COLUMN ONE : At Least It’s Not Moscow : Amid the Soviet Union’s collapse, Minsk’s quiet and dullness are attractive qualities. Though the city is the capital of a new commonwealth, nobody’s getting too excited.

“Pancakes with fried fat” and “composite jelly” grace the menu at this city’s premier hotel.

The mayor hasn’t quite gotten around to taking down the Lenin portrait on his wall because, well, heck, he’s kind of used to it.

And on the neatly swept avenues, pedestrians still show their civic pride by almost never crossing against the light.

Welcome to Minsk, the less-than-bustling metropolis proposed as the capital of the new commonwealth arising on the remains of the old Soviet Union.

With U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III due to visit Minsk at midweek, Robert S. Strauss, the plain-spoken American ambassador to Moscow, compared the idea of establishing the commonwealth’s center in Minsk with moving the capital of the United States to much-maligned Newark, N.J.

But that was too cruel. It may have fewer faxes than most mid-size American businesses and a hotel-room shortage that makes begging and threatening an integral part of the check-in process, but Minsk has other qualities to recommend it for a new role in international politics.

First and foremost, officials say, in the complex bitterness between the giant Russian Federation and its traditional little brother, Ukraine, the republic of Belarus is conveniently remote from inter-Slav tension.

“If the center of the commonwealth were in Moscow, there would be envious feelings in Kiev and vice versa,” said Vladimir Kavyzin, chief of the Minsk City Council’s press center. “In our case, this is absolutely neutral territory that can’t be argued about by either side.”

Ukrainians “fear Moscow like fire,” said Mikhail Mikhayevich, deputy editor of the Belarus-language daily newspaper Zvyazda. “There’s double fear--the fear of the Soviet center and the fear of Russian imperial ambitions. So to remove that fear, (Russian President Boris N.) Yeltsin proposed Minsk to show he’s not trying to be a Bonaparte.”

High-level politics aside, Minsk residents argue proudly that the very qualities that give their city of 1.7 million the reputation of a phlegmatic backwater also make it a fine host for commonwealth summits.

For one thing, they say in a repeated chorus, it is quiet--meaning that amid the upheaval accompanying the Soviet Union’s collapse, commonwealth meetings are less likely here than almost anywhere else to be interrupted by shooting, mass protests or food riots in the streets.

“Our republic has always been calm,” taxi driver Oleg Bakus boasted. “Ask any Soviet person and he’ll tell you: Even in these hungry years, we live better, and you know why? Because we’re used to working.”

Belarus diligence shows in Minsk. Stores are noticeably better stocked than those of almost any other Soviet city’s, even though officials have launched virtually none of the market-oriented reforms believed elsewhere to be the recipe for prosperity.

That conservatism, believes Minsk’s jovial mayor, Alexander Gerasimenko, may be the key to his city’s relative prosperity.

“Belarus is a rational republic,” Gerasimenko said, “and the people are rational. They think before they do things. Why do we live better? Because we’re rational and we act better. In Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), they take hasty decisions based on emotions.”

In Minsk, the populace is so slow to move that a giant statue of V. I. Lenin still stands in the central square six months after the Communist Party was banned. Portraits of Lenin and Karl Marx still hang in the editorial offices of Zvyazda as well, and though the names are due to change soon, visitors can still stand on the intersection of Lenin Street and Lenin Avenue.

Minsk’s tardy movement away from communism, however, also means that the city has done little to develop the foreign presence and profit-oriented service sector that will be crucial if hundreds of leaders, aides, journalists and experts periodically converge on the Svisloch River capital.

In a typical Soviet-era mix, Minsk has 179 World War II monuments and 16 hotels. Its telephone system is so antiquated that one city official suggested that commonwealth leaders and journalists would do well to ask for access to army communications systems from the Belarus Military District commanders.

