Profile : He Gets a Kick Out of Russia’s Foibles : Author Vladimir Voinovich delights in satirizing his nation’s chaotic bureaucracy.

With an ironic smile, Vladimir N. Voinovich stepped to the microphone to offer apologies to his audience.

Outside the House of Writers theater on Herzen Street, traffic was frozen solid. The flashing blue lights of militia patrols could be spotted in the jam, and rumors spread from car to car of fights and gun battles breaking out in town. Two days earlier, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin had dissolved Parliament and blockaded its headquarters, known as the White House.

Still, several hundred people had gathered to see a bare-bones production of a Voinovich play called “The Fictitious Wedding.”

“We have a slight technical problem,” Voinovich announced. “Our main actress still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps she’s been held down by the White House.”

Nervous titters in the hall. Two years ago, Yeltsin made his name an international byword by standing down right-wing coup plotters from atop a military tank in front of that very building. A week after Voinovich’s little speech, Yeltsin would be staging his own theater of the absurd by sending the same tanks to blast the building into charred rubble.

This answered a nagging question about Voinovich’s future as a Russian satirist. For without a Soviet bureaucracy, a chronicler of the bureaucracy’s absurdities might be feeling somewhat beached--like John Le Carre without a Cold War. As it happens, Soviet bureaucracy may be dead, but Soviet behavior lives on.

“Before, this country was a madhouse, but it was an organized madhouse,” he said in an interview in his Moscow apartment a few days after the theater performance. (The actress finally showed up.) “Now, it’s a disorganized madhouse. The insane are allowed to do whatever they want, so in this sense everything is much funnier than before. There is plenty to write about.”

It might take a Vladimir Voinovich to do justice to what has been happening in Moscow. Since Russia’s literary flowering in the 19th Century, the country has always made space for satirists. And for the last 30 years, this role has been played by Voinovich, the heir to Nikolai Gogol, Ilf and Petrov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Now silver-haired, with a voice alternating in tone between amused and bemused, Voinovich has made a specialty of skewering the Communist nomenklatura, which in turn has done its best over the years to skewer him.

In 1974, he was expelled from the Writers Union, which meant he could no longer publish in the Soviet Union. A year later, he charged, the KGB tried to poison him with a tainted cigarette. Finally, in 1980, he was forced to emigrate, setting up shop in Munich. Now, he divides his time between Germany and Russia--making him a rarity among emigre authors of his generation, many of whom have acquired sinecures in the West and show scant inclination even to visit post-Communist Russia.

The proximate cause of Voinovich’s earlier grief was his agitation on behalf of the persecuted writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, and his protest over the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But there was a deeper sting for the regime in Voinovich’s writings.

In such books as “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,” “The Fur Hat” and “Moscow 2042,” Voinovich grafted to the basic elements of farce a mordant, at times bitter, depiction of the struggle between intimidator and victim.

Sometimes the two are merged. In “Moscow 2042,” Voinovich’s first novel from exile, a Russian emigre writer travels ahead in time to find communism still on the verge of collapse, the instrument of destruction being a megalomaniacal novelist who in many particulars resembles Solzhenitsyn.

“After the novel came out, I heard a lot of people contending that you can make fun of whomever you want except for certain individuals you can’t make fun of,” Voinovich wrote in a 1990 afterword to the book’s English-language edition. “When I hear something like that, I quickly forget about all those you can make fun of and attack precisely those you can’t.” (For the record, Voinovich also refused to acknowledge Solzhenitsyn “as my one and only model” for the character.)

His books are filled with not only simpletons taken for savants, but privates taken for generals, conformists for dissidents, cowards for heroes.

A typical Voinovich hero is an ordinary stiff provoked by the soulless system into feats of courage. The illiterate orphan Pvt. Chonkin, dispatched to guard a crashed airplane and then forgotten by his superiors, will end up capturing a brigade of security men out to arrest him as a deserter, locking them in a cellar because they’re interfering with his job.

“I would say my characters are not struggling against the system,” Voinovich says. “On the contrary, it is the system that is struggling against them. They are rank-and-file people, and when the system sees the way they are, it wants to turn them into little screws of itself”--here he is craftily alluding to Josef Stalin’s own phrase about the role of the people in the great Soviet system.

Voinovich began returning to Russia at first not only to gather material and preserve his ties with Russian culture but with a vision of making a positive contribution. It was March, 1989, and perestroika was widely advertised.

“I thought it would be possible for me to play a certain role in this society,” he says. “I have lived in the West and can explain some points to the people. I thought they would listen to me. But when I came, I understood that was impossible. No one was waiting for me here.”

He got his first lesson while still moving through customs at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. “They opened each of my suitcases and examined each of my things,” he says. “It isn’t that they considered me a smuggler. They just wanted to say to me, ‘You’re no one to us, just a suspected criminal.’ Their primary objective was to insult me.”

After that, he noticed that a morbid mood seemed to have overtaken everyone in Moscow. “I wrote an article for the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets about how drivers who would give you a lift would tell you not to fasten the seat belt, but just to drape it over your shoulder, just to deceive the (traffic patrolman). As if you’re doing this not to preserve your own life, but just to cheat the militia!”

This brief narrative segues gently into a broader observation of how the Soviet system hammered its people into an unsympathetic mold:

“This habit of telling lies has become too deeply rooted here and is now believed to be normal. It is not considered to be bad, and that is what complicates relations here. I once wrote that when Soviet spies are caught by the FBI, it is very easy for them to stand a lie detector test. All Soviet people had become so used to lying that should they say the truth, the lie detector would go like this”--his hand describes a frenzy.

Voinovich agrees with Yeltsin that a radically new start was needed if Russia’s form of government was to measure up to modern demands.

“The old constitution (which Yeltsin is scrapping) was specially written for a totalitarian state. And no matter what it proclaimed, it remained suitable only for this kind of state. And now attempts are being made to build a democratic society by this constitution? That is the same as trying to build an airplane from the blueprints for a locomotive.”

His newest project is a book about his encounter with the KGB, which for years refused him access to his file and then claimed it had been destroyed. (“I have recorded all their lies; this is a long story.”)

Also being negotiated is a situation comedy for American television about contemporary Russia, featuring a visiting American innocent and a canny Russian.

“If we sign a contract, I will get down to business with great pleasure,” Voinovich says. “Not entirely because of money, but because life here is a constant comedy.”

Biography

* Name: Vladimir N. Voinovich

* Title: Author and playwright

* Age: 61

* Personal: Born in Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), Tajikistan. Wrote “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,” “The Fur Hat” and “Moscow 2042.” Expelled from Writers Union in 1974. Forced to emigrate in 1980. Divides his time between Germany and Russia. Wife, Irina, and daughter.

* Quote: “This habit of telling lies has become too deeply rooted here and is now believed to be normal.”