in the Stalin period, half of them would have gone. . . . '' He whistled in the direction of Siberia.

By Bill Keller

ILYICHEVSK, U.S.S.R.— Mikhail S. Gorbachev's new economic reality visited this Black Sea port city last year, passing like an unexpected tremor through the rock-stable lives of longshoremen, crane operators, mechanics and clerks.

Early in the year port executives informed the workers that, in keeping with the new drive for profit and efficiency, 634 of them would be laid off or retrained for different jobs, or pushed into retirement.

Anxious rumbles swept through this city not far from Odessa. So this was the bright future Mr. Gorbachev calls perestroika, or restructuring. No vodka, no meat, and now, no jobs. 'It Was a Shock, Really'

''It was so unexpected,'' said Mikhail Matiyets, a truck driver, who took a pay cut. ''It was a shock, really.''

Serafima Gorozhankina, a technical librarian who found her library organized out of existence, said: ''Everybody was afraid. Nobody knew who would be on the list.''

The port personnel director, Pyotr G. Sibalo, recounting the anxieties of a work force raised to think of the employer as a lenient parent, said, ''In some cases I was close to tears myself.''

But in the end, what many feared would be a painful upheaval was almost an anticlimax. For this was a Soviet-style layoff, in which cold-blooded economic sense gave way to the realities of a longstanding social contract.

Everyone Got Another Job

Everyone displaced was offered another job, with no loss of benefits. The few workers who complained about their new places were given jobs more to their liking. Yulian Serebrisky, offended at losing his job as a mechanic, sued in the local court to get his place back, and won. The workers who stayed in their old jobs were given new promises of job security.

Profit took a back seat to labor peace: for every ruble the port saved by the cutbacks, it spent four rubles on generous pay raises designed to keep the work force contented.

Mr. Gorbachev's economists tell him that if he is to lift this backward country to a modern standard of living and make it competitive in the world, the Soviet Union will have to begin loosening the safety net of cheap prices, job guarantees and cradle-to-grave entitlements that stifle initiative. Breaking 70-Year Habit

In principle, Mr. Gorbachev agrees. He argues that people should be rewarded for their work and for their initiative, not for simply showing up - and that society should not coddle those who refuse to pull their weight.

But the ruthlessness of the marketplace violates the sense of justice and equality reinforced by 70 years of Soviet rule.

Perhaps more than any of the obstacles looming before Mr. Gorbachev - the intractable bureaucracy, the degraded state of technology, the legions of managers who have never been taught to manage, the legacy of corruption, the entrenched interests of those who have privileges and cling to them - it is this social contract that presents the most serious challenge.

The Soviet people expect, as a matter of basic right, something most economists believe is impossible: that perestroika should bring them a better life without risk, without discomfort.

The Soviet economy is run along the lines of an Appalachian coal company town. The company - in this case the state - is the source from which all material blessings flow. That is critical to understanding why ordinary citizens find Mr. Gorbachev's program so disturbing.

In Ilyichevsk, a city thrown up haphazardly around a new cargo port in the 1950's, the company is the Ministry of the Merchant Marine Fleet, known as Morflot. Those who do not work for the port itself work for something related - the maritime technical school, the ship repair yard, the electronics plant built to provide jobs for port wives.

Because of the imported goods the sailors bring in, and because of the gentle Black Sea climate, life is somewhat better than in other places. It is immeasurably better than the grinding poverty of most of the nation's villages, where it is still common to find housing - and even hospitals - without hot water. But the average American would find little to envy in the living standards of Ilyichevsk's 70,000 residents.

All Things Flow From State: In Good Time, of Course

As in much of the country, newcomers must wait 10 to 15 years for a separate apartment. In the meantime they live in shabby hostels where single workers double up and share communal kitchens and showers, and a family of five occupies a 10-by-15 room.

Meat and fruit are scarce, except in the unregulated farmers' markets, where a chicken or a slab of stewing beef costs several times the official price, and where a precious lemon sells for up to $5 in late spring.

Perestroika has done little so far to brighten the life of consumers. The latest national economic report, for the first quarter of 1988, is a litany of shortages: meat, dairy products, shoes, clothing - even that bulwark of the Soviet diet, potatoes.

Ilyichevsk has one of the new cooperative cafes that have sprung up under recent laws permitting private enterprise, and there are several more in nearby Odessa, but ''you know what the prices are in those places,'' said Lyudmila Matiyets, a warehouse clerk, who has enough trouble keeping two growing daughters in clothes.

But if life in Ilyichevsk is not luxurious, it is at least heavily subsidized and relatively secure, assuring most residents a basic level of comfort with little regard for an individual's talent or effort. The necessities of life are provided as perks accumulated on the job.

Serafima Gorozhankina, who has worked at the port for 25 of her 53 years, recited the benefits that have accrued to her and her husband, a seaman, as a result of this system.

Their apartment, two cozy rooms in the port complex, takes only 27 rubles of their monthly 350 rubles in combined income, including rent, all utilities, and a telephone. The apartment is small, but it is theirs for life unless they move away.

The couple's basic medical care in the port clinic is free, as are the nursery schools and kindergartens their son and daughter attended. They can ride to work on port buses -transportation throughout the country is heavily subsidized - and vacation in port-owned homes or on travel vouchers provided at discount prices by their trade union.

When Mrs. Gorozhankina needed a new refrigerator, she borrowed 300 rubles from the port, interest-free. When the state stores are empty of meat and fish, she can often buy a chicken or piece of fish through the port cafeteria, ''not the fish I would like, but fish all the same.'' Soon she will have a garden plot to grow her own vegetables - another perk from the port.

''There are little things you are so accustomed to you don't even notice them,'' she said. For example, she subscribes to all her newspapers and magazines through the port, because that way she can pay on the installment plan.

The port plays an almost parental role in the life of its workers.

If Mrs. Gorozhankina, who has traveled to Bulgaria and Rumania, wants to go abroad again, it is the Communist Party committee at her workplace that certifies she is trustworthy to be let out of the country.

''If they agree that I have no reprimands, that I don't drink and that I am a good mother, then I can go,'' she said.

''You see why we were so concerned'' when word of the layoffs spread last year, Mrs. Gorozhkina added, as she poured cups of strong tea for visitors. ''We receive practically everything from the port.''

Pavlov Revisited: Money For Work, Not for Blue Eyes

In such a system, more money is not necessarily the key to a dramatically higher standard of living. It cannot usually buy a better apartment - only patience or privilege can bring better housing.

It cannot buy a car, because there are not enough cars to go around. The Government newspaper Izvestia reported last year that if the shortage of cars were suddenly eliminated, a million people in the Russian republic alone would turn up at sales outlets ready to pay cash. The right to buy a car, like housing, is bestowed on workers as a reward for patience or a senior position.

Money is, to be sure, an essential lubricant in the Soviet system of bribery and ''blat,'' or pull. A hospital patient expects to pay the nurse a few rubles for an extra blanket, and someone languishing on an apartment waiting list may advance his position with a well-placed gift.

But for most workers, what counts is not so much a higher paycheck as staying put and hanging on.

This is the boat Mr. Gorbachev has started to rock.

Mr. Gorbachev's strategy is to reduce the subsidies and perks, while giving people more money and more good things to spend it on. In time, he hopes, people will begin to understand the connection between harder work and a better quality of life.

One approach is to reorganize the pay system in each workplace so the eager worker is not limited by arbitrary wage norms set by a ministry in Moscow and the lazy worker pays a price.

Some workers clearly relish the new opportunity, but many are wary.

As Stanislav S. Mikhailyuk, the Ilyichevsk port director, says, they are still accustomed to the old system, by which ''we paid people, to a certain extent, for their blue eyes.''

''The hardest thing of all is to make changes in the head,'' he said, ''to teach people that there is a difference between receiving money and earning it.''

When Soviet officials talk of tampering with this system of entitlements, they risk the charge that they are straying from basic socialist doctrine. In Soviet parlance, the phrase ''human rights'' does not mean freedom of speech or emigration; it means guarantees of housing, job security, medical care and so forth.