Taxi drivers estimate that Minsk already needs almost triple its current number of cabs--about 1,700. And the Minsk International Airport has been under construction, according to one cabbie’s memory, for about 10 years and still looks only half-finished, although a Minsk-New York flight is scheduled to begin this week.

With 150,000 families on the waiting list for larger apartments, it is hard to imagine where even the smallest of commonwealth permanent staffs will live and work. Some propose that they take over several old party buildings. But the city council has promised to use them for culture, medicine and other social needs, and the Belarus Foreign Ministry, now in the utter disarray of moving and trying to expand to meet new demands, is slated to take over one former Communist headquarters already.

As for evening entertainment for potential hordes of foreign visitors, there is always the Stone Flower, one of Minsk’s two nightclubs with floor shows, offering a circular dance floor that curves around a giant white pillar in the form of a stem--presumably of a flower, although it somehow looks more like a mushroom.

The house drink, a concoction of dry wine and apple juice, is reputedly a tasty accompaniment to the dancers in scanty chiffon ruffles and the mini-clad crooners with mercilessly bleached hair. It was unavailable last week, though--the Stone Flower had run out of wine.

Minsk’s limitations are obvious, but in fact the city is a postwar miracle, built back up into a pleasing ensemble of broad avenues and imposing buildings after almost 90% of its structures were destroyed by the German invasion during World War II.

In recent years, an influx of rural dwellers has almost tripled Minsk’s population, said Vladimir Narkevich, editor-in-chief of Zvyazda.

“So if you’re talking about the commonwealth,” he said, “Minsk has experience in explosive growth, and it won’t be hard to evolve into a real world-class city.”

The extent to which Minsk will indeed be a capital is as foggy as most other aspects of the nascent commonwealth, and Mayor Gerasimenko said he had not been consulted beforehand by commonwealth leaders and still does not know even “the basic outlines” of Minsk’s future functions.

The agreement signed by the three Slavic leaders on Dec. 8 in a Belarus hunting lodge says only that the commonwealth is open to other members and that “the city of Minsk has been chosen as the official place for the gathering of the coordinating organs of the commonwealth.”

Yeltsin, however, said in a later speech that “Minsk is not the capital of the commonwealth. It is the place where heads of state and some working groups could get together. That doesn’t mean that any working structures we create for coordination necessarily have to be in Minsk.”

Minsk residents appear to be holding back on any excitement about their city’s new status until official plans take firmer shape.

“Let’s just see what will happen,” said Igor Zemsky, a 22-year-old plumber leaning against the balcony rail of Minsk’s giant central farmer’s market and cracking sunflower seeds with his teeth. “There’s only hope so far that this will bring something better.”

“I don’t believe in it,” Svetlana Pilyugina, a clerk at a central Minsk souvenir store said as she stood near a display of miniature glass models of Minsk’s best-known war monument. “It may become a capital, but I don’t believe that anything will change.”

But maybe that is just as well, she reflected.

“Minsk is small and neat,” Pilyugina said. “And the people are just so nice.”

Minsk: A Not-So-Bustling Metropolis

Devastated in World War II, Minsk has bounced back as a clean, serene and relatively sleepy city. It is the proposed capital of the commonwealth expected to succeed the Soviet Union. Some facts about Minsk:

* Founded: AD 1067

* Population . . .

in 1941: 270,000

in 1945: 50,000

in 1991: 1.7 million

* Housing destroyed in World War II: more than 80%

* Families waiting for bigger apartments: 150,000

* Apartments built yearly: 17,000

* Number of fax machines in the Yubileynaya Hotel, considered one of Minsk’s top hotels: 1

* Metro lines: 2

* Taxis: about 1,700

* Flight time from Moscow: 1 hour

* Industrial output per capita per year: $10,500, compared to $7,500 in Moscow and $6,800 in Kiev.

* Main population groups: 70% Belarussian, 20% Russian, 4% Ukrainian, 4% Jewish

* Belarus residents who support commonwealth: 67% (10% oppose)

Sources: City and republic governments