An L.A. Linkup : Cosmonauts: Alexi Leonov and Valery N. Kubasov packed a four-day schedule with lots of shopping and crowd-pleasing.

Stuffed animals and friendly Angelenos threw two Russian cosmonauts off schedule last week as nothing in space ever did.

Maj. Gen. Alexi Leonov and Valery N. Kubasov were scheduled to leave a Los Angeles hotel for Olvera Street when organizers of their visit noticed a problem.

“We can’t get Alexi out of the hotel gift shop,” said one anxious official rushing up to another in the hotel lobby.

The organizer hurried to the gift store. “We have a better place to go. We have to get back to the bus,” she told Leonov. But the contented cosmonauts leisurely signed autographs, posed for pictures and inspected stuffed animals and other items before departing.

Shopping and schmoozing with Americans were big draws for Leonov, 56, and Kubasov, 55, as they spent four days in Los Angeles celebrating the 15th anniversary of the only joint U.S.-U.S.S.R manned space flight, the Apollo-Soyuz Mission in July, 1975, which entailed the linking of the two spacecraft. The two Soviets were joined by Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford and Donald K. (Deke) Slayton, two of their American counterparts on the joint mission.

One hitch in the celebration/shopping spree came when a parking officer ticketed their small charter bus as they visited the Sharper Image in Beverly Hills.

The officer told driver Michael Christie, waiting in a yellow zone on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, that buses could not park on Beverly Hills city streets. When Christie said he couldn’t move because his international VIPs would return momentarily, the officer wrote a $13 citation.

But the parking ticket did not dampen the Soviets’ passion for shopping

At Olvera Street, Leonov and his wife, Svetlana, fingered beaded belts, leather coats and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap before selecting a ruffled dress with bands of red, white and green, the Mexican national colors, running through the skirt. Svetlana Leonov said the dress was for her 2-year-old granddaughter and happily displayed her picture.

At N. N. Camera & Electronics in Beverly Hills, Leonov and Kubasov bought Japanese cameras and Kubasov added a cordless telephone for outdoor use at his summer house near Moscow. Leonov spent $544 there and Kubasov $679.

After leaving the camera store, the cosmonauts and their wives entered a large, gleaming Ralphs market nearby in Los Angeles. Leonov, striding rapidly ahead of the group, said he liked the deli’s aroma and shook his head in wonder at the varied fresh fish at the meat counter.

“We don’t have a supermarket like this in our country,” he said.

Rushing toward a display of potato chips, he fingered several large, fluffy bags before selecting a bag of the barbecue variety. Leonov nibbled them on the bus as the cosmonauts traveled to their next appointment.

Because the cosmonauts’ four-day schedule was packed with visits to museums, Disneyland and a luncheon of the World Affairs Council, Leonov said he did not have time to find everything on his shopping list: film for the heavy, 16-millimeter camera he brought from the Soviet Union, bullets for his bear- and moose-hunting rifles or a hearing aid for his elderly aunt.

Shopping was not the only American custom the cosmonauts seemed to master; the Soviets were crowd-pleasers as well.

Leonov used a double-entendre in English to win over a crowd sweltering in 96-degree heat one afternoon at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory mall in La Canada Flintridge.

“I want to thank you for giving us such a warm welcome to Los Angeles,” he said, rolling his eyes toward the sun as several hundred spectators laughed appreciatively.

Then Leonov, who has visited the United States more than a dozen times since he began training for the joint space venture, said, “The most impressive thing in the United States is the American people. (When we toured America) after our flight in 1975, our visit was not received as warmly and friendly as it was right now. Times have changed a lot. I think our country is much more understandable (to Americans) than it was.”

After short speeches the crowd surrounded Leonov, Kubasov and Stafford, the commander of the Apollo mission on the flight.

The broad-shouldered but paunchy Leonov, who in 1965 became the first man to walk in space, signed autographs. He drew a dove beside his name for Amanda Clark, 8, of Altadena and pinned on his lapel a Russian-language button from a well-wisher reading “Let us march together.”

Slayton left the reunion before the JPL appearance and NASA did not send astronaut Vance Brand. Brand still flies space missions and belongs to a shuttle crew that is not expected to blast off before August.

The cosmonauts’ anniversary appearance, sponsored by the Aerospace Historical Committee of California Museum Foundation, was part of an 18-day tour that will also take them to NASA facilities at Houston, Huntsville, Ala., and Cape Canaveral and to Washington, D.C., and New York.

Leonov and Kubasov first met their astronaut associates during training for the linkup of their orbiting spacecrafts on July 17, 1975, and their 18,000-m.p.h. flight around the Earth.

Today Leonov directs training for cosmonauts in Moscow, while Kubasov is deputy director of the Ingergia rocket program. They both live in Moscow.

Leonov said that while the attitude of Americans toward Russia may have changed recently, the astronauts and cosmonauts developed life-long friendships unaffected by their nations’ relationships.

“We worked together and practically lived together training for our mission,” said Stafford, 59. “I was in the Soviet Union six times for six weeks at a time. They were in Houston five times for a month to six weeks. When we see each other, our relationship resumes right where it left off.”