During a meeting with port officials, Boris Kondratsky, a young official of the local county executive committee, raised an obvious question: how can a worker really learn the value of a ruble when most of his necessities are seen as gifts bestowed by the state?

''True, to a certain extent it spoils people,'' the port director replied. ''But it's also one of our advantages,'' allowing the port to hold on to good workers.

But suppose, Mr. Kondratsky suggested, that the worker got more cash in his pocket, and had to pay the real value of his housing, his medical care, his children's kindergarten?

''Then it would be not socialism, but capitalism,'' the director replied without hesitation.

The reluctance to take on greater risk and responsibility is compounded by a widespread suspicion, reinforced by decades of unfulfilled promises, that things will not really get better after they get worse.

Perhaps when Mr. Gorbachev talks of the illogic of price controls - where bread is so cheap, he says, you sometimes see children using a loaf as a football - people get his point. But when he vows that ending subsidies will be painless, because everyone will get compensatory pay increases, they are skeptical. They already see prices creeping up as a result of a partial deregulation of farming.

Mr. Gorbachev's initial calls last year for ''radical price reform'' caused a panicky public reaction, hoarding and anxious letters to the press, so the Soviet leader agreed that state controls on consumer prices would not be lifted before 1990, despite the advice of his economists that price controls hamper other aspects of his economic program.

Specter of Unemployment: It's Not Nice to Be a Parasite

Nothing frightens Soviet workers quite so much as the specter of unemployment, and not just because it means being cut off from a reliable source of material benefits. This is, after all, a country where the best-selling newspaper is called ''work,'' where a job is not only guaranteed by law but required, where someone without work is officially a ''parasite.''

Soviet officials insist that unemployment on any significant scale is not an immediate danger in the Soviet Union.

The country has a chronic manpower shortage exaggerated by the vicious cycle of the welfare state: workers have had little reason to exert themselves because they could not be dismissed, so that factories needed more workers to do the same job, so that even lazy workers became indispensable, encouraging them to perform badly.

Even if the average Soviet worker began to produce at Western levels, the country has many underutilized factories that could be run on two or three shifts, many working women who would be happier to stay home and tend their children, and a desperate need for people to provide basic services.

But repairing the Soviet economy will require massive dislocations. Soviet economists predict that 16 million people will have to be relocated or retrained by the year 2000, as the country tries to trim the fat from its factory work forces and create a service industry.

At Ilyichevsk, the layoffs last year entailed a six-month process of meetings, job placement, hand-holding and negotiations.

Port officials prepared the lists of which sections must be cut, and sent them to meetings of the ''worker collectives'' at each division of the port, where the workers themselves were told to chose who would go and who would stay.

The Unemployment Shuffle: Musical Chairs, Soviet Style

For the most part, the layoff was carried out according to the rules of the social contract, keeping the people who needed the jobs, not the people the company needed most.

''In our collective, first they took into account who has enough money, who is better off,'' recalled Fyodor Lobadrov, 63, who worked as a tallyman keeping track of cargo on the docks. ''Second, those of pension age were asked to go. If a person had only a year or two until pension, of course he stayed. If someone had two or three chiidren, he stayed. Or if a person could not learn another trade he stayed.''

A third of the tallymen had to be eliminated, so Mr. Lobadrov took a less demanding job supervising a boiler room.

Some workers say the cutbacks gave the remaining workers a new attitude toward their jobs, at least for now. The pay increases, workers say, had much less to do with this than the whiff of expendability.

''You can feel it,'' Mrs. Gorozhankina said. ''People are more diligent in their jobs and they don't try to evade work. Maybe people are more afraid, afraid they will be fired if another cutback happens.''

This disturbs Nikolai M. Grishin, the director's assistant, who feels people should be working better not out of fear but out of a sense that it will bring them a better life. At Ilyichevsk, he said, the jury is still out on this fundamental question.

''People are still thinking about whether it is advantageous to work harder,'' he conceded, adding, ''When they develop a taste for money, perhaps that will be a decisive factor.''

Since the layoffs at Ilyichevsk, employers have been given somewhat greater freedom, under new economic laws, to lay off unneeded workers. Job training and placement centers are being upgraded, and laid-off workers are being encouraged to look for work in cooperatives or other private business ventures.

So far the new thinking has produced widespread anxiety, but little real change in the economic landscape.

In Moscow, for example, thousands of workers have been laid off as government ministries were abolished or merged in a shuffle intended to break the bureaucratic habits of an economy dictated from Moscow.

At the recently dismembered Ministry of Machine-Building for light and food industries and household appliances, which supervised the production of machines for food processing and other consumer industries, the corridors are dim and ghostly as the last workers clean out their desks.

Where have the 495 workers gone? How are they coping with the adjustment to less prestigious jobs, or to life away from the cultural and material attractions of Moscow?

''No one was forced to leave Moscow,'' said Anatoly M. Yershov, a Deputy Minister and chairman of the liquidation committee, in an interview at the office he will occupy for a few more weeks. ''We cannot just tell a person he has to move. Nothing like that has happened.''

In fact, most of the workers were simply, as one Moscow newspaper put it, ''shifted from one armchair to another,'' shuffled to other Government offices, or to the administrations of Moscow industrial enterprises and research institutes previously overseen by the abolished ministry.

This attitude has slowed the growth of private business, which is a critical component of Mr. Gorbachev's economic strategy. Private business is supposed to quickly satisfy the public craving for better goods and services, while providing employment for many of the surplus workers in industry.

Private enterprise now employs some 400,000 people, according to the State Committee on Statistics, including those who moonlight doing repairs and driving taxis, and those who work in cooperative cafes, construction companies, beauty parlors and other businesses.

The new law has already spawned a small, energetic entrepreneurial class, mostly young people who have the appetite for Western-quality consumer goods and some exposure to Western ideas of commerce.

Here, too, economic change runs up against a prodigious sense of fair play.

In the Soviet Union, Horatio Alger would be called a ''money-grubber,'' Donald J. Trump a ''speculator.'' Americans believe the early bird gets the worm. Russians say the sunflower that grows tallest is the first to have its head lopped off.

Those who venture into private business recall from their history books the last great Soviet experiment of this kind, the so-called New Economic Policy that began in 1921, legalizing private trade. By the end of the decade, the private traders had been crushed, many of the ''nepmen'' arrested and put on trains for Siberia, often with the enthusiastic support of a public who despised the nepmen even as they patronized their shops.

Today the Soviet leadership is beginning to portray NEP in a more favorable light, but the basic bias against the ''money-grubber'' remains, evident in letters to the press and the complaints and personal slights often directed at new entrepreneurs.

''Some people don't understand,'' said Konstantin Kadtsi, who converted a warehouse in Odessa into a cafe offering cherry dumplings and Western videos. ''Some people are very cautious. Some people are unhappy about the higher prices. Some expect real magic. It's not part of our everyday life yet.'' 'Working Like a Dog' Gives Way to Old Lethargy

''The most serious obstacle to the cooperative movement is not bureaucratic, it is psychological,'' said Vladimir Y. Yakovlev, a 28-year-old former journalist who runs Moscow's only consulting service for new entrepreneurs.

''A person starts working in a cooperative, and at first he works like a dog,'' Mr. Yakovlev said. ''Because he's begun to make a lot of money, he works very hard - for the first two months. Then he gets used to the money, and automatically starts trying to work as little as he would in a state enterprise.

''The person is used to the idea that there's this enormous state, in which he is just a tiny cog, and the state pays for his every step, his trips, his health care and so on. And bankruptcy, or millions in profits - that's not his concern, that's the concern of the state.''

A few blocks away from Mr. Kadtsi's cafe, Arkady and Tatyana Sakhnevich have found another niche in the new economic thinking. Under a contract with the state, the family operates a simple grocery store.

The store is unassuming, offering only a half dozen kinds of vegetables and a small fruit juice bar. But on closer inspection it is a step up from ordinary state stores.

The produce is picked clean of rotten leaves and scrubbed. Customers can pick out their own and weigh it on electronic scales to avoid cheating. The sales clerks smile and say good day, which is enough to draw doubletakes in any Soviet enterprise. Prices are set daily according to quality and demand, and while they are a bit higher than state stores they fall well below the farmers' markets.

