COLUMN ONE : Surviving the Latest Upheaval : Soviets living outside the nucleus of power in Moscow know that the events reshaping their nation are out of their hands. So they can only try to cope.

Baba Lena grips a makeshift walking stick for balance, but even at 79 she is agile enough to slip through the missing rail of a cemetery fence to take the shortcut to her humble cottage after her daily pilgrimage to buy bread.

Picking her way briskly along a garbage-strewn walkway, she spies a ruined chapel that strokes an old wound.

“I remember how the soldiers would stand in there, out of the falling snow, smoking, making sure no one went to the church,” recalls the widow, tsk-tsking through broken teeth. “They wouldn’t even let me care for the grave site of my first son, whose life lasted only 10 days.”

For Russians of Baba Lena’s generation, Soviet history has been a succession of heartaches and hardships: the switch to collective farms in the 1930s; the slaughter of World War II; forced industrialization after the war; the repression and decay of subsequent decades.

Now the country, which is younger than Baba Lena, is once again swept up in revolutionary fervor. Yet far from the fracas and numbed by the past, Baba Lena and her weary provincial compatriots shrug off the momentous events reshaping their nation.

From aged pensioners to disaffected teens, the silent majority of Soviets who never felt part of the system view its turbulent demise with detached fatigue. For millions in the smokestack provinces of the Russian Federation, reform is a buzzword for disorder, the latest variation on history’s unjust theme.

For them, the challenge is not to assist in the rebuilding. It is only to somehow survive it.

Yelena Suluyanova, known respectfully as Baba (Granny) Lena, knows nothing of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform drive or the intransigent Communists fighting his calls for change. She is illiterate and too consumed by the task of survival to pay much mind to the news.

“All I know is that I can only buy bread and canned fish with my pension,” says Baba Lena, whose only son who survived infancy was killed in World War II.

“How difficult our lives have been,” she sighs, her gnarled hands clasped thoughtfully across the grimy coat that has seen 30 winters, her wrinkled face effused more with surprise than anger.

At 57, Galina Tarasova has seen less of the hardship Baba Lena has endured. But the refrain of suffering and lost hope echoes consistently through generations.

“We worked for an idea, but the young people today don’t believe in anything. They have no idols left,” says the retired factory worker peddling flowers on Ulyanovsk’s main street, Goncharova. “We really believed in Stalin, and we wept when he died. How could we know what he was like? It’s so hard to carry on when life is so often turned inside out.”

The ranks of flower sellers, all augmenting their meager pensions, feel cheated by a system that promised them a comfortable old age. Rather than relaxing and reaping the rewards of their labor, they must struggle along on the proceeds of their gardens and spend countless hours in line for the most meager of goods.

Tarasova’s daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter share her one tiny room in a pre-revolutionary cottage that has neither toilet nor running water.

“Imagine, all four of us in one room--eating, sleeping and everything else,” she laments with a roll of her eyes over the nocturnal rumblings, evoking giggles and nods from her fellow peddlers who are exposed to the same indignity at the end of their lives.

The portly pensioner, retired from factory work, has heard plenty about Soviet reform but seen little in the way of improvement.

“We have glasnost (openness) but nothing else,” Tarasova jokes, to her colleagues’ amusement, a reference to the pervasive shortages that only Soviets inured to life in the provinces can see as funny.

A visit to any Ulyanovsk shop explains the black humor and pervasive apathy. Ill-fitting polyester sweaters sell for upwards of 200 rubles--more than a month’s pay for the average wage earner. Most basics--macaroni, sausage, sugar and butter, even socks and underwear--are strictly rationed when available, which is rarely.

“It’s true there’s nothing in the stores, but that is not what is most important,” insists Nikolai Kovalenko, a 43-year-old design engineer at the Ulyanovsk motor works who quit the Communist Party before last month’s coup in fear of just such a resort to repression. “That we live in peace and can plan for tomorrow is a gift we have only recently been able to enjoy.”

While Kovalenko offers a rare acknowledgement of advance in the name of reform, he has recently fallen victim to the sense of isolation and disorientation afflicting his neighbors in the city on the Volga River 485 miles southeast of Moscow.

As he slathers tar on scrap boards and nails them together to fence off his dacha, he tells why he quit the Communist Party and the pretense of being politically involved.

“I quit as soon as (Alexander) Yakovlev did,” the disillusioned patriot explains, referring to the father of glasnost who left the party with ominous forewarnings only a few days before last month’s coup. “I knew then that there was something deeply wrong and it would be best to get out.”

Now his attention is focused on work and family.

“To each his own,” says Kovalenko. “I now work for bread for my wife and two sons.”

Natalya Nikolaeva believes people in the Russian Federation provinces have been cast adrift by the severing of ideological ties that anchored their lives.

“We’ve lost our frame of reference,” says the 38-year-old airport clerk and mother of a teen-ager.

“We were raised to believe in Lenin, in the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol,” she says of communism’s icons and social clubs for young people. “Now they are all disgraced. What are we supposed to believe in now?”

It is too much, the carefully coiffed blonde insists with unaffected dismay, to ask the indoctrinated to switch to a completely new set of values.

“I wasn’t brought up to value money,” she says. “I was brought up believing that capitalism led to unemployment and other social ills. Now everyone is expected to take money matters into account. All I want to do is cover my head and hide.”

Yelena Vyekelicha couldn’t agree more. A 17-year-old private secretary to a blind professor, she sees little change in the pace of life in Ulyanovsk.

“A province is a province. This putsch didn’t even make a heartbeat here,” she says, sipping champagne with friends at a popular central cafe.

She expects no better a living than her parents have endured.

“I never knew, until I went to study in Moscow, that pizza was supposed to have cheese,” says the teen-ager.

It is this sense of unshakable backwardness that haunts Soviets who live beyond the nucleus of power in Moscow, a fear that whatever will happen to their country is a matter that is out of their hands.

“We simple people can only get involved by reading and keeping abreast of the news,” says Rima Mironchuk, a 65-year-old retired laborer who says she no longer knows what or in whom to believe. “It’s not in our power to decide things.”

Baba Lena, back at her dollhouse-like cottage that is almost 100 years old, says it matters little who runs the country.

She is perplexed by the spiraling rise of prices in the name of a political transformation she knows nothing about.

But with an intuitive sense that no authority can be depended on, she has scaled down her financial needs to a daily ration of bread and the canned fish she feeds to a cat named Marquis.

The old woman is already bundled against a winter that has yet to come. Pointing to a stash of home-grown tomatoes under a tiny bed that takes up half her kitchen, she concludes with the wisdom of ages: “You have to do for yourself.”