Moscow

MOSCOW -- Russian legislators who found themselves outside the police lines when the government decided to cut off access to parliament Tuesday morning are now moving the struggle onto a much larger stage: the streets and subways of Moscow.Where once all the political attention was focused on the defiant parliament building also known as the White House, the government's blockade is now spawning demonstrations, speeches and meetings at various places throughout the city.They could, in the end, prove to be a more potent weapon against President Boris N. Yeltsin's government than the interminable sessions of the weakened rump parliament.

MOSCOW -- The empires cracks and dissolves, but the army goes on.Here, army life begins where it always has, in a dispiriting, dim building set in a gruesomely industrial district of southeast Moscow.Worn-out buses from all over the city pull up every morning, bringing in stoic young men, doing what's expected of them, their minds seemingly blank and definitely hung over.Soviet law said that every young man had to serve his nation. Now there is no Soviet law, and today it's a Russian army and a Russian navy -- and there's some question as to whether there actually exists a Russian law requiring service -- but still the draftees wearily show up.They don't know what awaits them.

MOSCOW -- America's man in Moscow was sound asleep in town house No. 1 Monday morning when the telephone woke him to a nightmare: The Soviet Union was in the midst of a coup.That was the last untroubled sleep Marylander James F. Collins would have for the rest of the week. As deputy chief of mission in a U.S. Embassy between ambassadors, Mr. Collins had to keep President Bush informed of what was going on and help to guide his decisions.So when Mr. Collins got the call from a staff member who was monitoring the radio, he wasted no time calling Washington.

MOSCOW -- With the moving van outside, U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Strauss gave a farewell assessment of Russia, its president and its future last night."

MOSCOW -- President Mikhail S. Gorbachev declared Lithuania's plan to hold a referendum on independence "legally invalid" yesterday and ordered the republic to participate instead in a March poll on the preservation of the Soviet Union.Mr. Gorbachev accused Lithuanian leaders of trying to use Saturday's referendum "to organize support for their separatist aspirations."He said the non-binding plebiscite could only be interpreted as an attempt to block the March 17 unionwide referendum set by the Soviet parliament.

MOSCOW -- With the smoldering war in the Caucasus heating up again, an international human rights delegation sharply criticized Soviet authorities yesterday for siding with the Azerbaijanis in their often violent efforts to expel Armenians.Delegation members said Soviet army units typically surround villages while Azerbaijani security forces circle overhead in helicopters, informing villagers that if they do not leave the province, they will be shot.Since the end of April, they said, more than 10,000 Armenians have been forcibly deported in this way from Azerbaijan.

MOSCOW -- The closed-door trial of jailed Russian scientist Vil Mirzayanov was postponed again yesterday as it developed further into an early test of Russia's new constitution.Yesterday's trouble occurred when a dozen armed guards refused to escort the 58-year-old scientist through a courthouse corridor lined with journalists and human rights activists. Dr. Mirzayanov is being tried on charges of revealing Russia's advances in chemical weaponryThe guards were bringing him from the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, where he was taken Jan. 27 after refusing to participate further in his trial.

MOSCOW -- As panic and chaos set off by Soviet currency reform spread yesterday, the order to withdraw 50- and 100-ruble notes from circulation by tonight became the latest cause for a clash between the republics and the central government of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.Two people were crushed to death in Leningrad in huge lines to exchange money, Russian Prime Minister Ivan S. Silayev reported. At least one elderly person died of a heart attack and several more fainted in Moscow lines.

SERPUKHOV, Russia -- Life in this gritty industrial city has changed so profoundly one year into President Boris N. Yeltsin's reforms that all of Moscow's squabbling politicians would have hard work trying to put the past back together again.Last week, the conservative Congress of People's Deputies that was meeting in Moscow, only 60 miles away from here, battered Mr. Yeltsin mercilessly. As the rest of the world watched uneasily, fearing a return to the old order, Serpukhov's leaders looked on in disgust, and strengthened their resolve.

MOSCOW -- Russians have always loved a political joke, mostly because the punch line has always been illicit. Before 1917, people could be put in jail for publicly mocking the czar.In Communist times, the slightest crack about party leaders landed people in Siberia. Under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, the rules slackened a bit, and high-minded satire began slipping onto radio and television, but never anything as low-down and biting as the average Reagan skit on "Saturday Night Live."So most Russians were not entirely shocked last week when the government moved against the popular satirical puppet show "Kukly," a weekly program modeled on Britain's "Spitting Image" and France's "Les Guignols de Lenfo."