The Sakhneviches, a cheerful and industrious couple who employ much of their family in the shop, say customers are enthusiastic. And yet, many react as if this family venture had fallen to earth from another planet. They scratch their heads at the sight of the store director unloading trucks or clerks scrubbing the floor.

''Yes, there are some people who envy, who do not understand, who try to interfere,'' said 77-year-old Arkady Shvarts, a family friend who serves as a consultant to the store. ''There are some suppliers who try to make trouble.''

The family is convinced, however, that a proliferation of private ventures will bring down prices and win converts. A recent poll by Leningrad sociologists found that in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, which has one of the largest concentrations of cooperatives, popular approval is much higher than in Leningrad, where cooperatives are few. Younger people support them more than the older generation by a wide margin.

The people who have ventured into this alien world so far are hopeful. Mr. Shvarts, who lived through the New Economic Policy, says this time it will be different because customers are fed up with the old way of doing business.

He has heard all the talk about the intractability of the Soviet system, the pampered Russian worker, but when he runs up against a farm director who refuses to sell his vegetables to a small businessman, or hires a 20-year-old worker who quits after a few days of washing potatoes because it smacks of real work, he thinks of the famed Russian circus trainer, Vladimir Durov.

''If Durov can teach bears to dance,'' he said with an impish laugh, ''why can't we learn perestroika?''

By Bill Keller

MAGNITOGORSK, U.S.S.R.— Day and night, the smokestacks of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Kombinat heave their plumes of orange, black and white into the perpetually hazy sky.

This sight once inspired Soviet poets to pen heroic couplets about the city -''Eternal city! Iron city!'' - built in the first fever of Stalin's industrialization campaign and still reckoned the world's largest steel producer in the days of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

Today Stalin's city of steel is Mr. Gorbachev's heritage, a decrepit giant coughing its poisons into the air of the Ural Mountains and defying the economic good intentions of perestroika.

Here in the Russian rust belt, a visitor fresh from the heady political circus of Moscow finds a sobering dose of the realities Mr. Gorbachev is up against in his attempts to revive the torpid Soviet economy.

To be sure, Mr. Gorbachev's policies have meant startling changes for this working-class city of 430,000.

The city newspaper has grown bolder, writing about fatal accidents in the steel plant and about the local history of Stalin's terror, subjects that were untouchable not long ago.

There is a daring bit of nudity in the play about prostitutes on the stage of the Metalworkers' House of Culture, a surge of anti-Stalinism in the movie theaters.

People can now buy $2.80 pork kebabs or $650 custom-chiseled marble tombstones from independent vendors, a product of Mr. Gorbachev's move to open the way to private enterprise.

In a Bleak Landscape, Stirrings of Change

A more striking symptom of the Gorbachev revolution is an independent political group that gathers each Thursday night at the corner of Marx and Gagarin Streets to rally for cleaner air by way of cutbacks in production at the local steel mill.

The group is grudgingly tolerated by local officials.

But so far, the citizens of Magnitogorsk say they have seen more glasnost than perestroika, more openness than economic revival. Life is more interesting, but not more satisfying.

Meat, sausage, butter, sugar and vodka are rationed. Nearly a quarter of the city's population languishes on a waiting list to get into the monotonous concrete apartment blocks that line the outskirts of the city.

Worst of all, the steel mill itself, like much of the musclebound Soviet industrial economy, has become an albatross. The local iron ore is depleted, the technology outmoded, and the public increasingly alarmed by pollution and disease rates that, thanks to glasnost, are listed monthly in the newspaper.

''Pittsburgh 20 years ago,'' was the verdict of Robert Barry, deputy director of Voice of America, who grew up in Pittsburgh, when he visited Magnitogorsk for the opening of an American technology exhibit last month.

The city was flung up on an empty steppe in the 1930's, a crash project of Stalin's first five-year plan.

The site, where the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains levels out, literally on the divide between Europe and Asia, was chosen because of a rich lode of iron ore - the Magnetic Mountain that gave the city its name - and because it was far from any threat of invasion.

Industrialization On the Grand Scale

They built the plant big, in the prevailing spirit of gigantism that has only recently come into question. Today the plant's output of 16 million metric tons of steel a year is equal to the output of America's three largest steel mills.

John Scott, an American who worked as a welder on the project, recalled the terrible, primitive conditions of the city's birth in a book called ''Behind the Urals.''

''Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered, but the construction work went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history,'' he wrote in late 1941.

But among the workers of Magnitogorsk the consoling memory of a time when things were much worse, the pride in shared sacrifice, is increasingly less vivid.

''It's been our place in history to build a new country, to build a new society, and we always worked without thinking of ourselves,'' said Valery N. Kucher, editor of the daily Magnitogorsk Worker. ''But a time came when it was right to start thinking about ourselves.''

Like many cities outside Moscow and Leningrad, Magnitogorsk issues monthly ration coupons for staples: 2.2 pounds of meat per person, 2.2 pounds of sausage, 6.6 pounds of sugar, 1.1 pounds of butter, and, since the vodka distillery was converted to a mayonnaise factory at the start of Mr. Gorbachev's anti-drinking campaign, one pint of vodka. Cheese is so scarce the authorities do not bother to ration it.

Residents resent the shortages, but they say that under the rationing system, at least the need is shared fairly.

Moreover, most workers eat one meal a day in a factory cafeteria, and can often buy extra groceries there.

Housing is a more bitter complaint. The wait for an apartment is typically 10 years, and city officials estimate that 100,000 people are on the list. At least half of them now live in communal housing with other families.

''Life here is no fountain,'' said Vladimir N. Lupachev, 27 years old, who graduated from the city metallurgical institute with an engineering degree but decided instead to seek his fortune selling tombstones.

He makes up to $1,280 a month, and his enterprise makes him a de facto part of the Gorbachev restoration. Only, he says, there is not much to spend it on.

The romance of the steel plant has also waned.

Giant Steel Mill: A Tarnished Symbol

Before Rima Dyshalenkova, a feisty local poet, became disgusted by the pollution and moved 150 miles away to Chelyabinsk, she wrote of the noxious domain of coke ovens and blast furnaces as ''our provider and destroyer.'' It is a common sentiment. Someone in almost every family works at the plant, and virtually everything else in town exists to serve the factory and its work force.

The aging, open-hearth furnaces that made the steel for every second tank and every third shell sent to the front in World War II now produce steel of such low quality, one plant official says, that it is no longer suitable for the armaments industry. Most goes to make autos and agricultural machinery.

The plant is clearly inefficient, requiring 60,000 workers to turn out its 16 million tons. The most modern American steel mill, according to industry experts, produces 8 million tons with only 7,000 workers.

Industrial accidents killed 14 people last year, according to Tamara V. Popeta, the deputy chief doctor at the medical clinic serving the factory. The fatality rate is about double that in the American steel industry.

The plant's colorful, malodorous emissions are the first thing residents of the city apologize for when meeting a visitor.

The Deadly Air: High Disease Rates

The Magnitogorsk Worker periodically publishes a table of air quality statistics, and they are grim. This summer the air has contained nine times the legal maximum level of benzene and three to five times the legal maximum for sulphur compounds.

The rates of heart, lung and respiratory diseases are far above the national averages, especially among children - and the data are said to show things are getting worse, not better.

Local environmentalists say they have seen official data showing the life expectancy in Magnitogorsk is only 52 years, far below the national average of 69. Officials in Moscow declined to make their figures public.

At the steel plant, Polish and Soviet workers are now installing a modern electric converter to replace the open hearths that are still used in 60 percent of Soviet steel mills. A second converter is to be completed by 1995.

''By the year 2000, you won't see this smoke,'' said the mayor, Mikhail M. Lysenko, a blunt-spoken former steelworker, waving a hand at the fumes visible, and smellable, through his office window a mile from the plant.

But a group of American steel experts who toured the plant Aug. 2 were skeptical that Magnitogorsk's salvation is at hand.

