COLUMN ONE : Getting in Line With the Soviets : Rules can be merciless for shoppers waiting to buy a dwindling number of goods. There are purges, payoffs and riots. A subculture helps people survive.

For Valentina Yusupova, slumped on a child’s bed in Furniture Store No. 37, a 10-month ordeal was reaching its climax.

Since January, when she signed up to buy a sofa, the 703rd person in a 1,500-person line, she had come to the store to reassert her claim once a month, then once a week as her name rose on the list.

Now, finally a member of the coveted “first 10,” she planned to spend all day, every day for the next week in the dim showroom, waiting for the sofa’s delivery to make sure that no one waylaid it before it reached her.

“It will be a liberation when it comes,” the plump, gentle-faced pensioner said. “I get so tired these days. I come home like a corpse.”

Yusupova was caught up in one of the cruelest and most elaborate of daily Soviet tribulations: She was slave to a line that, from a simple string of people, had taken on a monstrous life of its own.

Under the slow collapse of the Soviet economy, factories are producing less, and more goods are getting sidetracked into the black market. Stores, as a result, are emptier than they have been since World War II, and panicked consumers are forced to spend hours waiting in line for items that they used to buy freely.

Some Muscovites estimate that they are now spending double the time in line that they did two years ago--up to three hours and more a day--and with less to show for it because the quantities they are allowed to buy are dwindling, and more and more items are disappearing from the stores altogether.

Until this year, Soviet people spent an average of 1 1/2 hours a day in line for food and other essentials, according to a report from the Communist Party newspaper Pravda quoted by American author Thomas Heyman in his book “On an Average Day.” Heyman used the figure as a comparison, estimating that the equivalent time for Americans is 25 minutes.

The endless waiting, with its physical and emotional strain, has spawned a complex culture and code of behavior of its own that, when first encountered, can appear as mysterious as the purposeful swarming of bees or ants.

Outside Furniture Store No. 37 on a recent Monday evening, several hundred people in a busily mingling mob pressed against the windows, forming into tight knots and dispersing in the deepening dusk.

“Where’s the third hundred for the ‘Slava’ brand wall-unit from Sept. 17?”

“Is it you who’s noting people down?”

“What are you doing here, signing off?”

All these people had come to the store on a certain day and signed up for furniture offered for sale, then divided themselves into groups of 100 and elected a volunteer to keep track of their names.

Now, they have to gather outside the store as often as that volunteer decrees, to “sign off”--to show themselves to prove that they still want the furniture badly enough.

The rules are merciless: If a person has shown up regularly for a year, then drops from sight for one or two sign-offs with no explanation, his or her name is crossed out.

“The line is very tough,” said Anatoly Z. Rubinov, a specialist on the meaner side of life for the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta and author of “Cardiogram of a Line,” a book analyzing Soviet line behavior. “When someone is crossed off the list, everyone rejoices.”

When the sign-offs are required daily, as they are for the more than 3,200 people waiting for airplane tickets to America that are doled out at the rate of 10 or 20 a day, the demands on people’s time become unbearable. Then they organize even further, breaking down the groups of 100 into groups of 10 or 20 who take turns signing off for other members. Members of the small group stake the months they have already waited on their trust of the other members.

Arkady Mekertumov, the volunteer who runs the Aeroflot line with tight discipline and a touch of hammy showmanship, said he tolerates the breakup into small groups.

“That way, at least they suffer a little less,” he said. “I feel sorry for them--they’re all pushed around so much, and it’s not their fault.”

But he has waged repeated purges to fight the profiteers who sign off only in order to eventually sell their place near the front of the line for hefty payoffs.

It is often financially strapped pensioners who make money by selling their places in line for vodka or for tickets. It is normal line behavior to hold a place for someone else, so sellers generally just step out and let the buyer in.

Invalids, war veterans or mothers of large families have the right to skip to the front of a line, and some of these people sell their line privileges.

In a line for Czechoslovak crystal the other day in the sprawling Moskovsky department store, a shuffling, scruffy old man approached a young woman who still had a good two-hour wait ahead of her.

“Should I help you?” he asked. “Should I help you get it?”

Leaning toward her conspiratorially, he flashed a red-framed I.D. that showed he was a veteran of World War II and thus entitled to jump to the front of the line.

He found a willing customer, but the sales clerk had been too vigilant.

“We saw how you were making deals with people,” she said. “We won’t give it to you.”

“But I defended Moscow,” he complained loudly--but to no avail.

