By Howard G. Chua-Eoan/Reported by Sally B. Donnelly/Moscow

In the Soviet Union don't look to read about actor X sneaking out to the Bolshoi with starlet Y, while his famous author wife is on vacation in Odessa with her children from two previous marriages. Even if X and Y were engaged in hanky-panky, the country could not do the story justice, since it lacks the equivalents of People or Vanity Fair, the National Enquirer or Entertainment Tonight. Nor do famous lives play themselves out in newspapers or on television. The press is as conservative as the society at large, where direct questions about private lives are considered insulting. Movie magazines are simply film synopses and accounts of production and casting.

That does not mean, however, that inquiring Soviet minds don't want to know. "It often seems as if it is the national pastime to gossip about me," says pop superstar Alla Pugacheva, 39, the biggest musical draw in the country. "Perhaps we are better off here than in the West. We do not have entire magazines devoted to our private lives. But Soviets don't need a magazine to gossip." Instead, a vast rumor mill operates 24 hours a day, 365 1/4 days a year. A study of some unofficial youth groups in Tadjikstan in Central Asia listed among them "Celebrity Hounds," which a local paper described as "people who try to gain prestige among the less informed by exchanging stories about the private lives of stars."

Some may consider the meager trickle of personal detail about a pop star a blessing, but the lack of information about politicians proved to be a handicap for voters in last month's election. "Even if voters knew a candidate's program, they did not know the man himself," complains Yegor Yakovlev, editor of Moscow News. Soviet newspapers and magazines discuss the personal lives of leaders only when the person is dead and usually out of favor (thus only last fall did Moscow News claim that Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982, had been revived from clinical death in 1976, and was tended constantly by doctors for the rest of his life) or when refuting a nasty bit of gossip. Observes Zhenia, a semiprofessional celebrity watcher in Moscow: "The way it works is that first a rumor starts, then gains momentum, then, and only then, something appears in the press denying the rumor as unfounded."