Even with the new technology, the vast plant will still employ so many coke ovens and furnaces to make the raw pig-iron for the converters that, barring enormous investment in clean-up technology, the worst of the pollution will continue, the Americans said.

The Americans also questioned whether the plant will ever make economic sense.

Magnetic Mountain is almost wholly depleted and the plant now imports ore from Kazakhstan, 300 miles away.

''They're in a remote location, 1,200 miles from the sea,'' said Robert D. Pehlke, a professor of engineering at University of Michigan, who toured the plant last week. ''So how are they going to be competitive? You have to wonder if this is economical.''

The bookkeeping of a planned economy in which energy, raw materials and transportation are heavily subsidized, makes it virtually impossible to answer that question.

The new political group, Forward Movement of Perestroika, argues for cutting steel production by 25 percent, closing the least efficient and worst polluting ovens, and slowing the pace of work to improve quality. It contends that this can be done without layoffs.

The local newspaper, initially sympathetic, has lately disparaged the group as impractical and demogogic. A cut in steel production, the newspaper scoffs, will lead to social disruptions still unthinkable in this society.

Obstacle to Change: Bureaucracy's Needs

Any notion of cutting output also will run up against the Ministry of Ferrous Metals, which, despite a pretense of decentralization, still runs the plant through state steel contracts amounting to 98 percent of its business.

The Soviet Procurator-General, Aleksandr Y. Sukharev, who is responsible for enforcing environmental laws, complained in an interview in the weekly tabloid Nedelya that even his own attempts to shut down offensive coke ovens in polluted cities have met the ministry's fierce resistance.

''There is no way out,'' said Viktor M. Svistunov, a plant official. ''This is a planned system, and we've got to provide other enterprises with raw material.''

One hears approximately the same sense of resignation, but with a more cynical edge, at a tavern across town from the factory, the kind of bar where workers order pints of murky beer four at a time and down them quickly.

''We had some Japanese here,'' said Vadim, who works in the rolling mill at the plant. ''We said, 'Tell us, how far behind are we?' They said, 'Forever. You're behind us forever.' ''

Asked about Mr. Gorbachev's calls for more democracy and local autonomy, workers smirk and roll their eyes.

''Listen,'' confides Aleksandr, a driver. ''You have a Mafia. We have a system of princes.''

Passivity, bewilderment and pessimism about the economy abound.

Citizens interviewed in their homes and workplaces during a five-day visit were more likely to predict economic stupor than success for Mr. Gorbachev.

This attitude - perhaps as much a legacy of Stalin as the steel mill - annoys Mr. Kucher, the editor, who sees in it perestroika's real enemy.

''Everybody is still waiting,'' he said, ''to get their orders.''

By Bill Keller

YEREVAN, U.S.S.R., Sept. 4— Two nights ago, more than 100,000 Armenians, defying an official ban and a heavy police cordon, streamed into the square in front of this city's imposing stone opera house for a town meeting.

The vast crowd in the southern republic's capital was reminiscent of those in the heady days last February when Armenians began their campaign to claim the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, ruled by Azerbaijan. But there are two important differences.

The placards displaying the face of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and his slogans of change have disappeared, replaced by an outspoken disenchantment with the Kremlin chief. A Political Movement

And the campaign for Nagorno-Karabakh has grown into something bigger. The movement began as a campaign for the return of the small region, an enclave with a mostly Armenian population that is surrounded and governed by Azerbaijan, yet claimed by both Soviet republics for cultural and historical reasons. But the campaign has become a broad and ambitious political movement that appears to be headed for a direct confrontation with the Communist Party.

Recent developments in Armenia have gone unreported in the Soviet press, which now portrays Yerevan as a city back to normal.

But a visit by this correspondent to the Armenian capital, the first since officials lifted a six-month ban on travel here by Western reporters, tells another story.

Strikes and the Police

It is true that the general strikes that periodically paralyzed Yerevan earlier this year have ended, but no one seems to doubt that they will return. The uniformed troops that once patrolled the city, sometimes carrying automatic rifles and truncheons, are not in sight, but there is evidence that those same soldiers now walk the streets disguised in police uniforms.

And the mass demonstrations that first drew the world's attention to this region are now a weekly event, with a new sense of political purpose.

At the rally on Friday, the 11-member Karabakh Committee, a group of intellectuals recognized by many Armenians as their de facto leaders, read the detailed manifesto of the new Armenian National Movement. The committee described the group's plan to press its demands through electoral politics, backed by the threat of civil disobedience.

''We are very serious about this,'' said Galstyan Ambartsum, an ethnographer and a member of the Karabakh Committee, in an interview today at an outdoor cafe. ''They gave us a little bit of liberalization, but we are now well beyond that.'' Demands and Tensions

The beginning of a national movement resembles the people's fronts that have been organized recently in the Baltic republics to promote greater economic, political and cultural independence. Many of the goals of the Armenian group are similar, including a measure of Armenian economic sovereignty, and priority for the Armenian language in schools and in public affairs.

But in Armenia, the relationship between the new movement and the officials of the Communist Party has been tense.

At the Opera Square on Friday, a member of the Karabakh Committee demanded that the second-ranking party official in the republic, a Russian, be dismissed because of insensitivity to Armenians.

In turn, committee members have been attacked in the local press as extremists. Police or Soldiers? The authorities have not broken up the mass demonstrations that take place each Friday night, but the latest gathering was reportedly surrounded by thousands of men in police uniforms.

Karabakh Committee members said the police onlookers were in fact Russian soldiers wearing militia uniforms. The troops were reportedly called in because the local authorities did not trust the native police force to take action.

That assertion appeared to have subtance. Near the Dinamo Sports Hall, busloads of non-Armenian men in police outfits came and went today from a camp guarded by uniformed army personnel.

The goals laid out in the new Armenian manifesto stopped short of the call for complete Armenian independence advocated by some student firebrands, but the goals are enough to cause concern in the Kremlin.

The Armenians insist on veto power over all federal projects built in the republic, a demand intended to stop a new chemical plant and a nuclear power station.

Flag and Language

Other demands include the freedom to fly the flag used during Armenia's brief independence, from 1918 until 1920, when the Armenian Republic came under Soviet rule; the right to open consulates in countries with large Armenian populations, and the creation of an Armenian army detachment so that young men from the republic can perform their military service on home soil, using their own language.

Unification of Armenia with Nagorno-Karabakh, rejected by the Soviet Government in July, is still regarded as an overriding goal. Karabakh Committee members said they have gathered more than 400,000 signatures on a petition demanding that the Armenian Legislature defy Moscow by unilaterally declaring the disputed territory part of Armenia.

The Legislature is scheduled to meet in October, and committee members say they may call a general strike to dramatize their demand.

''We plan to do everything according to the Soviet Constitution,'' said Babken Ararktyan, a member of the Karabakh Committee and the head of the mathematics department at the University of Yerevan. ''Our Constitution says nothing that prohibits strikes.''

'Take Up Our Issues'

The committee has also begun organizing for next year's legislative elections, which Moscow has promised will, for the first time, be open to a wide range of competing candidates.

''If we can elect even a few dozen deputies out of the 340 in the Armenian Legislature, that will be enough to force authorities to take up our issues,'' Mr. Ararktyan said. Judging from interviews in Yerevan and in nearby Echmiadzin, the seat of the Armenian Orthodox Church, the committee has broad public support and respect, not only among intellectuals and students but among ordinary working families and even Communist Party members.

The committee's weekly town meetings draw 100,000 to 200,000 of Yerevan's 1.1 million residents, participants say. Souring on Gorbachev

Armenians say that while Mr. Gorbachev's promises of greater democracy and openness originally gave heart to their efforts, the public turned sharply against the Soviet leader after two events in July.

One event was a clash between Soviet troops and Armenian strikers at Yerevan's Zvartnots Airport. A 22-year-old Armenian was killed during the chaos, and dozens of people were injured. This was followed on July 18 by Moscow's decision to leave Nagorno-Karabakh under Azerbaijani jurisdiction.

On Opera Square, where a few hundred people assemble each evening to debate current events, the mention of the Soviet leader's name sets off a hostile murmur. 'A Scorpion'

''He's a scorpion,'' said one young man Saturday night.

