COLUMN ONE : A Cold War Capital Warms Up : When Bill Clinton first saw Moscow in ‘69, it was the grim, gray hub of a Communist empire. Now, he returns to a city alive with the clamor and chaos of a nation trying to remake itself.

When a bearded 23-year-old anti-war activist named Bill Clinton arrived here on New Year’s Eve, 1969, he found a sad, gray city under the heel of then-Communist Party leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Soviet troops had crushed the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia the previous year; the Cold War was a deep freeze. The Communist Party was launching its celebrations of the 100th anniversary of V. I. Lenin’s birth, and the Writers Union had just expelled revered novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Mikhail S. Gorbachev was a minor Communist Party functionary in Stavropol. Boris N. Yeltsin was an obscure Siberian construction engineer.

Moscow was cleaner and more orderly then, but poorer. The average Soviet diet was 50% starch. The nation had one telephone for every 32 people. And in Moscow department stores, a pair of shoes cost one-third of the average monthly salary.

Almost a quarter of a century later, as leader of the Free World, Clinton returned on Wednesday to a Moscow that is “a new city in a new country,” said Yuri N. Alexandrov, an architect and historian.

Moscow once called itself the Third Rome, heir to the Roman and Byzantine empires. Now expatriates call it the Big Potato. The young American President arrives in the Russian capital as it is trying to shed its Communist trappings and rediscover its pre-1917 identity and, paradoxically, to fast-forward past the decades of Soviet stagnation into the global high-tech economy.

Indeed, with its stunning ancient churches and equally breathtaking potholes, its new glitz, grime and gangsters, its neo-capitalist frenzy and its bitter new poverty, this metropolis of 9 million embodies Russia’s struggle to remake itself.

It is a city where more than 5,000 Mercedes-Benzes crowd Cadillacs and Saabs in traffic jams, where people no longer gawk at the sight of a car telephone. But each time they park, drivers must remove their windshield wipers or they will be swiped.

Such vandalism has become so endemic that elevators in high-rises have been disabled by hooligans who use cigarette lighters to burn off the plastic control buttons for all the floors.

The hottest thing in Moscow, though, is biznes. This is a city gone shopping-mad. Soviet economists once estimated that people nationwide spent 30 billion hours each year standing in line. Today, most lines are not to buy, but to sell. Children hawk sodas and bananas at busy intersections, and sleek boutiques offer European designer fashions and Rolex watches.

But the average Muscovite’s monthly salary is $92.65, so women still spend hours hunting for necessities at affordable prices. In winter, fruits and vegetables are still out of reach for many.

Russians who once sat in their kitchens arguing about literature, film and politics complain that the pressure to make money leaves them less time for friends. When they do meet, the talk is of money, shopping and real estate.

The beloved U.S. dollar is banned from commerce, as authorities try to prop up the value and the prestige of the ailing Russian ruble. When Clinton visited in 1969, one ruble was worth $1.10. On Tuesday, the official rate was 1,293 rubles to $1.

Clinton spent about a week in Moscow on a winter break from his graduate studies at Oxford University in England, where he was a Rhodes scholar. The student was described as being “pudgy,” bearded and always hungry by an acquaintance quoted in the Washington Times.

Clinton stayed in the National Hotel overlooking the Kremlin--then the enemy headquarters that no American President had ever visited. Today, the National is under scaffolding, as is much of old Moscow. Renovated 19th-Century buildings are unveiled almost daily, rising like pastel-painted confections from sidewalks crumbling into mud.

The National is being renovated by an Austrian firm. When it opens in August, it will compete with the luxurious Metropol and Baltshug Kempinski hotels, where the visiting White House press corps will shell out $300 and more per night for single rooms.

The nearby Lenin Museum, where student Clinton could have checked out the old revolutionary’s Rolls-Royce, is closed by Yeltsin’s decree. Across the street, a casino has opened up in Revolution Square, which retains its socialist name. The neighboring 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Square has mercifully been returned to its pre-Bolshevik moniker, Manezh Square.

If Clinton takes a stroll in Red Square, he will see a tiny, gold-domed brick church on the spot where public toilets stood in 1969. It is the Kazan Cathedral, razed by Stalin in an anticlerical campaign in 1936 but rebuilt and reconsecrated this year by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Religion is back in in the former Communist capital. Clinton also will meet with Patriarch Alexi II, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the Danilov Monastery. The Communists used the 13th-Century sanctuary to lock up juvenile delinquents before returning it to the church in 1983.

Moscow was spruced up for previous summits. But the only visible improvement this time is the removal of soot and artillery holes from the Russian White House. The massive marble fortress had not been built when Clinton visited in 1969.

