COLUMN ONE : A Grim Prophecy Fulfilled : Dire predictions for a collapsed Soviet Union have been borne out in a former republic. Anarchy reigns, thousands are dead, and tales of hideous cruelty abound.

Khalida Mansurova, a petite college secretary, had to step over the fresh corpses in her entryway recently to get out to buy bread.

When Islamic fighters took over the presidential palace here in September, they blindfolded economic adviser Mirsaid Saidov and threatened to teach him “how to fish”--meaning they would not shoot him as they had his colleagues but simply tie him up and throw him into the river.

Russian border guard Valery Romantsov could only look on in wonder as panicked families, fleeing into Afghanistan, trampled down the frontier fence he was supposed to protect. He knew they were only trying to escape the slaughter in their home villages.

“It’s just a madhouse here,” he said.

With anarchy sweeping the land and thousands dead, the economy in total collapse and half a million refugees on the loose, Tajikistan is living out the dire predictions that Dark Ages would succeed the Soviet regime in much of the former empire.

More have died in this country’s eight months of civil war than in all the other current conflicts on former Soviet territory combined.

Imomali Rakhmonov, the Central Asian nation’s new leader, has put the death toll at between 20,000 and 40,000. The government estimates that the fighting has wrought $500 million worth of damage to an economy that was already the poorest in the former Soviet Union.

The International Red Cross, the only Western aid group with a resident mission in the remote, mountainous republic bordering China and Afghanistan, believes that many of Tajikistan’s 500,000 refugees are now in danger from exposure and hunger.

The turmoil has brought not only chaos but also hideous cruelty. Tales abound of atrocities on both sides, and fighters supporting the current government show films of the remains of people who had been forced to drink gasoline and then were set on fire.

Russian media have reported widespread torture, with practices ranging from scraping off a victim’s skin to drilling a hole in his head and slowly extracting his brains.

Since the current pro-Communist government retook Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, from an opposition composed of Islamic fundamentalists, secular democrats and southern clans in early December, hundreds of revenge killings have been reported as triumphant government fighters carry out what they call “cleanup” operations.

Saidsho Davlatov, the camouflage-clad commander of 600 fighters in the pro-government Tajik People’s Front, said ominously that his men “are now looking for the guilty ones, those who took up arms. And we’re going to purge them.”

Beyond the suffering it has brought the country’s 5 million citizens, Tajikistan’s conflict poses a regional menace, its violence threatening to spill over into nearby Central Asian nations that have similar ethnic and political makeups.

It has also turned the former Soviet border with Afghanistan--once a solidly defended system of fences--into a mass of holes. Seasoned Afghan resistance fighters, who mainly support the Islamic opposition, send a stream of arms across the frontier, receiving Tajik cars, carpets and jewelry--and reportedly sometimes women and children--in exchange.

Throughout the fall and into late December, tens of thousands of Tajik refugees knocked down barriers there and crossed illegally into Afghanistan.

The weakened border so worried members of the Commonwealth of Independent States that they pledged at their Jan. 22 summit to send at least four battalions to support the overwhelmed Russian guards there.

On Friday, the Tajik government declared a state of emergency along the Afghan border, banning virtually all political activity, the Itar-Tass news agency reported, adding that the decree was imposed to restore order and end smuggling and other border violations.

Russia, worried about the 300,000 Slavs living in Tajikistan and the prospect of a broader war on its southern flank, has been trying to help maintain order in Tajikistan by leaving in place its stringently neutral border guards and an infantry division.

But aside from holding on to the border zone, picking up corpses and trying to protect their own bases and families, there is little the soldiers can do.

In Dushanbe, a formal state of emergency has reigned since Jan. 8. Young men who favor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme action movies stroll the streets with the special strut that a Kalashnikov over the shoulder imparts. Civilians stand in line for bread in daytime and do not dare venture outside after dark descends at 5 o’clock.

Only the tree-lined streets and brightly striped robes on some men hint at the leisurely charm of prewar Dushanbe, a city of long interludes in teahouses and giant welcoming kettles of plov, the national rice dish coated in heavy grease.

Although Dushanbe was largely quiet on a recent visit, the fighting continued in the regions near the glorious snowy heights of the Pamir mountain range, with the new government reportedly launching a major offensive against opposition forces there in mid-January.

The battles and the dead are visible facts, but exactly who is fighting whom, and why, remains a matter of interpretation so murky that many Tajiks say they simply do not know.

Some describe the conflict as simple clan warfare, a regional clash stemming from decades of domination by prosperous northern Tajikistan over the poorer south and center, with the powerful central Kulyab region and many ethnic Uzbeks siding with the north and the poorer Pamir region siding with the south.

Others call the war a struggle of ideas, pitting Islamic fundamentalists who want an Iran-style theocracy and their strange political bedfellows, liberal democrats, against Communist hard-liners.

“Islamic fundamentalism is a plague that spreads easily,” said Tahir Akhmedov, a Foreign Ministry official with a poster of Madonna on his office wall. Most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims, but “we want to live in an enlightened, democratic society, not like in Iran,” Akhmedov said.