''Gorbachev killed our trust,'' shouted an older man at the same meeting.

Other Armenians are somewhat more sympathetic to Mr. Gorbachev, pointing out that he feared an uprising in Azerbaijan if he yielded to the Armenian demands, and that conservatives in the Kremlin might seize on any concession as a sign of weakness.

But the sense of disappointment is deep and freely expressed.

''Glasnost, perestroika, since July 5 we don't use those words,'' said Mr. Ambartsum. ''After all that's happened, those words are discredited here.''

Correction: September 22, 1988, Thursday, Late City Final Edition An article on Sept. 5 about a new national movement in Yerevan, capital of Soviet Armenia, misidentified a member of a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Karabakh Committee. He is Ambartsum Galstyan.

By Bill Keller

MOSCOW— RUSSIA has always loved the man on horseback. Peter westernized, Lenin revolutionized, Stalin industrialized, each moving the country from one historical stage to the next by sheer, personal and often ruthless power.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev has, by now, proven himself adept at gaining personal power. The question is, how much good will it do him? Mr. Gorbachev's own reasoning suggests that for the task he has set himself -making the Soviet Union competitive in a world of computer chips and satellite dishes - personal power is not enough.

At least Mr. Gorbachev has stilled the debate about who is in charge here. He doth bestride the Kremlin like a colossus, more or less. Some Western Sovietologists smirked last year when Jerry Hough, the Duke University and Brookings Institution Kremlinologist, declared that Mr. Gorbachev's command of the Kremlin was comparable to Stalin's in 1929, before the great purge. But after last week's forced realignment, Mr. Hough's assessment does not seem so farfetched.

The party leader not only rejuvenated his Politburo, but also expanded his own impressive list of titles to include the Presidency, a largely ceremonial post that is to be invested with real power next year. The most Machiavellian stroke was the reassignment of Yegor K. Ligachev, reputedly Mr. Gorbachev's conservative rival, to the seemingly hopeless task of running agriculture. If Mr. Gorbachev lacked the muscle or the will to remove Mr. Ligachev, this at least distances Mr. Ligachev from the ideology and foreign policy spheres, and puts him on the line. If Mr. Ligachev succeeds in feeding the country, Mr. Gorbachev wins. If he fails, Mr. Gorbachev has a scapegoat.

Beyond Tinkering

When Mr. Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin U. Chernenko in March 1985, the prevailing Soviet doctrine was the failed orthodoxy of central planning at home and proxy revolution abroad. Now, as the new ideology chief, Vadim A. Medvedev, reasserted last week in his maiden speech, the gospel has changed to one of markets and experimentation at home, pragmatism and coexistence abroad. The practice lags behind the rhetoric, but few accuse Mr. Gorbachev anymore of merely wanting to tinker at the margins.

In foreign policy, Mr. Gorbachev has pulled his country halfway out of Afghanistan, begun the destruction of medium-range nuclear missiles and made summitry commonplace. He has widened the focus away from the preoccupation with the United States to include more sophisticated relations with Europe and Asia. The evidence of domestic changes, moral and intellectual, is even more impressive: the release of most political prisoners from the Gulag, the escalation of emigration and foreign travel, the exorcism of Stalin, the publication of banned classics, the beginning of a real and rich political discourse, the formation of independent political groups, the promises of a more humane justice system, the birth of legal private enterprise. Visitors who know the country are struck, most of all, by a decline in the level of fear.

Each time Mr. Gorbachev impresses, however, it is worth backing off and marking the distance he has yet to go. The problems before him are staggering. Foremost is the economy. Its sad bulwark is a rust belt of heavy industry whose most important product has been a working-class welfare mentality. The factories are not equipped for the computer age and, worse, neither is the workforce. Then there is a food system that is a mess at each stop from farm to grocer's shelf. Then there are the crumbling roads and railroads and a phone system that is barely fit for human exchanges, let alone data transmission. Diminishing Optimism

''The concept of perestroika as social revolution has not yet come true,'' said Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the sociologist who heads a new Institute for Study of Public Opinion. ''One might stretch things a bit and say that reforms in the press and glasnost are revolutionary, but changes in the economic sphere often deviate far from what was originally planned.'' Mrs. Zaslavskaya's research shows that public enthusiasm for Mr. Gorbachev's program and optimism about the future are diminishing.

Her sociologist's way of putting things does not nearly convey the sense of despondency one finds in the average, pathetic grocery store - the pervasive feeling, as the days shorten into winter, that there is nothing to buy, nothing works and nobody knows what to do. Mr. Gorbachev says these problems cannot be solved by people waiting around for orders from the top. People can be force-marched onto collective farms, but the reverse, creation of a robust, small-scale farming sector, requires individual initiative. Central planning can build a steel mill, but probably not a successful software firm.

Mr. Gorbachev accumulates personal power, but he lacks real political power, the support of constituencies who understand what he has set out to do and support it. His best hope is probably the budding entrepreneurial class and an educated urban elite that seems potentially adaptable to a changing world. Against him, or merely not in his favor, he has workers trained for an economy that is already out of date and a Communist Party and government apparatus that stand to lose jobs and power as he reshapes the system.

Some of those who initially seemed promising allies are preoccupied with their own problems. The Armenians have been too bogged down in their feud with neighboring Azerbaijan to concentrate on economic change. The Estonians, who last weekend formally launched a movement for economic and political autonomy, show little interest in taking Russia with them.

Caution and Compromise

Even Mr. Gorbachev's romance with the intelligentsia, his first and most ardent supporters, is showing signs of strains. The intelligentsia, while loath to contemplate life without Mr. Gorbachev, seem increasingly impatient with the caution and compromise that are part of his political style. Mr. Gorbachev, in turn, seems annoyed to discover that the best and brightest are not necessarily the best company in a foxhole.

There is no sign that Mr. Gorbachev intends to revoke the freedoms he has granted. Glasnost, however inconvenient it has sometimes been, has served Mr. Gorbachev well. It has helped him purge or intimidate his political resistance by exposing enemies of his program, it has periodically rallied public interest, and it has certainly burnished his image abroad. But the Soviet leader has always seen liberties such as freedom of expression more as tools than as rights. The more the tools do not work, the more power he may be tempted to take into his own hands, and the more he may incline toward Stalin's famous advice: ''You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.''

By Bill Keller

When Mikhail S. Gorbachev first visited the United States one year ago this week, the biggest question in most Western minds was whether he was the reformer he claimed to be, or simply a totalitarian with style.

As the Soviet leader prepares for his second trip to America, Western curiosity and skepticism seem to have shifted from his intentions to his prospects: not ''Does he mean it?'' but ''Can he pull it off?''

Mr. Gorbachev is scheduled to arrive tomorrow in New York, bearing, one Soviet official promised today, ''very interesting new ideas'' to be disclosed on Wednesday in a speech at the United Nations and a lunch with President Reagan and President-elect Bush. 'Weimar Russia'

In this astonishingly eventful year of Kremlin intrigues, nationalist eruptions and economic discontents, Westerners and Soviet citizens alike - and probably Mr. Gorbachev himself - have come to grasp better the magnitude of what the Soviet leader is up to, and what he is up against.

Only half in jest, Stephen Sestanovich, director of Soviet Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, calls Mr. Gorbachev's perilous situation ''Weimar Russia,'' alluding to the period of political moderation and economic crisis in Germany that gave way to the Third Reich.

The joke would evoke dark laughter in the parlors of Moscow intellectuals. For many of Mr. Gorbachev's admirers, euphoria has given way to pessimism.

And yet this has also been a year in which Mr. Gorbachev's program has begun, in small but unmistakable ways, to take hold where it matters most, in the thinking and behavior of ordinary Soviet people.

Few imagine that Mr. Gorbachev's revolution-from-the-top is now widely popular, let alone irreversible. But Soviet citizens seem increasingly convinced that the genie is not going back in the bottle.

Mr. Gorbachev's aim is to pre-serve his country's status as a major power by stopping its steady economic decline relative to the West.

The problem, as he has recognized from early on, is only partly the cruel, corrupt and inefficient system he inherited from Josef Stalin and Leonid I. Brezhnev.