The line was already grumbling against him, displaying the nasty temper that the collective can show the individual who breaks its rules.

“The line has its moral code,” Rubinov said. “And the most forbidden thing is to put anyone in ahead of the other people.”

Rubinov is now working on an expose on line deaths, the largely undocumented but increasingly frequent incidents in which people are trampled to death, and line riots, when stores are trashed and pillaged as those in line go berserk. Such explosions happen less to the yearlong lines, apparently, than to the hourslong, slow-moving “tails” for liquor or meat or--in hundreds of minor rebellions this past summer--tobacco. The use of police or private guards to maintain order in unruly lines is growing ever more common.

In a celluloid indictment of the Communist system brought to cinema screens this year under the title “This Is No Way to Live,” Soviet director Stanislav Govorukhin’s camera pans down a long vodka line surging out of control as his voice is heard commenting: “This is disgusting humiliation of the type not even the Marquis de Sade could have come up with. It makes me want to shout: ‘Comrade leaders! Aren’t you sorry for these people? Don’t you hurt inside for them? The most valuable thing any of us have is life, and this is what you have made of it!’ ”

Such outrage lies just beneath the surface of the apparently unshakable stoicism that Soviet consumers exhibit as they wait away their lives.

“We are slaves, and we have always been slaves,” Valentina Yusupova said in the furniture store. “This is just the way our life is for the time being.”

The vast majority of the Soviet population share her passive anger, a survey by an independent polling service, Mnenie, found.

Among more than 7,000 people who sent back questionnaires, 99% said they spent hours in lines, and about 90% felt either “passively negative” or “actively indignant” about it. However, 84% opposed raising prices to reduce the lines, and a majority also came out against the introduction of more ration coupons, which are already in use for meat, butter, sugar, vodka and cheese in many areas of Russia.

Who belongs to that perverse 10% who don’t mind standing for hours with, as Rubinov puts it, “their noses in a strange back?”

“Some people love standing in lines, especially single women, who find out the news that way,” Rubinov said. “And a person who has stood through a line and reached the front starts to consider himself very special, and he’s very content. When he manages to buy something, he comes home happy.”

Lines also become little communities.

“People meet, get married and find lovers there,” he said.

And in a sense, Rubinov said, the line is the most democratic side of the Soviet Union’s shortages. At least in a line, everyone has a more or less fair chance at what is being sold.

In contrast, when hard-to-get goods are distributed at workplaces, those who hand them out often take bribes or favor their friends. Other consumers get around the lines by buying under-the-counter from clerks they have cultivated or by paying exorbitant prices to speculators.

Mutterings against a shady network of speculators who create shortages and lines in order to jack up black market prices tend to dominate conversation during the long hours of standing in place.

“How to explain where it all goes?” Yusupova asked. “Speculation takes it all.”

Whether the lines spawn the black market or the black market creates the lines, “the whole system ruins people’s morality in all kinds of ways,” Rubinov said.

And the lines have become wholly unavoidable, he comments in his book; they encompass Soviet life from the cradle “right to death itself, because when a person leaves this life, he often has to lie around a while longer.”

In fact, lines extend even beyond death.

At the Golovinskoye Cemetery in northern Moscow, on a gray Saturday morning, dozens of women had gathered in a rutted lot smelling of wet earth to sign off in a line for gravestones.

They were familiar with each other. Some had been signing off once a month for more than five years.

“I want a black one,” said a 77-year-old woman who identified herself as Grandmother Lena Frolovna. She had been signing off for seven years in hopes of getting the kind of headstone she wanted for her son, who had died in the Soviet Far East.

“My son deserves a good one,” she said. “I thought this would be faster, but I’ve tried all different ways, and nothing works.”

As she spoke, a small crane dangling a shoddily cut headstone deposited it near the lot’s fence, where waiting women eyed it with sad contempt.

Nearby, a laboratory chief who has waited five years for a monument for her father said she plans to buy a stone for herself as well.

“I never want my children to go through this,” she said.

A refugee from Azerbaijan is the king of the line at Aeroflot. A18

LINE TIMES

Although there are no government statistics on how long Soviet citizens are likely to have to wait in line for particular items, an informal survey of Moscovites yielded the following estimates:

Item Time in line Car 5 to 10 years Refrigerator or TV 2 to 3 years Sofa or Chair set 2 years Telephone installation 1 to 10 years Imported shoes 4 or more hours Meat 40 minutes Wine or vodka 1 1/2 hours Eggs 1 hour