For Man in the Street, a Weary Resignation : Reaction: Old animosities are softened by reluctant appreciation for Gorbachev’s departure.

Just before 7 o’clock Wednesday evening, in the cavernous waiting room of Moscow’s Byelorussian Railroad Station, hundreds of worn travelers suddenly looked attentively upward toward the public television suspended from the ceiling.

The block letters promising “The Declaration of U. S. S. R. President Gorbachev” brought dozens of people into the aisles to get closer to the set, and as Mikhail S. Gorbachev read through his resignation speech, they stood there frozen, craning their necks toward the screen.

Face after upturned face took on a solemn, grim expression, with eyes narrowed, perhaps to see the distant screen better, or perhaps in stoic acceptance of this latest twist of history.

“It makes me very sad,” said Anatoly Usenko, an aviation engineer from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. “But his period is over. It’s sad he has to go but it’s natural for him to pass the baton to someone better. Now, a stronger and more forward-looking leader should take the baton.”

Even among travelers from the working class--some of Gorbachev’s harshest critics during recent years as the rubles they earned came to buy less and less--the old rancor was softened by some reluctant appreciation.

“We do know more now, even if there’s nothing in the stores,” Belarus truck driver Victor Yevtsukhin said. “But we need both democracy and food.”

Usenko said that Gorbachev probably was a man ahead of his time, correct in the assessment he gave Wednesday night that the Soviet people didn’t know how to use the democracy he helped to give them. “He moved the stone from its place, and a lot was learned, and people started to realize that it’s better this way, but we haven’t grown into democracy yet,” Usenko said.

Alexei Kovalyonok, a tall, young history teacher from the Russian city of Nizhniy Novgorod, was most charitable to Gorbachev, predicting that “the man will go down in history as peerless.”

“He took the right road,” Kovalyonok said. “There was no other way. There may have been mistakes and detours on the way, but the highway he got on was the right one. I’d call him the Martin Luther of the 20th Century. Martin Luther reformed religion in the 16th Century and communism is also a kind of religion.”

But in general, although acknowledging the value of Gorbachev’s political reforms, the tired, well-bundled travelers at the Byelorussian Station had more to say about the series of obvious mistakes their president had made, mistakes that repeatedly affected their own lives, from an ill-conceived anti-alcohol campaign to price rises.

“He made blunders from the beginning,” said Alexander Pavelovich, a construction worker from the Orenburg region of Russia. “Blunders about vodka, about cigarettes. The mistakes came and were constantly being felt.”

And worst of all, several travelers said, was his inability to keep the Soviet Union together as a single country. “Things have just gotten worse under him,” said Yevtsukhin, the truck driver.

Gorbachev’s first mistake, said Vladimir Khaiko, a 60-year-old self-described “military man,” was that he tried to hold onto the three Baltic republics, even after their drive for independence took on unstoppable momentum.

“And his second mistake is that he allowed the collapse of the Union. It was all in his hands,” Khaiko said. “I’m sorry he gave up what he started and didn’t bring it to its conclusion.”

Usenko complained that Gorbachev was just not decisive enough for the job and refrained from using force even in the ethnic conflicts that demanded it.

“What he’s trying to say,” put in Lilia, a former Communist Party functionary sitting nearby, “is that our people love the stick.”

In fact, she argued, Gorbachev “is a great man. Time will show just how great.”

“For now,” she added, “All we have is high prices, grief, poverty. Now we talk about only the bad things. But that’s like the foam on waves. It will all die away, and then people will see how great he was.”