It also lies in a popular psychology that has changed little since the czars ruled peasant Russia. It is a conservative mentality, accustomed to complying with strong central authority, egalitarian in the extreme, deeply respectful of tradition and intolerant of rival opinions.

The Western concept of citizenship, with its respect for individual right and responsibilities, never took root in Russia.

To these instincts, seven decades of Soviet power have added a strong streak of cynicism and apathy.

Switching to Fast Forward

Mr. Gorbachev, therefore, is trying to fast-forward Russia through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and build a political culture that prizes initiative, individual responsibility and law over forced discipline and mindless equality.

The past year has made it dramatically clear that the Soviet leader faces dangerous opposition on both flanks.

The conservative resistance includes comfortable bureaucrats loath to give up their power and privileges. It includes the more active opposition of dogmatic Marxists in the party apparatus, who would prefer to modernize the economy without the discomforts of a more aggressive press or greater democracy. And it includes a public fearful of change, as demonstrated by the open resentment directed at the new class of private entrepreneurs, and by the apparent revival of brooding, xenophobic Russian nationalism. Gorbachev Counteroffensive

Mr. Gorbachev now acknowledges that he underestimated the strength of these conservative forces. This year he mounted a strong counteroffensive. He purged or weakened conservative rivals in the Kremlin, sending holdovers from the Brezhnev era into retirement and isolating his putative chief rival, Yegor K. Ligachev, in the thankless job of running agriculture.

He has given the press even greater license to rake up the sins of Stalin and Brezhnev, and opened the debate on the future of socialism to longtime outcasts such as the human rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov and the dissident historian Roy Medvedev.

He has grown steadily more radical in his prescriptions for the economy, embracing more private farming, worker ownership of industry, and greater integration with the outside world.

He has pushed through a far-reaching redesign of the political system aimed, he says, at shifting greater power to elected legislators and independent courts and rendering the course of change ''irreversible.''

All of this has demonstrated Mr. Gorbachev's nimbleness as a politician, his toughness, and his capacity for compromise. But in consolidating his own position, he has also reminded his supporters how much the drama of change in the Soviet Union depends on this one compelling but mortal figure.

It may be that Mr. Gorbachev cannot decentralize power until he controls it, but his steady accumulation of authority has somehow left him appearing both lonely and imperial.

Danger of Impatience

Armenia and Estonia have taught the world this year that conservative resistance is just one of Mr. Gorbachev's worries. Impatience is another, immediate peril.

Mr. Gorbachev's liberalization has set loose bitter grievances that have simmered since Stalin's time in many of the 14 non-Russian republics.

The hatred between neighboring Armenians and Azerbaijanis, focused on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, has left dozens dead in both republics and forced the Soviet leader to put the region under military supervision.

Yearnings for independence in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have given birth to huge, popular movements that seem to be seriously competing with the Communist Party for political control.

The Soviet leader has failed so far to find any unifying ideology - a new patriotism or Soviet pride - to counteract the divisive stresses of many nationalisms.

And unless Mr. Gorbachev can satisfy public demands for a quick improvement in the standard of living, he faces the danger of similar uprisings from angry consumers and workers.

But the disorders in his domain are also signs that people have begun to take Mr. Gorbachev at his word -faster than he reckoned. 'A New Way of Thinking'

In Armenia and Azerbaijan, the result seems dangerously intractable, an explosive situation that Mr. Gorbachev's more authoritarian critics can cite to prove the dangers of liberty.

But in the Baltic region, Mr. Gorbachev seems convinced that compromise and restraint will prevail over impatience and anti-Russian feeling. If he is right, the potential reward is a Baltic economic success that become an example for other regions of the country.

''This is not disorder,'' a prominent Soviet editor said recently, discussing the bold popular demands for greater autonomy in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. ''It is a new way of thinking about order.''

Ed A. Hewett, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, often tells Soviet colleagues that more turmoil in the economy would be cause for celebration, not alarm. Mr. Hewett says he will believe economic change is serious when he sees bankruptcies and strikes, the natural upheavals of an economy adjusting to reality.

The same is true in the political realm. Democracy is messy. How much of it the system - or Mr. Gorbachev himself - is willing to tolerate is still unknown, but it has already tolerated more than anyone thought possible a year ago.

Mr. Gorbachev's supporters can already point to other hopeful portents for the survival of perestroika, or restructuring.

A Lower Level of Fear

Perhaps most striking is the general reduction in the level of fear, as ordinary citizens begin to say in the press and on the streets what they once said only around their kitchen tables. Even though Mr. Gorbachev has not yet delivered on his promise of new laws to safeguard individual rights of expression, people have begun to accept those rights as their own.

Another sign is the birth of genuine interest groups to defend the promised changes. These include not only the popular fronts in Baltic and other republics, but associations of private entrepreneurs organized to protect their new niche in the Soviet economy.

There are also fitful flickers of faith in the system, startling in a population that has grown so cynical about such official institutions as the courts, the legislature and elections.

Proposals for new laws and constitutional amendments now provoke the kind of heated debate that suggests the public believes the outcome makes a difference.

Dissenters who once might have turned to the underground press now turn to the long discredited court system.

A few months ago, Boris Kagarlitsky, an organizer of a small independent leftist group in Moscow, sued the official newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda for maligning his name, and -to his own amazement - won. This fall a lawyer from the Ukraine went to court to defend the name of Stalin, and lost. Eager Western Businesses

In Armenia, a nationalist campaigner entered a special election to the republic's legislature and won, defeating the Armenian Minister of Internal Affairs. The Commuist Party voided the election, but accepted the outcome when the challenger won a rematch.

Even the rubber-stamp national legislature, the Supreme Soviet, has seen its first dissenting votes in decades.

In recent months, even as Western Kremlinologists have been calculating Mr. Gorbachev's political life expectancy, bankers and businesses in Western Europe have slowly begun to gamble on Mr. Gorbachev, with loans and joint business ventures.

When Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany and President Francois Mitterrand of France visited last month, their jets were packed with eager businessmen, searching out ventures in the Soviet Union.

This is a small vote of confidence, and one that could help Mr. Gorbachev deliver some satisfaction for his consumers.

If success is defined as catching up with the West, few, even among Mr. Gorbachev's admirers, can quite imagine it. The leap across a chasm of psychology is so vast.

If success is defined more generously, as continuing at some pace on the path toward a more normal Soviet Union, then the question - Can he pull it off? - is still very much an open one.

By Bill Keller

LENINAKAN, U.S.S.R., Dec. 14— One week after the mountains convulsed here in an earthquake of heartbreaking dimensions, the authorities laid plans today for a vast and probably forced evacuation of survivors who show little willingness to leave.

Officials in Spitak said that by Friday they plan to begin bulldozing what was once a city of 20,000 and sowing the ruins with lime and disinfectant before undertaking the task of rebuilding the entire city.

In Leninakan, where 290,000 people lived before the earthquake last Wednesday, the authorities insisted that they had not committed themselves to a complete evacuation. But a Soviet construction engineer involved with the rescue effort said the choice was inescapable: either forced relocation of many thousands who still inhabit the spectral city, or a serious risk of epidemic from bodies decomposing under collapsed buildings.

Risk of Epidemic Cited

''For the moment they are evacuating on a voluntary basis,'' the engineer said. ''But they have been discussing the evacuation of the whole population, because it is already clear that it is impossible to take all the dead bodies out of the ruins, and there is the risk of epidemic if people remain.''

A 160-mile hitchhiking tour of the devastated zone - in a truck delivering rescuers from a Ukrainian mountain climbing club, in an army colonel's jeep and in the car of a grieving Leninakan man - was filled with indelible images of despair:

* Paruir Karapatikyan, a worker in the now demolished Spitak sugar factory, in the first light of dawn, prowling through the coffins and frozen corpses laid out in the city soccer stadium, moaning in agony as he searched for his lost daughter.

* Families squatting hollow eyed in a freezing drizzle, waiting for French patrol dogs to sniff the ruins of their home in Leninakan, some imagining the cries of trapped children.

