COLUMN ONE : Sad Legacy of Lenin in Leningrad : Once elegant, the cradle of socialism teems with pollution, hunger and hopelessness. But the city has exorcised Communist power and is desperate to start anew.

They don’t look much like revolutionaries, the hundreds of haggard workers drawn by a common purpose to the foot of Dictatorship of the Proletariat Street.

They plod drone-like outside the grim concrete Universam grocery store, concerned only with the dictatorship of standing-in-line etiquette, which ensures that the righteous triumph in their battle to buy cottage cheese.

Stone-faced and emotionally deadened by a lifetime of hardship and broken promises, the desperate foragers appear too docile and downtrodden to ever confront authority.

Yet it is these stoic victims of institutionalized inefficiency who have brought down the monolithic Communist Party, most swiftly and ironically in this city of Soviet power’s birth.

More than the allure of building a socialist utopia, it was a March, 1917, food riot that toppled the last czar in this former capital of Imperial Russia. V. I. Lenin and his zealous Bolsheviks filled the power vacuum seven months later.

Now, after 74 years and another spate of days that shook the world, it is again hunger and hopelessness transforming the cradle of the Great October Revolution into socialism’s grave.

A counterrevolution by the bitter and disappointed proletariat has decisively swept Leningrad Communists from power, bringing what may be history’s most devastating political experiment to a merciful end.

But discrediting the ideology that was born of one coup and died of another will likely prove the easy part of Leningrad’s latest political upheaval. The party’s one undeniable accomplishment during the better part of a century of absolute rule was its penetration of every level of society and building a bureaucracy that threatens to live on.

“Today the situation is much more difficult than in 1917, because everything has been destroyed during this 70-year experiment,” says Ernst Perchik, head of the city government committee for social justice. “We have lost our beautiful city, our hope and our ability to work.”

Pondering a question that was unspeakable even just a few weeks ago, Perchik wonders aloud from his cellar cubbyhole of the stately Marinsky Palace: “What was Lenin thinking of when he created such a state?

“Such a principle could never succeed,” insists the bearded municipal deputy, typical of Leningrad’s post-Communist leadership whose reforms have been bolstered by the failed Kremlin coup.

“Our people go to their workplaces to sit and eat and talk. They earn only a little, but they get that salary for doing nothing. Nothing is ever produced because no one can get anything for his effort. Was this the society Lenin had in mind?”

The ravages of a philosophy by which ambition and property were deplored as evil are most visible in this city where elegance has been wholly displaced by willful neglect. The “Venice of the North” now has little in common with the Italian city it once sought to emulate, aside from periodic floods and waterways plugged with sewage.

The Baroque architecture of the city founded as St. Petersburg is encased in grime from the oily exhaust spewed out by a constant convoy of empty trucks and overloaded buses.

Most of the mud-encrusted delivery vehicles crowd the rutted city avenues without good cause. Some drivers are simply running up the odometer, since they are paid by the distance they drive rather than by the quantity of goods delivered. Others are on personal errands, ferrying girlfriends to work or moving a heavy object for a friend, building up points in the favor network on which the quality of Soviet life depends.

With so few trucks transporting their intended cargo, shops stay empty even when food and goods are sufficiently produced.

“We are not poor. We have gold and a wealth of natural resources,” says Perchik, digging at the roots of Soviet discontent. “Yet we are in such a state that just a rumor of butter will bring masses of people flocking into the streets.”

Lenin’s attempt to make reality out of Karl Marx’s dream of a workers paradise stalled in his namesake city more than a year ago when voters were allowed to hold free elections for the first time in their history. Democratic reformers won more than two-thirds of the seats in the new Lensoviet government, relegating the Communists to opposition status.

In a stunning expression of Leningrad’s ideological sea change, residents decided in a June referendum to restore the name given their city when it was founded by Peter the Great. The reversion to St. Petersburg still awaits Russian Federation approval, but the popular vote inflicted a deep scar on Lenin’s icon-like image.

And since the party’s bungled coup attempt in Moscow, what little remained of Communist power has been thoroughly exorcised.

Leningrad’s popular mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, was one of the first Soviet politicians to denounce the putsch on Aug. 19. Thousands of the city’s silent revolutionaries, tired of contemplating their anger while waiting in line, found a voice for their long-stifled hostility and hit the streets to demand protection of reform.

“Communist power in Leningrad had already been exposed as fiction,” says Inna Tkachenko, a political columnist with the liberal newspaper Smena. “Since the coup, it has absolutely no authority whatsoever.”