After President Yeltsin’s tanks blasted rebels out of the former Parliament on Oct. 4, workers labored around the clock to repair the building for use by Yeltsin’s Cabinet and other top officials. Before they moved in, a priest was summoned to bless the building with clouds of incense, as though to exorcise the evil spirit of the former occupants.

From his room at the new Radisson Slavjanskaya Hotel, the American President may be able to see a line of empty windows at the former Moscow mayor’s office, now the home of the new Duma, or lower house of Parliament. The windows were shot out during a firefight between government forces and anti-Yeltsin rebels who stormed the skyscraper on Oct. 3; as of Tuesday, the windows had not been repaired.

Clinton probably won’t be riding the Moscow Metro, which has been expanded since his last visit and now has electronic signs announcing how much time has elapsed since the last subway train departed. At rush hour, the ticker rarely passes the two-minute mark. And though fares have increased sharply, the Metro is still a bargain at 50 rubles, or 4 cents, a ride.

Happily for Clinton, security precautions will keep Moscow motorists far from the President’s limousine. The demise of the centrally planned economy has allowed anyone with money to buy a car, and millions of new drivers have done so.

Traffic jams are approaching Los Angeles frustration levels, with accidents epidemic. In 1992, 36,371 people died nationwide in car crashes--more than double the number of Soviet soldiers killed in nine years of war in Afghanistan. The 1993 death toll is expected to be even higher. To the casualty list must be added the Russian who was shot by a neighbor for taking too long to turn off his screeching car alarm.

Moscow now requires that all non-Russian visitors pay a daily fee of 774 rubles, about 60 cents. No one has suggested applying the rule to the visiting President, as it is mainly aimed at merchants and other people from the Caucasus; Russian officials blame them for much of the city’s skyrocketing crime.

Human rights groups have protested the fee as racist. But Moscow officials have not backed off, perhaps because public sentiment is behind them. During the period of martial law last fall, police detained more than 14,000 people and deported 5,000 who did not have permission to live in Moscow, many of them Caucasians. Polls showed most Muscovites were sorry to see the state of emergency end.

What irks most people more than economic hard times is the dirt, anarchy and carelessness that many blame on the permissive Yeltsin democrats. Last year, Muscovites were incensed by the discovery of more than 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail that had been dumped in a pond near Sheremetyevo airport, confirming their worst suspicions about the Russian postal service.

Still, what has probably changed most here is the people.

On Dec. 31, 1969, the day Clinton arrived here, the Communist Party official newspaper, Pravda, reported that America was “continuing the criminal use of chemical and biological weapons in Vietnam.”

Other Page One stories lauded Moscow factories for having met their annual production quotas by the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and declared that the cotton workers of Tajikistan were busy familiarizing themselves “with great interest” with the party Central Committee’s latest doctrine released for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

“Nineteen-sixty-nine was a dreadful year,” said Bulat S. Okudzhava, who was then the most popular songwriter in Russia and remains almost a national hero today. In an interview this week, Okudzhava said his circle had been despondent over the crackdown in Czechoslovakia, the stepped-up repression of intellectuals and the “mendacious” Brezhnev reign.

Clinton then could hardly have spoken with any ordinary Russians, except the “security people and (Communist) Party people” who kept an eye on tourists, the bard said.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Republicans suggested that the young anti-war activist could even have met with the KGB during his trip, an intimation that candidate Clinton scornfully dismissed.

As a visiting President, “I wish he (Clinton) would stop in the street and talk to people,” Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, Yeltsin’s press secretary, said in an interview Tuesday. “He would see that Russia is a psychologically open society,” not the repressed country of 1969 when “people were dressed in gray coats and Russian-made suits that all look alike.”

Clinton is due to speak directly to the Russian people on television Friday and to take questions from callers in a TV “town meeting” of the sort he held during the presidential campaign.

“Imagine an American President on Russian television back then--simply impossible!” Kostikov said. “Now there is even no need to negotiate with Russians the topic of his speech.”

And though Russians’ unquestioning worship of everything American has cooled, the young President should have an easy time winning the hearts of Moscow’s youth, who are already sold on U.S. pop culture. Teen-agers are listening to Guns N’ Roses, Poison, Culture Beat and rap, though “American rap is better,” said Tatanya Klimenko, 16. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are hot, as is Whitney Houston.

The blue jeans their parents tried to buy from visiting tourists like Clinton are out; leggings or, better yet, bell-bottoms are in. Fashion and image matter here.

As for the President, “I like Clinton,” said Maria Romanova, also 16. “He is a new power. Clinton, in my view, can change the country--both countries--for the better.”