Still others say that Tajikistan fell victim to a geopolitical power struggle--that it is now a critical domino in Iran-based fundamentalism’s quest for expansion. When the opposition reigned, they note, Tajik television was broadcasting Iranian news shows, and calls to prayer came over the radio five times a day.

And then there is the “Mafia” factor--well-armed, established criminal groups that are aligned with political forces but, as even Tajik security police acknowledge, are actually fighting for control over territory to fatten their racketeering income.

All those elements appear to be in play. Men from the north and the Kulyab region predominate in the current government; the new leader, Rakhmonov, is a 40-year-old collective farm chairman from Kulyab.

Government officials deny vigorously that they are pro-Communist--”Where do you see Communists here? Where?” the solid, beetle-browed Rakhmonov asked, spreading his arms wide. But he and his allies remain members of the party and lean on supporters with red armbands.

Their opposition comes mainly from the poor Garm district and the Pamir environs, now the last strongholds of the anti-government fighters.

According to the government line, Tajikistan would have muddled through the confusion of the post-Soviet era if not for the Islamic fundamentalist underground that had been building support and training fighters for close to 20 years.

“You can go outside in cold weather and not catch a cold,” presidential economic adviser Rustam Mirzoyev said. “But if bacteria are present. . . .”

Opposition members--contacted in Moscow because all their leaders have reportedly escaped either to Afghanistan, Russia or farther abroad--blamed the fallen pro-Communist president, Rakhman Nabiyev, for being unable to function in a democracy, unwilling to share power until it was too late.

Now, said journalist-in-exile Timur Klychev, the backlash against opposition members is so violent that “it amounts to genocide. They are being hunted down to a man.”

In essence, said Communist Party chief Shodi Shabdolov, Tajikistan is caught in a historical spasm.

“The old government structure collapsed and a new one wasn’t ready to replace it, and so political currents carried everything away,” he said.

“We just weren’t politically prepared,” said Tajikistan Parliament spokesman Abdulzhabor Aliev. “We weren’t politically mature.”

Whoever was at fault, Tajikistan fell apart so badly that the presidential palace has changed hands three times since May, and blood feuds are intensifying.

Inkhom Rakhmatov, deputy chairman of Tajikistan’s security police, acknowledged that hatred was burning so high in many of his compatriots that authorities could not hope to control them.

He said that attempts to persuade government fighters to leave suspected opposition members to the court system brought this response: “Where were you when they raped my mother, killed my wife and took all my property? And if someone (from the opposition) falls into my hands, you really expect me to call you?”

Despite government claims to have the fighting under control, Tajik citizens are convinced that the bloodshed will continue. And for the scores of thousands who ran from the brush fire of conflict that swept their regions, no relief is in sight.

Kasira Saodat, 36, crammed with her five children and elderly mother into the room of a dormitory meant for students of Dushanbe’s Polytechnical School No. 4, said she still does not know why fighters came to her village last month, drove her away and burned down her home.

Now, she said in the smelly, concrete-floored dormitory swarming with barefoot, grubby children, “Look at how we live. Even a cow should not live this way.”

Caught in equally frightening circumstances are permanent residents of Dushanbe such as Mansurova, the college secretary who found herself “sitting in the middle of a war” last month.

“We ourselves can’t understand who’s fighting whom,” her niece, Raisa Fazleyeva, said as she ran the record department of Dushanbe’s main department store.

The fighting and fears of ethnic reprisals are spurring many of Tajikistan’s ethnic Slavs to move north to Russia. Real estate firms are springing up to facilitate “resettlement” for Russians so eager to leave that they sell four-room apartments in Dushanbe for as little as $1,000.

Refugees are so desperate that tens of thousands have crossed into Afghanistan despite the lack of shelter and food for them there. Dozens, many of them children, have reportedly died of exposure and hunger as they tried to dig bunkers to protect themselves from the winter winds.

Other former Soviet republics in Central Asia appear increasingly reluctant to take in floods of Tajiks, complaining that armed fighters often sneak in along with the legitimate refugees.

Uzbekistan has particular cause to worry, with more than 1 million ethnic Tajiks, a healthy Islamic fundamentalist movement of its own and a hard-line government headed by Communist-era holdover President Islam Karimov.

Karimov has been the most vocal among Central Asian leaders in warning that Tajikistan’s troubles could spread, and opposition members say he has supplied thousands of troops as well as armor and aircraft to shore up the current government.

As it pushes to take the last opposition strongholds, the Tajik government is trying to impose order elsewhere by forcing militants to turn in the estimated 30,000 guns floating around the country.

Recent nights in Dushanbe have left only two or three corpses on the street--compared to 140 or so last month--but with reports of opposition fighters regrouping in Afghanistan and the Pamirs for a new attack, few Tajiks expect the quiet to last.

“This is just a small breathing spell,” Fazleyeva said. “They’ll gather their forces, and the fighting will start all over again.”

“It’s just one big nightmare,” Mansurova said.

Fazleyeva shrugged. “It’s pointless, all of it.”