Postscript : The City That Led Russia Into Space Is in Retreat : * Leninsk residents once saw only the future, launching satellites, rockets and space capsules. With the Soviet space program in limbo, they are suddenly groping for survival.

Imagine, if you can, the Kennedy Space Center with its employees lined up to buy bread. Or clerks in motels around Cape Canaveral tallying the day’s bills on an abacus because there are no electronic calculators.

That will give you an idea of how schizophrenic life is in Leninsk, population 90,000--”the city where the Space Age began,” but where eggs are now so scarce they must be rationed.

For more than a third of a century, the highly qualified people who live here have blasted satellites and human beings into outer space. But they can’t produce enough milk to supply the town’s 1,216 infants.

Built on the flat, barren banks of the Syrdarya River, this settlement honored with the name of Soviet founder V. I. Lenin was created from scratch to be the command post and bedroom community for the great national effort that launched Sputnik and the cosmonauts.

But in the town’s fifth-floor maternity ward, things are still so low-tech that the toilets don’t flush. The premier store, the Univermag on a pedestrian walkway called Central Street, has so few wares that shelves marked “leather goods” and “perfume” are stocked with toilet paper at five rubles (about a nickel) a roll.

On Soviet Square, a great statue of Lenin extends his arm, showing, locals say, the way to the cosmos that is Leninsk’s vocation. In the scruffy Central Hotel across the way, the elevator hasn’t worked since the day the place opened.

Leninsk doesn’t appear on most maps; in fact, its existence was long such a closely guarded secret that expectant mothers here were barred from going anywhere else to have their babies. It is ringed by a high white concrete wall, and soldiers manning guard posts still check the papers of anyone coming and going.

As spring comes to the nearly treeless flatlands near the Aral Sea, what for Soviets was nothing less than “Space City” now seems to float on a sea of dun-colored mud. Roads are rutted and deteriorating.

Residents live in dreary prefab high-rises spruced up with rocket and satellite motifs. Although they may work in rocketry, guidance systems or some other advanced field, many move around on bicycles, since they can’t afford a car, and none are on sale anyway.

In vast lots overgrown with grass blown in from the surrounding steppe, here and there one sees a monument to the conquerors of space who worked at the nearby Baikonur Cosmodrome and made Leninsk their home. Their successors wonder what will happen to them now that the Soviet Union has disappeared.

“Baikonur without the rest of the country is like a wheel without the rest of the car,” cosmonaut Alexander Viktorenko said.

Although Leninsk is in Kazakhstan, one doesn’t see many moon-shaped Kazakh faces here. The Russians remain in charge until somebody works out exactly who owns Baikonur.

This is a company town, and the “company” is the Space Units of the former Soviet armed forces. What has grown up since Leninsk was settled in the mid-1950s looks like a Russian military outpost in a foreign land. Army officers hold 65 of the 100 seats on the city council.

But the town is being buffeted by the same forces that brought down the Soviet Union. In February, thousands of Kazakhs drafted into the Construction Troops and brought here to do menial, backbreaking labor decided they had had enough of their appalling living and working conditions.

Space City, it turned out, was being built and maintained by a labor pool that was seemingly treated little better than slaves. The 17,000 Construction Troops were paid seven rubles a month, or enough to buy a single stick of bubble gum. Even that pittance was withheld for three months.

The soldiers, mostly 18 and 19 years old, complained that officers--mostly Russians and other Europeans--trained their dogs to attack conscripts for sport.

On Feb. 24-26, the Construction Troops rioted. A government commission is probing the incident, but the spark seems to have been an attempt by the troops to ram their way into the commandant’s office in a stolen car.

Three people were burned to death--two of them reportedly Russian officers. Elite police units, armed for battle, kept the rampaging Kazakhs from penetrating the walled city, but “panic” broke out here anyway, one lieutenant colonel recalls.

Commanders hastily demobilized thousands of the Construction Troops and sent the rest home on what is supposed to be a short holiday. The cheap labor on which Leninsk depended may never return.

The unspoken compact that residents used to have with the state has also disappeared. The deal was simple: In exchange for diligent scientific work in austere conditions, the Soviet government kept the settlement supplied with choice foodstuffs and a luxury or two. But that arrangement expired with the demise of the Soviet Union.

“I’ve lived here for seven years, and in the past two, things have really deteriorated,” said Lyubov Osachai, a military officer’s wife from the Ural Mountains city of Perm. “Even a year ago, things weren’t the way they are now--the lines for bread, the lack of milk.”

The state-run supply system that built and maintained Leninsk from far-flung depots ranging from Moscow to Alma-Ata is now so moribund that the City Council here has passed an ordinance barring people from taking more than 6 1/2 pounds of meat or five cans of fish out of town.

In Space City, infants are far more prone to illness than elsewhere in Kazakhstan. Residents face frequent power failures and water cuts.

Mikhail I. Druzhinin, former chief of Communist indoctrination at the space center, returned to Leninsk recently after a 21-year absence, and shook his head at how life has changed. Noting that buildings were “heated” to only 44 degrees Fahrenheit, he grumbled to the local newspaper: “I don’t understand how things have come to this.”

Residents now debate how to guarantee that their city--an offspring of the Soviet military-industrial complex--will survive the complex’s passing.

Some want to open up Leninsk completely to encourage commercial space projects. Others caution that if the city loses its “closed” status and people can come and go freely, crime will rise and housing, now relatively available, will become scarce.

In any event, it will clearly take massive investment to end the Jekyll-and-Hyde existence of this high-tech, low-tech locale. One recent morning, a group of visitors attended the picture-perfect launch of three cosmonauts at Baikonur. They were then rushed back to Leninsk for a return flight to Moscow.

Officials sheepishly told the foreigners they had to leave, since Leninsk restaurants had run out of food to feed them.