COLUMN ONE : Tent City: a Home of Final Hope : A shabby squatters’ camp near the Kremlin is a visible symptom of the crisis in Soviet society. Its occupants come from all over to air their gripes and seek justice.

Huddled under polyethylene to keep out of summer downpours, some of Soviet society’s losers are now camped out near the Kremlin. For refugees fleeing deadly ethnic feuds, workers fired for speaking out and self-described victims of the Communist Party and the KGB, this is the last resort.

From the flimsy tents pitched on a sward near St. Basil’s Cathedral, they emerge to plead their apparently hopeless causes to anyone willing to listen. A boldly lettered sign hung on one of the ramshackle shelters warns the passer-by: “We are here today, but you’ll be here tomorrow--We’re all without rights in the U.S.S.R.”

The shabby cluster of tents that has sprouted this summer beside the modernist bulk of the Rossiya Hotel, near some of Moscow’s most glorious landmarks--Red Square, the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower, St. Basil’s--is a visible symptom of the crisis in Soviet society and the inability of the political system to respond. Put simply, citizens have come from Central Asia, the Ukraine and Siberia because they cannot obtain justice at home. They expect to find it here.

Despite more than 72 years of scientific socialism, the Soviet Union often seems to have changed very little. In past centuries, legends say, a basket was hung from a Kremlin tower so that people could fill it with petitions to the czar. The motley tent city is a glasnost- era equivalent of that basket.

Its occupants, like their ancestors, have come to the Kremlin to seek a redress of grievances by their ruler.

“We chose this place because (President) Mikhail Sergeyevich (Gorbachev) and our legislators are there,” said Galina Maly of Siberia, pointing her finger at the ruddy brick walls of the Kremlin across the esplanade. A wrinkled Tatar woman, her gray hair tucked into a green kerchief, held out her hands to a group of Western tourists walking up the hill to Red Square and cried: “Help us, comrade foreigners, help us tell Gorbachev what is really going on!”

Since the national Communist Party Congress in July, as many as 50 people nursing various wrongs and gripes have been squatting outside the Rossiya in tents made from milky plastic sheets usually sold to Soviet fishermen for shelter.

The men, women and children sleep on folded cardboard or air mattresses and use the toilets in the hotel--”when the doorman lets us,” one woman specifies--and buy cheese sandwiches and bottled water at its buffet.

What Muscovites have dubbed Palatochny Gorodok, or Tent City, is far from the only place where such forlorn but tireless petitioners from the provinces can be found. By the hundreds, perhaps thousands, they sleep in Moscow’s cavernous train stations and wander from the Supreme Soviet Presidium’s reception room to the offices of the Soviet prosecutor-general and the party’s Central Committee, and back again.

One woman from the Crimea came to Moscow because, she said, the chairman of her collective farm stole her cow, by far her most valuable possession, and she wants Gorbachev to get it back. Two Meskhetian Turks who mounted a vigil the other day outside the Presidium’s offices want Gorbachev to let them and their compatriots return to ancestral lands in Georgia taken from the Meskhetians by dictator Josef Stalin.

Stretched above Tent City, a banner proclaims: “We demand public prosecution and a public trial for those who have violated our rights and committed crimes in their jobs!”

The people here have a persistent, sometimes pathetic belief that everything will be put right if they can somehow get the attention of Gorbachev or the government officials who work on the other side of the thick, high Kremlin wall.

That is more than the Soviet political system can guarantee. The Supreme Soviet, or national legislature, is now gagging on citizen complaints. When it was only a rubber-stamp parliament, it received 300,000 complaints a year. Last year, the number topped 1 million, according to Vladimir Fateyev, chairman of its committee charged with defending citizens’ rights. The legislature, which must pass market-type economic reforms, help create a new federation of the 15 republics, reform the armed forces and perform other duties, simply cannot cope.

And yet, people in Tent City seek the latter-day Kremlin basket, or whatever its equivalent might be, to alert their rulers to their plight.

“If Gorbachev and the prosecutor-general were doing their jobs, we wouldn’t have been here for the past month and a half,” confidently declared Vasily Nikitin, 15, a fuzzy-cheeked Kazakh whose mother came to Moscow to seek reinstatement in her job at a bookbindery in Karaganda.

Tales of Woe

Perusing the dozens of wordy, often heartbreaking complaints inscribed on placards and spread out on the lawn at Tent City is a crash course in the problems of the Gorbachev age. On one sheet of cardboard, Uzbeks protest ethnic riots in Kirghizia in which at least 200 of their countrymen perished and demand to know if Gorbachev “is with the people, or against it.”

Nearby, a red-bearded chauffeur from Kiev, N. F. Kravstov, has turned himself into a living protest sign. On his forehead, like a phylactery, he wears a cardboard rectangle that says: “Fired for no reason, without a job, without a home, without rights.” Only his head protrudes from the opening of his tent, and he periodically declaims the story of his dismissal and eviction from his apartment.

From pockets and handbags, Tent City inhabitants produce wads of court documents, newspaper articles and heartfelt typewritten manifestoes that tell tales of injustice, of lives ruined when local government and party potentates abused their powers. Here are two of the stories that can be heard at the entrance to Red Square:

Kapitalina V. Tsoi, an ethnic Korean, worked as an onion farmer with her husband in the parched Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. After years of scrimping and saving, they managed to put 9,000 rubles, or about $14,400, in the bank to pay for a new car.

