SOVIET UNION / ANOTHER SHORTAGE : Smokers Doing a Slow Burn Over Scarce Cigarettes : Sometimes-violent ‘tobacco rebellions’ sweep the country. Jars full of butts go on sale.

The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, remarking on the amazing passivity of his countrymen, compared them to sheep: “You can slaughter them or shear them.”

But Pushkin had never seen a line of hundreds of nicotine-starved Soviet smokers--nerves raw from hours of waiting at a tiny tobacco kiosk for a promised shipment of cigarettes--turn suddenly into a mob prepared to block traffic, break store windows, storm the mayor’s office--anything to get their hands on those precious smokes.

“Tobacco rebellions,” as they have been dubbed by the Soviet media, are sweeping the country this summer in the strongest signals yet that the populace is so fed up with shortages of the most basic items that it will take to the streets in protest.

--In the Ural Mountains city of Perm, 1,000 enraged smokers stopped traffic, then sent a strike committee to City Hall to confront authorities, who cajoled 12,000 packs of cigarettes out of a nearby army garrison to calm the crowd.

--In the Russian city of Krasnodar, farm workers refused to bring in the sorely needed harvest until they received cigarettes. Similar stoppages were threatened or carried out in Kuibyshev, Berezhniki, Ilyanovsk, Lipetsk and Ufa.

--In Moscow, police have counted more than 100 tobacco rebellions in August alone, according to the state-run Tass news agency, and they are growing more and more frequent.

The Soviet Union has 77 million smokers, and the numbers are rising despite government health warnings. Nothing like the anti-smoking movement in the United States has taken root, and Soviet smokers routinely light up without a by-your-leave in buses, elevators and restaurants.

This year’s cigarette supply of somewhere around 500 billion is estimated to fall at least 38 billion cigarettes short of demand.

Angry smokers who blocked off Petrovka Street just behind the Bolshoi Theater on Wednesday blamed organized crime, sabotage and speculators for the shortage, convinced that it is artificially created. Others said it was all a plot to bring down President Mikhail S. Gorbachev by turning the people against him.

“The whole country is just a bardak, “ factory worker Alexander Romanov said, using an impolite word that literally means a brothel but approaches the Russian equivalent of the American snafu. He had been standing in line for six hours to support his pack-a-day habit.

Officials cite several reasons for the shortage, all of them reflecting the Soviet economy’s general distress, foundering as it struggles with reforms.

Soviet cigarette-producing equipment was allowed to fall into such poor condition that, in the Russian republic alone, 22 of 24 cigarette factories have reportedly had to close for repairs this summer.

With a severe shortage of hard currency, the government is hard put to buy new equipment abroad or to import cigarettes. However, the Council of Ministers, alarmed by the smokers’ outcry, decided on July 21 to import cigarettes from India.

Ethnic unrest in the southern Soviet Union also has played a role, disrupting a factory in Armenia that produces filters.

Shortages of paper, foil, glue and cotton have aggravated production problems further in an example of the ripple effect that shortages of raw materials have on the Soviet economy.

Because of supply problems and general economic disarray, Soviet production dropped by 15 billion cigarettes in the first six months of 1990, and Bulgaria failed to come through with an additional 5 billion.

With the shortage worsening, black-market prices are spiraling. A pack of Marlboros, long a key medium of exchange in the Soviet Union, now goes for 30 rubles or more ($48 at the official rate of exchange), and domestic brands such as Yava, Kosmos and News that normally cost just a few cents now sell for 3 rubles (about $4.80).

Desperate Soviet smokers are resorting to extremes, puffing dried tea leaves and buying tobacco dust used as insecticide. And a new, stomach-turning trade has blossomed: Jars of used cigarette butts are on sale at peasant markets. Travelers returning from the Crimea say an eight-ounce glass of butts costs one ruble (about $1.60).

In the long run, the problem is likely to continue growing. Cigarette smoking increased among Soviet citizens by 25% between 1970 and 1988, with a doubling of the incidence of lung cancer, according to government statistics.