SPORTS : Ted Turner Takes the Rap for Ills of St. Petersburg : Russia’s czarist capital prepares to host Goodwill Games he sponsors. The usual chaos is even worse.

You’re stuck in traffic. Or your paycheck is late. Or you’ve noticed that lately, when the sun goes down, it gets really dark. Who or what is responsible for this madness?

If you’re a citizen of St. Petersburg, chances are you blame Ted Turner and the 1994 Goodwill Games.

Turner, the founder of Cable News Network, created the Goodwill Games in 1986 after politically inspired boycotts kept apart athletes from the United States and the Soviet Union. The 1986 games, held in Moscow, and the 1990 games in Seattle both had disappointing TV ratings, and Turner lost millions.

But for the host city--St. Petersburg this year--the games are an enormous cash gift. A post-event study in Seattle suggested the games brought $150 million into the local economy. Moreover, the relentlessly positive TV coverage of the host city that accompanies such a sporting event usually guarantees a tourism boom for the next several years.

All of this would be welcome in St. Petersburg. The local government is running an enormous deficit, while foreign tourists--frightened by crime stories in the Western press--are pushing the czarist capital farther down their list of vacation destinations.

So most Petersburgers support the games. But that doesn’t stop their complaining. Preparations for the games have turned life upside-down in this city of 5 million. Long-overdue road repairs have created downtown traffic snarls and brought curses to the lips of many a cabdriver. Shabby palaces and buildings are getting shiny new facades. But the improvements are often derided as rushed “Potemkin villages”--a reference to the fake villages Grigory Potemkin erected to fool his lover, Empress Catherine the Great, into admiring the prosperity of his lands.

To speed preparations for the games’ July 23 opening, city leaders have called in the army: privates shouldering shovels are a common sight these days. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak--the games’ most ardent supporter--has also reinstituted the Communist tradition of subbotniki , or volunteer Saturdays. Most of the volunteerism is coerced: Sobchak has threatened harsh fines for businesses whose workers aren’t raking leaves or sweeping streets by 8 a.m. every Saturday.

In addition to ruining weekends, the games are being cursed for much of the usual chaos of Russian life. Government paychecks and student stipends often arrive months late here--an old phenomenon, but in St. Petersburg it has a new twist: Suddenly the games are to blame, on grounds that they have emptied local coffers.

In May, when city officials turned off street lights, plunging St. Petersburg into darkness--the games were again to blame. Len Svet, the local electrical company, hoped a month without street lights would save 80 million rubles (roughly $40,000), but it made life after sunset frightening.

“I can’t even see the cars, much less the license plates,” fretted Capt. Nikolai Kuznetsov of the auto police, sitting glumly in a parked Ford on pitch-black Moskovsky Prospekt, the city’s main north-south road. “They’re saving every kopeck for these Goodwill Games.”

Opponents of Sobchak, meanwhile, complain that the games will be fine sport but the city will be left with the bill. As the Russian Communist Workers Party sees it--ignoring Turner’s pledge to spend $70 million on the games, about two-thirds of the cost--Sobchak is using public money to throw a party for foreigners. “Mayor Sobchak is spending billions of rubles that could be better spent in our times,” said Viktor Tyulkin, the party’s chief.

The Green Party worries about trees being cut down to widen playing fields, and wonders if worthy environmental programs will lose funding to track and field events.

And then there’s AIDS. The city’s chief epidemiologist, Aza Rakhmanova, holds that the arrival of 80,000 foreign tourists will be--in the words of the daily newspaper Smena--”the spark that ignites AIDS” in Russia. “Too many people are coming, and you can’t check them all (for AIDS) beforehand,” Rakhmanova said.

She said thousands of condoms would be flown in from Canada and distributed free--possibly with each morning newspaper--to prepare locals for spontaneous physical expressions of goodwill.

What Games Offer

The Goodwill Games open in St. Petersburg on July 23.

Nations competing: 50

Athletes: 2,000

Number of sports: 24

Nations receiving telecasts: 100

Potential audience: 600 million

1998 site for games: New York