COLUMN ONE : Slipping Through the Cracks : There are not supposed to be any homeless people in the Soviet Union. But in the streets sleep the forgotten, many of them the victims of a Kafkaesque system.

It is nearly 1 a.m. at the railroad station, and 14-year-old Galina Simbirskaya is getting ready to spend the night. She puts down her book and stretches out on a tattered brown blanket on the concrete floor.

“ Spakoni nochi , Mama ,” she says. “Good night.”

Her mother, Valentina, 45, is lying with her face turned to the wall, trying to tune out announcements about arrivals and departures, trying to forget for a few hours the reality of her daily life as one of the bomzhi .

The Simbirskayas are members of a segment of Soviet society that is not supposed to exist: the homeless.

The bomzhi --an acronym for people of no fixed address--are overlooked by police and passers-by. They do not even appear as numbers in official statistics. Ask a government official about them, and you will be greeted with polite disbelief.

But this is not just a story about homelessness. It is a story of how outdated ideology, even in a time of reform, can cloud perceptions and prevent a country from dealing with a glaring problem.

Despite the glasnost , or openness, that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has brought to this country, it seems almost impossible for officials and the public even to acknowledge the increasingly acute problem of homelessness.

The main reason is that homelessness was long viewed by the Soviets as a classic symbol of the failure of Western capitalism. Among the tenets of communism the Soviets have been proudest of--something many still believe sets this society apart from the West--is the constitutional guarantee of housing for all.

“According to our laws, such a problem cannot exist,” Lev M. Bychkov, chief of planning for the Moscow housing department, said resolutely in the course of a 90-minute discussion in which he argued that homelessness is not a real concern. “You will be given a place to live, no matter what. You will not be forced to sleep in the open air.”

Bychkov’s conviction was echoed by four other Soviet and city officials. But what officials say in the daytime, in their offices, is sharply at odds with what can be seen at night in the railway stations, in airport terminals and abandoned buildings: homeless men sprawled on the floor, using old newspapers for blankets; women sleeping in pairs, some hunched protectively over small bundles of belongings.

Although the bomzhi have never been officially counted, they are becoming increasingly visible, in part because the refusal to acknowledge them has led to an unwillingness to try to cope with them. But on any given night, according to estimates by Soviet journalists, police and the homeless themselves, there are several hundred to several thousand people sleeping on Moscow’s streets.

The predicament of the Soviet homeless is particularly tragic because their numbers include a group that is unique to this country--Kafkaesque victims of chance who have simply slipped through the cracks in a complex system that rigidly controls where a person is allowed to live.

The system is based on the propiska , or permit. This includes one’s address and appears on every Soviet citizen’s internal passport, which must be carried at all times, presented to a policeman at his request and shown to state officials when traveling.

The system was born in the 1930s, under the dictator Josef Stalin, to help the secret police control the public and to regulate migratory movements.

Today, the propiska serves to exacerbate the problem of the homeless: No one is officially homeless as long as an address is listed in his passport--even if he no longer lives there.

Valentina Simbirskaya is a victim of the system. She had a home and a job on a dairy farm until she was hospitalized four years ago with what was diagnosed as cancer. She lost her job and her husband threw her out along with their daughter, Galina.

According to her residence permit, she is still living with her husband. This has made it impossible for her to get housing in Moscow, which also has a severe shortage of hotel rooms.

Simbirskaya’s story is hardly unique. Of every 100 marriages in the Soviet Union, 40 end in divorce, a rate second only to that in the United States. To obtain separate housing, the Soviet Union requires that a divorced couple apply to trade in their shared quarters.

But Simbirskaya is no longer in contact with her husband, and she no longer has faith that the state will help her. She and her daughter were picked up by the police but were returned to the railway station after telling their story.

“We don’t run a charity,” she quoted one of the officers as saying.

The mother and daughter survive on handouts from other bomzhi . They have applied to move to a collective farm but have been turned down, largely because Simbirskaya, owing to poor health, is not able to work full-time. But they dream, and this helps to keep them going.

Galina, who has dropped out of school and spends all her time on the streets or at the station, said: “I would like to have a home very much, just a small shelter. No need for a bed. I would sleep on the floor. Maybe someday. . . .”

Alexander Dunayev, 23, is another of the homeless trapped by the propiska system. His parents kicked him out of the house when he was 18, but he is still officially listed as living there.

Dunayev has managed to find a job as a research assistant for a cooperative information service and he lives with friends, moving regularly to avoid wearing out his welcome. But he is forced to spend an occasional night in a railway station or on the street, where he socializes with his fellow bomzhi .

“There is a kind of community among the homeless,” he said. “They all get to know each other. But when I drink with them and talk with them, I feel very depressed. For most of them, there is no way out, and they know it.”

Dunayev has two possible solutions. He could marry and move into his wife’s apartment, or he could reconcile with his parents, something he says is unlikely.

He is not as angry with his parents as he is with the officials and the public, who turn a blind eye on the homeless.

“Most people don’t want to pay attention to us at all,” he said. “And those who do behave as if we were guilty of something, when actually it is society itself that is guilty, for failing to help the bomzhi and for failing to reform the propiska system.”

Vladimir D. Buladnikov, deputy chief of the Moscow housing department, was asked how the Soviet government should respond to a situation that makes teen-agers homeless because of unhappy family conditions, and he answered, “I do not believe such cases exist.”

There are no plans to build overnight shelters for the homeless, such as those that existed before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, because “there is not yet a demonstrable need for them,” he said, adding:

“When a true case of homelessness comes to the surface, if the person deserves official attention, his problem can be solved quickly.”

Buladnikov’s distinction between the deserving and those unworthy of official attention is typical. Soviet authorities often argue that anyone sleeping in a public place is there by choice, either an alcoholic or a criminal. This makes it easier to dismiss the problem, even though it is an argument easily disproved by a few hours among the bomzhi .

Boris V. Chekanov, a Ministry of Internal Affairs official said to be a government expert on homelessness, said: “Personally speaking, even though today we are talking more about taking care of our neighbors, I must say that I have formed a very negative view of this category of people.”

Antanina Lebedeva is in this category. Another victim of the system, she is a bright and articulate retiree who moved out of her assigned home for the aged northwest of Moscow because, she says, the director was stealing her pension checks.

“I came to Moscow looking for justice, but I’ve long since given up,” said Lebedeva, who has lived for the last year and a half in the Kurski railway station here even though her propiska still lists her as a resident of the home for the elderly. She sleeps on the cold floor of a transit hall dominated by a bust of V. I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, and survives on what she can beg.

Lebedeva, toothless, hands blackened by dirt and wearing a faded green coat, said she is sustained by a deep religious faith.

“But my fate in this life doesn’t depend on God,” she said. “It depends on the Moscow authorities, (who deal with the homeless like) bureaucrats playing football, kicking us from one office to the next.

“That is why I know I shall die here in the railway station one day. I will never have a home again. But I am 71 years old, after all. Very young and strong people in our country are also forced to live in the streets, even if the officials don’t want to admit it.”