Leningrad

This Soviet city yesterday began its first broad-scale food rationing since World War II, a move exhausted shoppers actually welcomed after weeks of dwindling food supplies and panic buying had emptied store shelves. In stores throughout the city that survived a 900-day German blockade during the war, shoppers for the first time this fall could buy such staples as flour, rice, butter and eggs without waiting in long lines. "If they can keep stores supplied with these minimal norms of food, rationing will be a very good thing," Tamara Kirillova, 64, said at grocery store No. 72 in the southern part of the city.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev yesterday engineered the ouster of the Leningrad regional Communist Party chief and strongly hinted that the region's new leadership would be more responsive to political criticism. Yuri F. Solovyev, 63, who had been first party secretary for four years, was relieved of his duties as first party secretary "in connection with his own request and retirement on a pension," the news agency Tass reported. The move came less than four months after Solovyev was rejected by Leningrad voters in historic multicandidate elections to the new Soviet parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies.

In a stunning rejection of the country's communist present and past, Russian voters have elected populist Boris N. Yeltsin as president and Leningrad residents have voted to give their city back its old name, St. Petersburg. Yeltsin, who ran a strong anti-communist, pro-capitalist campaign, flattened his five opponents and pulled in 60 percent of the votes in Wednesday's race for the presidency of the Russian republic, according to unofficial returns released yesterday. In Leningrad, the birthplace of the 1917 Russian Revolution, 55 percent of the city's voters chose to scrap the city's current name, which honors Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev yesterday began an unannounced visit to Leningrad, a city shaken by political turmoil after the defeat of its Communist Party leadership in parliamentary elections and the rise in profile of unofficial activist groups. Gorbachev was believed to be planning to meet today with members of those independent political movements, which would be a first in the process of reform in the Soviet Union. Leningrad, cradle of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, embodies one of the chief problems facing Gorbachev - public dissatisfaction with the power structure, particularly as it is represented by the local Communist Party leaders.

Nancy Reagan will make at least one appearance next week in the Soviet Union where she won't have to worry about being upstaged by Raisa Gorbachev. The first lady's press people said yesterday that on Tuesday, while her husband is hunkering down with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Mrs. Reagan will journey to Leningrad accompanied by the wife of Soviet President Andrei Gromyko. So little is known of the woman that her name wasn't even included on a dispatch from Moscow. "She doesn't seem to speak any English," said a source who has met her. "And judging from her reactions, I think she might be a little deaf.

LENINGRAD - No, on second thought . . . ST. PETERSBURG - That's better. At least some Russians think so. And so on June 12, in yet another attack on Lenin and the communist system he created, residents here will go to the polls to decide whether they want to wipe the word Leningrad off the map and give the city its original name - St. Petersburg. A vote to yank Lenin's name from the cradle of the Russian Revolution would carry enormous symbolic weight, said Vitali Skoybeda, a Leningrad city council member who sponsored the renaming bill.

Fifty years ago last winter, Dmitry S. Ivanov, who kept the rice collection at one of the world's biggest seed banks, died of starvation at his post during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. After his death, workmen found several thousand packs of rice that he had preserved. A.G. Stchukin, a specialist in peanuts, died at his desk. Liliya M. Rodina, keeper of the oat collection, and more than half a dozen others also succumbed. They all refused to eat from any of their collections of rice, peas, corn and wheat.

Accomplishing the release of an Anatoly Shcharansky may require diplomatic negotiations of the highest order, but a brief telephone call early yesterday morning to a house in Pitman, N.J., proved that the best detente may be between two hearts. About 2:30 a.m., Robert Reilley, 21, picked up the phone in his parents' house and heard the ecstatic voice of his Soviet wife, Aina Robertovna Reilley of Leningrad. "She said hello," recalled Reilley, a senior at Glassboro State College.

Alexander Nevzorov is out to break the Soviet Communist Party monopoly over television. And this sleekly handsome, blue-eyed television muckraker, the Geraldo Rivera of Leningrad, has shown that in these times even this last sacred bastion of party power can be assailed. Nevzorov, whose name has become a household word to his 50 million viewers, dreamed up the idea for 600 Seconds, a nightly, 10-minute news show that uses snappy bites to focus on crime, Communist Party corruption, public service announcements and the failures of 70 years of communist rule.

"An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art," on view here through May 31, seems ready to become as big a hit in the Soviet capital as it was in Leningrad. Since opening at the Academy of the Arts on Kropotkinskaya Street on April 24, the exhibition has drawn more than 10,000 visitors and is now averaging close to 2,000 a day. The recent fine weather has helped encourage attendance, and the line to get into the exhibition hall often stretches outside the entrance to the 18th-century building.

