Moscow Ussr

"Moscow: how violently the name plucks at any Russian heart!" --Alexander S. Pushkin Anxious yet keenly hopeful, the crowd began clustering on the sidewalk outside Shoe Store No. 16 more than an hour before opening time, unaware that despite its tempting name, the shortage-stricken shop had no shoes to sell. When, at about 10:30 a.m., the four-limousine motorcade bearing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the Kremlin raced by, sirens screaming, few heads turned.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev moved Friday to limit political rallies in the capital, stripping the radical-dominated Moscow City Council of the right to authorize them and giving control to the far more conservative Council of Ministers. The move is likely to bring the Soviet leader into conflict with the city council, which elected radical economist Gavrill K. Popov as mayor Friday.

It was a big day for Anya. For the first time, the 7-year-old was asked to go to the store for bread by herself. Equipped with a plastic bag and two rubles, she proudly set out --only to return minutes later. "There was no bread," she said this week with a look of great disappointment. Those four words have become increasingly common in Moscow in the last week since Russian Federation President Boris N.

As part of his Tuesday routine, Leonid A. Ivanov went to the steamy cafeteria at the small technical school where he teaches, took a plastic shopping bag out of his pocket and bought 4 1/2 pounds of hot dogs to bring home to his family. Empty shelves in Soviet grocery stores have become commonplace over the last year, and people like Ivanov have had to become more resourceful to feed their families.

The best of Spain's bullfighters will go to Moscow next year to fight 30 bulls in a demonstration of their death-defying art, Tass reported. The official news agency said Friday that five bullfights will be staged in June at Luzhniki stadium, which seats 100,000 people.

There's a riddle often told in the towns and villages that surround Moscow: What's long and green and smells of sausage? The answer: The commuter train from Moscow. The riddle points up the mass invasion of the Soviet capital each day by an estimated 2 million people. Nearly all of them come to the city intent on doing some shopping, and most do a lot. Compared to other Soviet cities, let alone small towns, Moscow is well supplied with food and merchandise.

Three teachers sulked in a foyer of School No. 29 on Kropotkinskaya Street in Moscow at the end of last week, feeling betrayed and hurt by an article in the weekly Moscow News. In a caustic commentary on Friday, the newspaper's Mikhail Shevelyov reported that workmen had spent six weeks at the school painting it, plastering it, replacing its drain pipes and refashioning its front porch in granite. While the work went on, the pupils had to stay home. "Why all the rush?" Shevelyov asked. ". . .

On the parquet floors in the spacious rooms intended for the country's elite, the unkempt Timchenko children played with their puppy on a well-worn mattress. Baby carriages and cots with broken metal springs lined the hallway. Toddlers' clothes and towels were hung out to dry on a balcony of what should have been an unoccupied building.

When a city dumps its sewage into an adjacent river, pollution not only affects it but other cities down the river. Each adds to the blight. "We're going to pay a penalty," says Chief Oren Lyons, an American Indian spiritual leader, in sketching that image of the cumulative effects of despoiling nature. "All these currents in the world, the air, the water, the currents of life on land, the wind, even the Earth we travel on, are moving and they don't recognize any borders," he said.

Old-timers still know the cooperative apartment building at 19/8 Chasovaya St. as "the Jewish house," which explains how it has been swept up in an anti-Semitism scare so widespread that it triggered an extraordinary public appeal for calm by the KGB on Saturday and expressions of concern by the visiting U.S. secretary of state. One of the first Moscow cooperatives built after World War II, the Chasovaya building on the capital's northwest side once had a clear majority of Jewish residents.