Soviet Public Intrigued--but Cynical : Reaction: The party meeting sparks citizens’ interest. And they’re much more willing to speak up.

Soviet housewives, students, clerks and secretaries who lined up in unusually large numbers to buy their morning newspapers Thursday were in for a disappointment.

Hoping to find the text of a draft Communist Party program detailing historic changes bound to affect their everyday lives dramatically, they instead got page after page of transcripts of party debate--but not the key document itself.

Party leaders have promised that the program will be published in full, but the word now is that readers will have to wait at least until today, and possibly until the weekend, to see it.

Nevertheless, public reaction to this week’s fateful plenary meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee provides a useful barometer of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s progress in enlisting a long-apolitical society as soldiers in his perestroika reform campaign. It suggests that people here are growing far more interested in politics and increasingly willing to talk candidly about them. But they remain enormously cynical about their Communist leadership.

“Our party always talks a lot, but it doesn’t do anything,” said Mikhail Fyodorov, a 21-year-old night school student, in a remark echoed by several other men and women interviewed at random Thursday in Moscow’s central Pushkin Square.

“Demagoguery!” sneered a full-bearded, middle-aged man when asked his reaction to the plenum. And a young woman visiting from the southern resort of Sukhumi said she didn’t want to talk about the party meeting because “anything I have to say would have to be censored.”

Said a senior party official and Gorbachev ally with a sigh: “The two most dangerous traits in the Russian character are cynicism and apathy.”

Not so many years ago, of course, trying to conduct a citizen-on-the-street interview here was about as useful as a canceled check. A television camera tended to send all Soviets scurrying in the opposite direction--except those hired by dark political forces to keep an eye on the foreign press.

This week, dozens of ordinary citizens joined reporters in their vigil outside the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate, anxious to hear from anyone emerging from the plenum about what was going on inside. Many crowded around a Soviet television reporter as he did his “stand-up,” just as anxious as any enthusiastic Western crowd to get in the picture.

“I especially came here to see what was going on,” said Igor Posnyok, a medical student from Byelorussia, referring to a huge, pre-plenum rally last weekend which drew up to 250,000 people. “I heard about the big democracy demonstrations and wanted to find out for myself what is happening, because I couldn’t believe it.”

Official newspapers that once piled up unread in the kiosks are now in such demand that readers have to get to their newsstands at the crack of dawn if they want to be assured of finding any copies.

At one newsstand on Pushkin Square, the line stretched Thursday for almost a city block as anxious Muscovites waited for a late delivery of the popular weekly Nedelya. An elderly man with the right to go to the head of the line because of his invalid status bought several copies when it finally arrived, then sold at least one for a ruble, several times its cover price.

Across the street, three men sold copies of underground publications for a ruble apiece next to glass cases displaying the latest edition of Moscow News.

Both the government newspaper Izvestia and the Communist Party daily Pravda published five pages of verbatim debate from the previous day’s plenum, while many other newspapers printed summaries assembled by the official Tass news agency.

Two notable exceptions were Komsomolskaya Pravda and Moskovskaya Komsomolets, both directed at younger audiences, which displayed their relatively rebellious line by virtually ignoring the plenum.

None of the papers have yet carried any substantial commentary on the party meeting.

Soviet citizens have gotten relatively little of their news about the meeting from television, if only because the sessions ran well beyond the time of the main evening news program, “Vremya.” Domestic and foreign radio stations do a better job of keeping Soviet citizens up to date.

However they got their news, Muscovites were at least well aware that the party leadership had decided to seek an amendment to the Soviet constitution’s Article 6 to end the party’s “leading role” in national life and clear the way for a future, multi-party system.

Two middle-aged men exchanged disparaging remarks about the party on a subway train while other passengers sat stony-faced around them, clearly listening but not butting in.

“They made a mess of the country for 70 years, and now they talk as if they can put it back on track in a year or two,” sneered one of the men. “Fat chance!”

“What matters is the removal of Article 6,” said his companion. “That will make them as irrelevant in law as they are already in fact.”

While the constitutional change appears universally popular, there is much more ambivalence about new political parties.

“The problem is that there are no leaders around who can start up an opposing party,” said one young woman to an office colleague. “And even if there were alternatives, I’m not sure anyone can come up with a solution to our problems.”

One young man, a cashier, argued that it was precisely because Gorbachev knew it would take so long for any real change that he pushed to abandon the party’s leading role. “It will take at least five years before anybody can put together a meaningful challenge to Soviet power,” he said.