2 Delegates Watch Chaos in Congress : Politics: ‘The worst thing is that people don’t listen to each other--they only hear what they want to hear,’ says a singer from Moldova.

By Tuesday night, Leonid Sukhov, a Kharkov taxi driver unable to afford a restaurant meal, was eating a modest dinner in his hotel room, while Mikhail Muntyan, an opera singer from Moldova, was studying Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” in the coziness of the Moldovan mission’s guest house.

Their styles differ. But the two delegates to the Congress of People’s Deputies shared one thing--the conviction that the Congress now under way in Moscow was working poorly and headed in the wrong direction.

Both Sukhov and Muntyan admitted that it was an undeniably dreary day of speeches on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s plan for a new government structure giving the country’s 15 republics more freedom.

“The worst thing is that people don’t listen to each other--they only hear what they want to hear,” Muntyan said. “In such chaos, a person is needed who could appear and say, ‘Comrades, let’s work!’ ”

Sukhov said he found it hard to sit through the eight hours because the country was falling apart and the Congress appeared about to put its official seal on the dissolution.

“I wish I could have spoken,” he said. “Although maybe it’s just as well--I would have been thinking about what I wanted to say instead of listening.”

Muntyan--whose small, southwestern republic has declared independence--did not even make it all the way through the day’s sessions. In the afternoon, a dispute suddenly arose with Congress officials over Moldova’s declaration of independence, and he was called away to solve the crisis.

The problem, Muntyan said later, was that the Secretariat, which takes care of the Congress’ daily affairs, “picked a quarrel” and refused to accept the declaration because it had been sent by fax. The rest of the Moldovan delegation was “pretty inert,” Muntyan said, so he dashed off for a quick phone call to the republic’s capital, Kishinev.

After a talk with the republic’s leadership, and some negotiating at the Congress, Muntyan secured the Secretariat’s agreement to accept a copy of the declaration, thus clearing the way for the Parliament to discuss Moldova’s independence--one of his delegation’s top goals.

“The most important thing right now is two points,” he said. “To recognize the independence of the republics that have reached that point and to come to an economic agreement. Today, nothing else can be done.”

Muntyan was disturbed Tuesday by news from home--of a mounting confrontation with the non-Moldovan minority living in a section of the republic that has declared itself a separate entity called the Dniester Republic.

Dniester residents were blocking roads between Moldova and the rest of the Soviet Union, he had been told. Now they were threatening to cut off the electricity and gas if Moldova did not withdraw its declaration of independence.

Unknowingly, Muntyan was bearing out Sukhov’s central opinion about the dangers of changing republics’ status and allowing ties to fray under ethnic friction.

As Tuesday’s session ended, Sukhov complained that everything, “as always, is going according to the scenario of Mikhail Sergeyevich” Gorbachev, who--he said--is allowing the Soviet Union to spin apart.

The Congress is full of people who are used to doing whatever the leader tells them, Sukhov said. “In this society, the leader is still everything.” The speech he liked best, Sukhov added, “warned that breaking up the union could lead to catastrophic events.”

Sukhov, a taxi driver who consciously speaks for the working class, said he sits next to a professor who has an innovative solution to the country’s problems but who has been unable to gain the floor.

Sukhov failed to sign up in time to speak. In any case, he added, another speaker had already said what he wanted to say: the republics “can’t stop helping each other.”

Often when he and other deputies are sitting around in one of their rooms eating breakfast--food they have bought because the hotel buffet is too expensive for them--they discuss the problems of the non-Russian republics and the Russians and other minorities who face growing problems as the drive for independence continues, Sukhov said.

“We get together and exchange opinions,” said Sukhov, a Russian living in the Ukraine who has a personal stake in good inter-ethnic relations. “It just hurts that the union is falling apart.”