* Buildings ruptured and spilling their intimate contents - cribs, sewing machines, overstuffed armchairs -into the streets.

* Seven corpses laid out alongside an excavation site in downtown Leninakan, covered with curtains and paper and a raincoat, while two women sat nearby hugging and weeping.

* The Leninakan city council building, its walls peeled open to reveal offices that look as if someone just dashed out for a meeting.

* Thousands of coffins: coffins of cheap plywood and cardboard, coffins painted black or red, stacked in family groups on the sidewalk with the tiny ones on top, or arranged in vast pyramids under the undisturbed statue of Lenin.

The unsupervised and unobstructed tour, in a region recently closed altogether to foreigners because of ethnic unrest, was a sharp departure from the usual restrictions imposed on Western correspondents.

In recent days, Soviet officials have allowed journalists to travel at will, presumably knowing that world attention is essential to keep up the flow of international aid.

Foreign relief workers were among those most shocked by the magnitude of the destruction and especially by the conspicuous negligence that allowed so many thousands - the official estimate is 55,000 - to be crushed to death in their homes, schools and offices.

''The survival rate of people in these buildings has been very small,'' said Paul Quick, a London fireman who also aided in relief efforts after the Mexico City earthquake in 1985. ''They are mostly volcanic blocks, loosely put together and of dubious construction. That is why the devastation here far outclasses Mexico, or anything else.''

Hope for Rescues Fading

Rescuers said that even today, after seven days of freezing weather, they were finding a few survivors, but hope was quickly fading. Soviet officials said 20 people were rescued today.

''We're not finding people alive,'' Mr. Quick said. ''We're finding people dead. I'm becoming a professional undertaker.''

The authorities seemed to be bracing for the transition from rescue to evacuation, and some admitted privately that they expected resistance.

Strict curfews that had been lifted earlier this week were reimposed on Tuesday in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, and in the quake-damaged cities. Tanks and soldiers wearing bulletproof vests blocked the entrances to Leninakan, limiting access to residents with trucks who have come to salvage their few remaining belongings.

Stepan Ordukhanyan, an aide to the chairman of the Leninakan civil defense headquarters, in the city's largely intact K.G.B. office, said officials were surveying habitable buildings before deciding whether to allow some people to stay on. #8,000 Persuaded to Leave He said the evacuation had focused so far on women, children and the injured. He added that on Tuesday, nearly 8,000 people had been persuaded to leave the city, mostly for other places in Armenia.

Special burial teams assigned to inter the dead have been photographing them first for later identification. But many Armenians balk at the idea of leveling the cities before all of the dead have been found and given proper funerals.

The cities teemed today with thousands of survivors, many of them choosing to live in the streets rather than leave. Leninakan was dismal under a cold rain. The mud running in the streets was tinted green from broken sewers. Streets suddenly ended in piles of concrete. Rescue workers wore masks against the stench of death.

The police said looting was becoming a serious problem.

Residents and relief workers said that food supplies were adequate, but that distribution was sporadic. It was not unusual to see scores of survivors mobbing a bread truck, with their arms stretched out for the round Armenian loaves. #95 Percent Destroyed Spitak, ringed by frosted mountains, is now a tomb situated in a natural paradise. It was about six miles from the epicenter of the quake, and in the estimate of Col. Vyacheslav G. Yavrumov of the army, a rescue supervisor, the city was 95 percent destroyed. Other soldiers said that from one third to one half of the population had died.

By night, the stragglers sleep beside campfires in the ruins.

''We buried her mother yesterday,'' said Yuri Gursky, nodding toward his wife, who slept alongside their teen-age son, near a pile of embers. He pointed to the spot where his mother-in-law had been found, a heap of concrete scraps that had once been an apartment building.

''My son doesn't want to go, but they won't let us stay,'' Mr. Gursky said. ''It's already getting dangerous here. You can smell it.'' The nationalist clashes that broke out anew on Sunday in Yerevan seemed distant here. Several Armenians in the earthquake zone said they felt the leaders of Armenia's territorial dispute against the neighboring southern republic of Azerbaijan should lay those grievances aside during such a tragedy.

Mistrust of Moscow

But the bitterness generated by 10 months of that conflict, and the mistrust created by Moscow's refusal to side with Armenia, remained.

Armenians seemed uniformly convinced that Moscow has intentionally underestimated the earthquake death toll. Some even speculated that the quake was caused by a secret military explosion.

When a factory worker in Leninakan was reminded today that much material aid has arrived on a railroad line from Azerbaijan, he snapped: ''We don't want any connections with them. There's something bad in the blood of those Muslims.''

Yerevan itself has been calm since Sunday, under a heavy troop presence that some of the foreign relief workers find unsettling.

''At the same time those cities are full of coffins, Yerevan is full of tanks,'' said an Austrian Army officer who had just returned to the Armenian capital from relief work in Spitak. ''It's a tank democracy.''

By Bill Keller

SPITAK, U.S.S.R., Dec. 16— Last Tuesday rescue leaders from a half dozen countries convened in the green army tent that is now Spitak's Communist Party headquarters for a tense diplomatic faceoff in the middle of the most staggering misery any of them had ever seen.

The Soviets announced that after six days of pulling Armenian children from collapsed kindergarten buildings and picking half-alive victims from flattened nine-story apartment blocks, it was time to give up, shoo away the grief-stricken survivors and level what little remained of the city.

British, French, Austrian, Italian and other Western relief workers objected. Reports were still coming in that faint cries for help were audible in the debris. They made clear that if the bulldozers came in too soon, what had been an unparalleled exercise in East-West emergency cooperation could become an international embarrassment for Moscow.

''I thought at one time they were trying to use the rescue teams to say that no one was left alive and they could go in to begin demolishing and clearing,'' said Norman F. Roundell, a London fire inspector who led the opposition. ''We let them know in very strong terms that they were wrong.''

The Soviets yielded and the gruesome dig went on until, on Thursday, the foreign contingent in Spitak met again and agreed that it was time to start packing up.

These days of death and diplomacy have exposed backwardness and inflexibility in the Soviet system that are certain to provoke months of official recriminations. But they have also seen a society long secretive about domestic tragedies and ashamed of soliciting foreign help, open itself to the world's pity - and defer to outside advice - as never before.

Official Toll Is Still at 55,000

As the emergency rescue effort gives way to evacuation, refugee relief, demolition and rebuilding, many participants in the rescue believe this painful time has also marked an important turning point in official Soviet attitudes to the outside world.

The spectacle in the earthquake zone is nauseating and numbing, both in the scale of the quake and in individual vignettes of loss. Each tortured city and village in the quake zone has its own special character of suffering. The official death toll is still put at 55,000, but many estimates are much higher.

Spitak, a regional center once known for its sugar factory and elevator plant, was barely recognizable as a city. In 200 seconds on Dec. 7, it was pounded flat by the three massive jolts of the quake.

The stench of thousands of corpses was so intense that some foreign workers smeared Vicks Vaporub on their chests to hide it. Reporters returned to their hotels in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, with the smell of death clinging to their clothes and hair.

Narband, a sheepherding village west of here, looked today as if it had been crisscrossed by a colossal plow. The grade school fell in a heap, killing 500 students and teachers, sparing only a group of eighth-graders playing outside. The children in two kindergartens were also fatally engulfed in concrete and volcanic stone.

''In Narband, there are no children,'' said Gryant A. Mangasaryan, 57-year-old worker on a state livestock farm.

About half the population of 5,000 was believed dead, villagers said, and those who have not fled to relatives are camped in tents amid the ruins.

Mr. Mangasaryan took a visitor along a path through the ruins, past a litter of demolished houses, a gutted television set, and campfires surrounded by shell-shocked survivors.

On Thursday, where his house once stood, he built from scrap a tiny dirt-floored shack where he and his wife can retreat from the freezing weather and grieve for their three daughters and the grandson who were found crushed to death.

''If they rebuild Narband, we will live here,'' Mr. Mangasaryan said. ''If they build in another place, we will live there. We'll wait until they tell us.''

