Soviets Not in Mood to Celebrate on Bolshevik Anniversary : Communism: A traditional military parade will mark Revolution Day. But it won’t be a happy holiday.

The headquarters of the Communist Party are lit up like a Christmas tree. A huge portrait of Vladimir I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, covers the facade of the KGB’s central offices. Red flags, flashing stars and glowing torches adorn buildings across the city.

Yet, the Soviet Union has never celebrated a Revolution Day the way it will today. Already on the eve of the 73rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the mood in the Soviet capital was far from festive.

Fewer than a third of 2,222 Muscovites polled approved of the planned parade of tanks, missile launchers and armed troops through the capital and across Red Square in the traditional demonstration of Soviet military strength, according to a study by the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion.

Unlike previous years, the stores have not been stocked full of scarce foods for holiday tables, and many people say their economic hardships leave them with no appetite for celebration.

And for the first time, people seemed unsure about whether to wish each other “happy holiday,” as has been the custom for decades.

There were even doubts at the traditional Kremlin celebration of the revolution. Normally a meeting of self-congratulation and praise for the Communist Party, the gathering of nearly 5,000 readily acknowledged the questions that many people have about where the country had gone wrong as well as the angry tempers today.

“Sometimes it is difficult today to understand what is what,” Anatoly I. Lukyanov, the chairman of the Soviet Parliament, said. “It is difficult to make a simple decision, to discuss anything civilly.”

But the manifest problems of the country should not detract from the importance of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukyanov asserted. “No one has the right to belittle the importance of this revolution and its influence on world history and the progress of human civilization,” he said, answering the Communist Party’s critics.

Still, there was criticism from other speakers.

Describing this as “a time of great trial for the country, of national tragedies and an economic disaster,” Irina A. Antonova, a museum director, drew thunderous applause when she said that the Soviet Union could only emerge by being honest about its mistakes.

“For many years, we have been living lies,” Antonova said. “We must not allow people’s minds to be poisoned further today with new lies.”

The country must distinguish, she argued, between the Bolshevik Revolution and “its noble, lofty ideals of freedom, justice, equality and the people’s happiness” and the mistakes made later as the system grew increasingly totalitarian in character.

Leonid Y. Bliznov, a machinist and a member of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, turned his criticism on the current leadership, including President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, who were both seated behind him.

Asking why the Soviet Union’s two most powerful men could not put their rivalry aside and work for the good of the nation, Bliznov said: “It is incomprehensible who or what stands in the way of these two leaders who know the people’s needs and whom the people recognize. Both must realize that continued opposition will cost them support.”

The criticism, supported by resounding applause, had its impact. Gorbachev approached Yeltsin after the meeting and, extending his hand, proposed that they meet, one on one, after the holiday to discuss their differences.

“People must again look back and pay tribute to what the revolution did and what the mistakes were during that period,” Yeltsin said, describing the holiday as a time for reflection. “The biggest mistake was turning things over to a totalitarian regime.”

Gorbachev, speaking later at a state awards ceremony, said, “We know that people in the factories and in the lines (for food and consumer goods) say that we in the leadership know nothing about the situation and do less to change it. In fact, we are aware of all the problems, and we are working for change.”

All these doubts and disputes aside, the traditional military parade will still be held in Red Square today to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution and the achievements of seven decades of socialism, and Soviet leaders will view it from Lenin’s mausoleum just beneath the Kremlin’s red walls.

But two alternative demonstrations, both authorized by the Moscow city government, will highlight the darker sides of Soviet history.

The Moscow Voters Assn., which sponsored several large anti-Communist demonstrations this year, will hold a “funeral march” from Staraya Ploshad, the square in front of the headquarters of the Communist Party, to the apartment building where longtime dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov lived until his death in 1989.

The organizers say they see this demonstration as a chance to mourn innocent victims who died under repression sponsored by the Communist state.

“The outcome of the revolution was that millions of our countrymen were murdered,” Vera F. Kriger, an organizer of the rally, said. “Because of this, our demonstration can be nothing but a funeral march.”

In another alternative Moscow demonstration, radicals in the national Parliament will lead a march from the Byelorussian railway station to Red Square. Its leaders include Oleg D. Kalugin, a former general in the KGB state security and espionage agency, and anti-corruption campaigners Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov.

Across the country, controversies about whether to hold Revolution Day celebrations have become a barometer of public opinion about the Bolshevik Revolution, the society it created--and what reforms the country must now undertake.

A strike organizer in the Arctic mining city of Inta told the independent Postfactum news service that union members will hold posters with anti-Communist slogans and the three-color flag of pre-revolutionary Russia during the parade there.

“Citizens, by turning this mournful date into a holiday,” the Inta trade unions said, “we are once again committing an act of outrage with respect to all sons and daughters of Russia who perished in the bloody meat chopper started by the Communists.”

The nationalist government in Armenia canceled the holiday altogether. In neighboring Azerbaijan, the military commander called off the parade to avoid inciting further unrest in the capital, Baku, the scene of ethnic rioting in January.

Military parades were banished from main thoroughfares in many other major Soviet cities.

In the southern Soviet republic of Georgia, where a bloc of parties calling for independence beat the Communists in elections last month, the army will hold a parade at a military base rather than in the center of Tbilisi, the capital.

The City Council of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, ordered the military to hold its parade away from the city center so the soldiers would not clash with radical students, whose calls for independence from the Soviet Union have grown over the last several weeks.

In Leningrad, where the 1917 Revolution began, liberal Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak quit his drive to cancel the holiday and sanctioned a traditional celebration.

Patriarch Alexi II of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose followers had been persecuted through much of Soviet rule, told the government newspaper Izvestia that Revolution Day should be a time of somber reflection.

“Let all the years that have passed rise in our conscience one after another,” Alexi said, “and persuade us not to pay for politicians’ experiments and principles with human destinies.”