There's no getting around the fact that what makes the Philadelphia Orchestra the Philadelphia Orchestra is a certain skillful manipulation of sound. And why would you want to get around it? This trademark sonority, much remarked on over the years, is a dear asset. With change in the air at the orchestra and so much at stake, this seems a good moment for an identity verification. "There is no such thing as the Philadelphia sound. The sound is the sound of the conductor," Eugene Ormandy reportedly once said.

A Cherry Hill computer technician who went to the Internet to find a Ukrainian bride was convicted yesterday of killing her in front of their son outside a day-care center. Jurors deliberated about a day and a half before unanimously agreeing that Lester Barney, 60, stabbed his estranged 24-year-old wife, Alla, in the throat intentionally - not in self-defense, as his attorneys contended. Barney faces 30 years to life in prison and will be sentenced in October. The verdict in Burlington County Superior Court was followed by a statement from Alla Barney's grief-stricken mother, who blamed herself for urging her daughter to sign up with a mail-order bride agency.

Dance this mess around to Les Georges Leningrad, a self-described three-headed monster from Montreal that performs what they call "petrochemical rock. " Les Georges fill in the blanks between Le Tigre and artier predecessors like Liliput, and actually have fun while doing it. Les Georges play with the Angels (former and active members of Philadelphia bands S PRCSS, An Albatross and the Deadly), Z's (New York experimentalists with dual saxophones, guitars and drums) and the Bowie-esque punk-funk of the Watchers (7:30 tonight, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., $8, all ages, 267-972-6264, www.r5productions.

Zynovi Kaplan and Vladimir Shapiro began playing violin together about 40 years ago, in the city where their parents during World War II had survived a devastating 900-day siege - Leningrad. They were children, learning, without knowing it, what would take them far away, far from each other. They played together for about 12 years, first at a special elementary school for musicians, then at a conservatory, both in the city still recovering from the siege. But they were Soviet Jews, outsiders in the city where they were born, in the nation of their parents.

More than 400 palaces grace this town. Their facades stretch along the famous canals in endless, undulating waves of architectural extravagance. Bathed in the white light of the long summer nights, they form a stunning stage set, as beautiful and deceptive as the prostitutes who lounge in the new luxury hotels. But right now, it's about all St. Petersburg officials can do to keep the palace lights on, and to keep the elaborate stonework from crashing into the Gulf of Finland. At Peter the Great's seaside palace, the hidden fountains that once amazed visitors with their surprise sprays of water are too leaky to work.

On Sunday, half a century after Viktor Speransky flew his last bombing raid over German territory, he dressed in his best blue suit, pinned five red stars and 10 golden medals on his chest, and took a crowded subway to have a look at Russia's lavish new World War II memorial. No one on the train offered him a seat. There was a time here when any white-haired veteran with a ribbon fluttering on his lapel was treated as if he had just arrived from the front. But such reverence seems to have gone the way of the hammer and sickle, the red flag of the Soviet Union, and the concrete certainties of Communist ideology.

One question about these Goodwill Games that begin tomorrow on TBS and ABC: Are they necessary? The Goodwill Games developed out of Olympic boycotts of 1980 (by the United States) and '84 (by the Soviet Union). Now that the USA and Russia are pals, what is the purpose of assembling these top athletes in St. Petersburg, Russia? Mike Klatt, the coordinating producer for Turner Sports, expects "the best track meet since the Barcelona Olympics" two years ago. Klatt also raves about the "exotic locale" of St. Petersburg.

Fifty years ago last winter, Dmitry S. Ivanov, who kept the rice collection at one of the world's biggest seed banks, died of starvation at his post during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. After his death, workmen found several thousand packs of rice that he had preserved. A.G. Stchukin, a specialist in peanuts, died at his desk. Liliya M. Rodina, keeper of the oat collection, and more than half a dozen others also succumbed. They all refused to eat from any of their collections of rice, peas, corn and wheat.

GO AWAY After the Bush Administration announced it would pay cash for "old clunkers," White House aides had to explain to Strom Thurmond and Jessie Helms it was for cars manufactured before 1980. NO WAY While stranded in space, a Soviet cosmonaut missed the fall of communism, the break-up of his country and the renaming of his hometown from Leningrad to St. Petersburg. When asked what one thing was the biggest shock, he replied, "Warren Beatty really got married?" LIGHT UP MY LIFE Researchers believe a chemical in chili peppers can cure a running nose.

The dragon is an ordinary-looking fellow in a sequined black shirt, even if his roar does sound like the Concorde taking off. The mayor, who keeps the dragon supplied with meat, drink and virgins, is afflicted with every known nervous disease - plus three that haven't been identified yet - and periodically slips into a straitjacket to steady himself. The heroine's girlfriends are cardboard cutouts, borne by two live actors who prattle in Valley Girl patois. The hero prepares for battle by plopping an aqua bedpan on his head.