An Illusion of Luck: Brittle Buildings Stand

Stepanavan, a city the same size as Spitak at the northern edge of the damage zone, presented an illusory picture of miraculous good luck. Most of the buildings remain standing; only one of 1,000 children was killed when the shock rattled the grade school. But the tremors left the surviving structures as brittle as eggshells.

''We will have to knock down 99 percent of the buildings,'' said Lieut. Col. Anatoly V. Khludnev, commander of an army unit that was initially sent to Stepanavan last month to enforce a state of emergency after clashes between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis. ''Even a mild earthquake now could bring these buildings down.''

City residents sleep in tents or shepherds' yurts outside the hazardous buildings, awaiting evacuation. A contingent of West Germans was already demolishing buildings that threatened to tumble.

Leninakan, a city of more than 300,000 people, was an urban nightmare, with just enough tottering shells left standing to convey the outlines of a bustling city. There is an eerie, voyeuristic quality about buildings with walls sheered away, exposing living rooms and kitchens. Tonight, work crews with cranes and shovels picked over the debris by floodlight, ghostly figures wandered the streets and campfires flickered in the rubble.

''It's totally outside my experience,'' said Peter Wilson, a London fireman who was part of the last foreign rescue team still camped tonight at the Leninakan airport.

''As a fire professional, it's a very interesting technical problem,'' Mr. Wilson added, as his companions spooned up canned beans heated over a wood stove. ''But as an individual, I wouldn't want to see anything like this again. It gives a very good impression, I suppose, of what the Second World War must have been like.'' Seeming Whimsy To Path of Destruction

Throughout this spectacular but hardscrabble wheat and cattle region of the Transcaucasus, the quake picked and chose with cruel whimsy.

Barns and pinkish stone houses in the village of Dzhamushlyu slumped to the ground, while a few miles down the road in Tsilkar farmers were peacefully pitching hay and doing farm chores, largely unscathed.

Especially in the first few days, rescue and relief efforts were plagued by confusion and inefficiency, according to relief workers and residents interviewed throughout the region.

Foreigners said they were frequently frustrated by a bureaucracy that still awaits orders from the top.

A British rescue team had to go all the way to the commanding general to get clearance to use an army truck, and then had to negotiate for diesel fuel to run it.

Mr. Wilson, a divisional officer from the Kent Fire Brigade, said it took him a full day of arguing against strong resistance - evidently from the K.G.B. - before he was allowed to set up a satellite dish in Leninakan for direct communications with London.

Relief crews arrived at the Moscow airport, only to find that the authorities had no idea where to send them. It took several days to muster translators for the rescuers.

''Thousands of people came here of their free will, and sat for two or three days at the airport in Moscow,'' said a Latvian journalist who had spent days with an Italian team. Foreign doctors complained that Soviet physicians often refused to let them treat patients with the sophisticated medical equipment they had brought in. Soldiers at the Ready, But Mostly as Guards

By chance, thousands of Soviet troops were already in the region to enforce a state of emergency imposed after ethnic conflicts that broke out last month, the latest outbursts in a 10-month territorial dispute with Azerbaijan. But as of midweek the military seemed to view its role as maintaining order rather than taking part directly in the rescue.

In the first two or three days, most of those pulled alive from the debris were rescued by local citizens using picks, shovels and bare hands. Later, the rescue was largely handed over to the more than 2,000 foreign specialists who came with training and equipment not available here.

Except for construction brigades sent to work on repairing rail and water lines, the soldiers in Spitak and Leninakan seemed to be doing little but controlling access to the damaged areas, chasing looters and standing around camp fires.

Later, when the civilian bureaucracy proved inadequate and occasionally obstructive, the army also stepped in to organize the distribution of hot food, drugs and tents and to generally supervise the deployment of men and vehicles. But not until the end of the week was there any systematic distribution of food to the smaller villages.

The military is expected to play the major role in razing the cities. Hundreds of army tents and rows of earth-moving equipment have been deployed outside Spitak and Leninakan.

Officials 'Overwhelmed' By Scope of Calamity

Foreigners working here tended to be more forgiving than the Soviet press, which has railed against bureaucratic snags and ill-prepared local officials - though not against the military.

''I think the scale of it overwhelmed the local officials,'' said Mr. Roundell, the senior British aid representative sent to Armenia. ''But this improved enormously as time went on.''

Western rescuers said the recovery was severely hampered by the breadth of the quake. Unlike the 1985 quake that devastated parts of Mexico City, for example, the Armenian quake cut a wide swath, simultaneously crippling communications and transportation necessary to begin saving lives.

Railroads were twisted or blocked by upended boxcars, boulders tumbled into country roads and fractured roads tumbled into ravines. On the roads around Spitak, traffic was backed up for hours, a bottleneck of buses, ambulances, bulldozers and hay trucks.

Although the official death toll remains at 55,000, extensive travel through the zone of destruction lends credence to the view of many foreign specialists that it was perhaps three times that number. A French doctor this week estimated that 100,000 had died in Leninakan alone. In Spitak today, an Italian team that was packing to leave estimated that 30,000 had perished in this region of 50,000 people. The Soviet Openness Reaps a Rich Reward

For the foreigners working in Armenia, the most impressive thing was that they were allowed in at all.

The Soviets have given free access to the foreign press and the monitors from foreign governments to make sure the aid was delivered.

On the day of the quake, while Mikhail S. Gorbachev was preparing to cut short a visit to New York and fly home, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze was asked repeatedly about Soviet interest in foreign aid, and he seemed slightly offended at the suggestion that the Soviet Union could not handle its own catastrophe.

But after initial hesitation, the Soviets embraced the contributions enthusiastically, including an estimated $6.6 million in Government and private aid from the United States and loads of medical equipment from Israel, with which Moscow has no relations.

''These people had to have been pretty shocked by what happened to allow this level of foreign assistance,'' said one senior Western diplomat. ''Frankly I think they were overwhelmed by the generosity from Western countries. I don't think they expected to be treated this well by us.''

The Soviet press has played up the Western donations as the greatest example of East-West comity since Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River in 1945.

Nightly features on the television news and daily articles in the newspapers have doted on French, American, German and even Israeli contributions, often stressing the superior mobility and readiness of Western teams.

Julia Taft, director of the United States Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, said Thursday after a tour of the quake zone that ''it seems to reflect a change in official attitude.''

Although foreign rescue workers were departing this weekend, there is a fresh influx of Western specialists to help with demolition and reconstruction, seismic studies and medical care.

After Chernobyl, A 'Total' Difference

''It is a big transformation since Chernobyl,'' acknowledged Colonel Khludnev, the commander in Stepanavan, recalling the nuclear disaster two years ago. ''After Chernobyl, they allowed foreigners to participate in the investigation of why it happened, but that was it. This time, we are asking for concrete help.

Although foreign rescuers had earlier found the Soviets overly impatient to end the search for individual survivors and begin erasing the mess, they were impressed that Soviet officials relented, mindful that they would be seen as insensitive, and perhaps swayed by the argument that prolonging the rescue work as long as possible would make it easier to deal later with reluctant evacuees.

''It's not the number of lives you save that's important, but the hope you give to the people that in fact you're making an effort to try to find their relatives,'' Ms. Taft said. ''If you find that there is no hope for life after the people say 'Well, I think I heard voices,' and then you tell the person that and you hug them and say you're sorry, they're so relieved because they can make the break.''

Under the agreement reached at the end of the week, the Soviets are to forestall the wholesale bulldozing for a few more days, removing rubble systematically in hopes of uncovering a few more survivors. The more time-consuming search with dogs, heat-seeking devices and sound detectors would be abandoned.

In the next few days, there is likely to be a poignant separation of thousands of traumatized survivors from their cities and villages. Although many Armenians interviewed in the region said they do not want to go, foreign specialists agreed that this process is necessary. ''At some point you have to stop,'' Ms. Taft said. ''At some point you have to say, 'These people are going to catch pneumonia if they stay out there.' The surivivors then become the victims of the disaster because they have no place to go and no shelter.''

Mr. Roundell, the British fire official, noted the emotional drain of unearthing dead bodies. ''There's a limit,'' he said, ''to how much more you can do before you crack up.''