But then Communist Party workers in their town of Amalik demanded a cut of the onion profits, contending their own salaries were too low. Tsoi’s husband, a brigade leader on a government-run farm, refused.

“My riches come from the land, so why should I give you people anything?” his wife, a stout and bespectacled woman in her 50s, recalled him saying.

Such insolence cost the Tsois dearly. Police appeared with a bank receipt claiming 7,000 of the rubles they had in their account at the state-run Sberegkassa savings bank had actually been deposited by a man named Rashchid Khalimulin and belonged to him. Kapitalina Tsoi was accused of having misappropriated the funds and was convicted and sentenced in November to a five-year prison term.

Everything about the trial was corrupt, Tsoi says.

“At the end, the judge took my husband aside and said: ‘Give us 5,000 rubles and we’ll close the case.’ ”

The couple refused, lost the jeep-like Niva car they had bought, the remainder of the money in their bank account and, to compound the injury, were ordered to pay 7,000 rubles to the ostensibly defrauded Khalimulin.

Where Next?

Tsoi came to the Soviet capital after Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court and Supreme Soviet refused to review her case. But the Moscow-based prosecutor who is supposed to supervise the work of Uzbekistan’s courts, a man named Stepanyants, reportedly shrugged his shoulders and told her: “If they rehabilitate you, they’ll have to throw 15 other people in prison.”

Now, Tsoi doesn’t appear to know where she should go next. One recent afternoon, as a chilly August rain drummed on the plastic stretched taut above her head, the woman in a cream-colored turtleneck dipped a brush in a bottle of ink and made a poster that expressed her feelings: “You can’t believe Communists. The only good Communist is a dead Communist.”

Galina G. Maly is a plump, plain-talking Siberian who won the coveted title of “shock worker of Communist labor” in the oil-producing town of Nizhnevartovsk. She drove a shuttle bus for pipeline workers, and the local party newspaper, Leninist Banner, gushed a few years back that “she takes good care of her vehicle, and it’s always in running order and clean.”

At the time, Maly was earning about 300 rubles monthly, or $480, and had an apartment of her own for the first time in her life. But her luck suddenly shifted. At the state-run petroleum trust where she worked, her bosses one day unexpectedly assigned her a different, broken-down vehicle, and told her she’d have to fix it herself.

With trademark Siberian obstinacy, she refused.

“I am not a mechanic,” explained the woman in her early 50s, a solitary gold tooth glinting in her upper jaw.

That dispute occurred on Nov. 30, 1986, and Maly hasn’t worked since.

“They didn’t even give me a notice saying I was fired,” she added.

She came to Moscow after failing to win reinstatement in Nizhnevartovsk. She is determined to win back her old job, rather than seek a new one, because she had 25 years of seniority and received extra bonuses for working in the rigorous conditions of the Soviet north.

Maly, who has inhabited Tent City for almost two months, can no longer get in the door at the office of Prosecutor General Alexander Y. Sukharev, because the guards tell her she’s already filed too many petitions. She has become what Soviet government workers label a “plaintiff,” a word in Russian that also means a chronic bellyacher. To fend off boredom, she lies in her tent, which is barely wide enough to roll over in, and makes handicrafts from wooden matches, such as a little basket with a bow.

Not everyone at Tent City is a wronged victim. Yuri Khramov, a member of the Moscow City Council, said about 200 panhandlers, whose numbers are increasing, show up daily to beg from tourists bound for Red Square. The take, by Soviet standards, can be fabulous: 500 rubles, or the equivalent of about $800, and from $30 to $50 in foreign currency daily.

“More and more, criminals are being attracted by this phenomenon, and racketeering is on the rise,” Khramov, deputy chairman of a Moscow city commission on protecting citizens’ rights, said in an interview.

Tsoi also said criminals were loose in Tent City, but she blamed the KGB and Soviet police, who she said wanted to silence critics of the Soviet system. She showed her palms, both of which were slashed when a man attacked her with a knife for no apparent reason one night this month.

According to Khramov, Moscow’s progressive government has taken steps to assist Tsoi and her neighbors. Two weeks ago, he and other deputies went to meet four representatives of the “tent people,” who cheekily demanded that they be allocated a proper headquarters, complete with telephone, fax machine and bank account.

Moscow’s city council did not agree to that request, but Khramov said that, at the suggestion of city prosecutor Gennady S. Ponomarev, a special group of prosecutors and Interior Minister officials has been sent to Tent City to see if the claims of its residents have merit.

The existence of Tent City, the tabloid weekly Arguments and Facts wrote recently, is graphic proof of how much remains to be changed in Soviet political life.

“We are not taking it on ourselves to judge how founded the demands are of specific people living today by the walls of the Kremlin,” it said. “But their desperate act of protest once again shows that in our country much must still be done to develop an effective mechanism for the defense of individual rights and the construction of a state truly based on law.”

A blond 10-year-old from the Ukraine, playing in an afternoon shower while waiting for his unemployed mother to return to Tent City, expressed the same idea in fewer words. Around his neck, he wore a sign that said, “We came to look for the truth in Moscow, but we haven’t found it yet.”