Since the attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev failed, Leningrad officials have shut down all party operations, including the headquarters at historic Smolny Institute. The imposing yellow mansion overlooking a bend in the Neva River--a finishing school in czarist times--was the nerve center for the 1917 revolution and a Leninist shrine until last week.

Criminal investigators now comb the oak-lined halls of hallowed Smolny, searching for evidence against erstwhile untouchables who may have had a hand in the Kremlin coup.

As a team from the city prosecutor’s office hustled out six sealed metal trunks of documents late Friday, a Soviet tourist snapped a picture of his mother standing before Smolny’s statue of Lenin. One of 127 erected in this city, the bronze tribute seems destined for the scrap heap, or one of the new museums sprouting in reformist Russia dedicated to the victims of Communist repression.

Lenin’s fall from grace may be mostly symbolic, but city leaders say the replacement of his flawed political legacy is of Gargantuan importance.

“A post-Communist structure is already appearing in Leningrad now,” says Nikolai Smirnov, whose Popular Front pushed the Communists to the sidelines in last year’s election. “But we cannot yet say what strength or political orientation it will have.”

Unless a palpable difference can be made in the destitute lives of the people, today’s democratic leadership risks losing momentum and falling victim to the same political fatigue that has done in reform Communists.

“The putsch has speeded up the pace of change, but also the level of psychosis,” Smirnov says, pointing to intensified secessionist movements that threaten to break up the Soviet Union.

“We can be integrated into Europe only when we have our internal affairs in order,” Smirnov says.

While conventional wisdom in Leningrad holds that Communist power is a thing of the past, some of the city’s older residents worry that their lives will be judged by history to have been wasted and their contributions overlooked in the feverish quest to bury the party.

“Some people think we have just thrown away 70 years, but I don’t see things that way,” says Ivan Vasiliev, 83, a native of St. Petersburg. “People accomplished much, maybe for the party, maybe not. But it got done just the same. The Soviet Union became a superpower. We defeated fascism. . . . We did it for the motherland, and all would do so again today.”

As a survivor of the siege of Leningrad and decorated veteran of World War II, Vasiliev shares the discomfort of his dwindling contemporaries about the direction in which younger Soviets are pushing their city.

He accuses the new reformers manning the Leningrad government of dwelling on peripheral issues.

“I don’t know about changing the name back to St. Petersburg,” says the toothless veteran, compressing the wrinkles of his mouth into doubtful creases. “It sounds too German for my liking, but if the people want this, let them decide. In any case, it’s not the principal issue. We should be worrying about the winter that is coming, yet the Lensoviet (government) is concerned more with who might have done what during this coup.”

The youthful forces taking over Leningrad society agree that the impending name change is symbolic but contend that it is important to restore their cosmopolitan city’s original identity.

“The name of Lenin has been used as a kind of decoration by the Soviets to cover the identity of St. Petersburg,” says Tkachenko, the political commentator at Smena, where most of the staff is under 30. “People here have already stopped seeing this as the city of Lenin. Whether it will again be identified with Peter the Great, I’m not sure. People have so many other problems to deal with immediately that they don’t talk about the past or the future.”

Peter the Great wrested his imperial capital from the swampland of Russia’s northwestern corner. Thousands of serfs died in what was an ironic forerunner of socialism’s hero projects before Russia’s “window on the West” was opened in 1703. Until the Bolshevik Revolution two centuries later, St. Petersburg was an architectural and cultural jewel at the edge of an untamed empire, exposing its residents to European values and style.

Whether Czar Peter’s capital ever recovers its former glory will likely depend on the initiative of Leningrad’s distracted and reluctant revolutionaries.

Simply putting a halt to the systematic destruction of their city would be enough to satisfy most. Tired of being subjected to the whim of experiments cooked up in Moscow, the people have revolted against illogical projects such as a massive seawall being constructed around the mouth of the Neva in the Gulf of Finland.

The 15-mile structure was envisioned as a barrier against the seasonal floods that regularly inundate Leningrad. But if completed, it would have the concurrent effect of damming about 60,000 cubic feet of untreated waste discharged into the Neva each day, turning the city threaded by canals into a giant open sewer.

“With the money spent on this project, we could have replaced the whole public transport network,” complains Galya Nikolaeva, a retired power station worker. She gestures disparagingly toward a smoke-belching bus running the gauntlet of sooty buildings flanking Dzerzhinsky Street, named for the KGB founder otherwise known as “Bloody Felix.”

“Look at what socialism has given us! Our city and the environment are ruined,” the 50-year-old pensioner laments. She bobs her henna-tinted bun toward the street nameplate and thinks better of her denunciation.

“On the other hand, maybe this is how a street named for Dzerzhinsky should look.”